We all know the SEO value of keywords. But have you ever wondered which of the thousands of relevant keywords brings meaningful traffic to your site and earns you your real money? If not then it’s about time you do.

For a while now, the online marketing community has known that long tail keywords convert cheaper and faster. Long tail keywords are those millions of keywords and phrases that a site is searched for, but go unnoticed.

Long tail is the exact opposite of focused or targeted keywords. In SEO, everyone focuses on the “top keyword”. This is what everybody follows and tries to gain rankings for. But if you just dig deeper into referrals and study the traffic they generate you will realize that you are actually missing a major portion of search keywords and hence the market!

Marketing managers are often pleased to see their top 10 or 20 keywords ranking consistently. The focus is usually only on the popular terms and the number of visitors they bring. It is believed that 80% of the business is driven by these popular terms, but when you evaluate multiple sites, it is quite the opposite.

The top 10 terms do provide a lot of traffic, but when you calculate the percentage of traffic driven by terms after the top 10 or 20 most popular, they will add up to more total visitors than the top terms. More often than not, the visitors who come to your site using long tail keywords spend more time on the site and convert better. Most sites have a majority of their sales and leads generated from these terms. This is the heart of the long tail keyword strategy. So it makes perfect sense to SEO your site for these long tail keywords to the fullest.

Long tail keywords have added benefits when applied to SEO. The skill is to pick the right mid tier keywords and phrases and optimize your site for these. The profit gained from these terms can then be reinvested.

Google AdWords is among the most popular tools that you can use to find these long tail keywords and grow your search traffic. All you have to do is just enter your core keywords in the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion tool and allow it to suggest other terms. Use “Exact Match” if you are selecting keywords for their SEO value and you will know how many times these keywords are searched for in a month. Then download the entire list in a text or excel format and there you have your own natural long tail keyword list.

If you are an established website then finding out what your competitor does to get traffic to his website is also a good idea. There are chances that your competitor might have already targeted a whole lot of long tail keywords. Your next step then should be optimizing your site and creating new pages which target those keywords as well. There are two ways of doing your investigation. One is to visit your competitor’s website and analyze all the webpages, checking out their title, metatags and backlinks. The other is to use tools like SEODigger. Just enter the site’s URL and you can find out which keywords your competitor is targeting.

So do a little thinking and get your long tail keywords on top and they will undoubtedly increase the amount of traffic you receive from search engines.

Contributed by Shruti Kekre, SEO Team

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