What are Longtail Keywords?

Have you heard of longtail keywords? If not, you should read this article carefully as it may be very useful in helping boost your traffic and online sales.

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In simple terms, longtail keywords are keyword phrases that are at least three words long. Short tail keywords are those phrases that are less than three words long. Longtail keywords are used when you want to target a very specific audience. It is this specificity that gives long tails their power to convert. Here is why.

When someone types in a specific longtail keyword phrase chances are very good that they know exactly what they want to buy. If your campaigns have been set up with these same longtail phrases, that customer can more easily find you over your competition.

Here is an example: Let's say you sell sneakers and one of your keyword phrases is "quality sneakers". This is a normal short tail phrase and highly competitive when it comes to PPC cost. It is also rather vague and you will be fighting with thousands of other vendors for position with this phrase. What if you expand this phrase to target a more focused audience? For example, you might try "quality discount sneakers" or "discount Nike sneakers" or "quality discount running shoes".

When someone sits down and types in "quality discount running shoes" you can be sure this person knows what he or she is looking for. If you sell this product, and have implemented a longtail keyword campaign, your store should appear to the shopper in their search results.

Because you are offering the exact same thing that the shopper is looking for, your conversion rates will often improve dramatically. Online buyers are impatient and they want to get to where they want to get to fast. Longtail keywords help get them to your store fast.

Now, there is one very important consideration you have to understand before you begin using this tactic and that is relevancy. If you put out a PPC campaign using longtail keywords, you must have a destination page that is also specific to those keywords. This means adding pages to your site that are specifically created for those longer phrases. If you fail to do this, you may end up being penalized by the search engines.

The upside to this is that all of the search engines like to see new content being put into sites. New content will also initiate the spiders to come visit your new pages which they do not do if your site is static.

If your website is not pulling in the traffic that you want and not making the sales conversions you believe it should be making then try adding a few longtail keyword campaigns. Try to think of exactly what your customer is thinking and use that as the basis for a campaign. Make sure, however, that you also create a keyword specific page to act as the destination url.