The Importance of Long-Tailed Keywords

As you delve further into the schematics and details of search engine marketing and SEO, you’ll realize the dire importance of long-tailed keywords. Search engine crawlers index pages and websites through keywords and phrases.

That’s why optimizing your website by targeting keywords that relate to your business is the key to appearing on the search engine result pages (SERP). So, where do long-tailed keywords come in?

Let’s say that you want to research something. Your first response, of course, is to pull up a search engine like Google or Yahoo and type in your query into the search bar.

As you’re typing, you’ll notice that the search engine will have a dropdown of suggestions based on similar topics that other people searched for. These suggestions are often more specific keywords or phrases. They’re what you would call long-tailed keywords.

The Benefits of Long-Tailed Keywords

One of the main points of SEO is tailoring the keywords on your website and pages to fit your business. Otherwise, having pages that are irrelevant to what you offer means you’re bringing in the wrong traffic.

That’s why keyword research is an important step that an experienced Houston SEO company can take care of for you.

There’s a difference between simple keywords and long-tailed keywords. Simple keywords are often short and encompass a broad topic. For smaller businesses, there’s a chance you won’t be able to beat out corporations or larger local businesses in the industry.

For example, if you’re a coffee shop, your pages may not rank as high for the keywords “coffee” or “coffee shop near me” because you’re competing with more authoritative businesses.

So, in what space should you compete? The answer is through long-tailed keywords! You can tailor these keywords to your business!

Taking on the coffee example, you can focus pages on phrases like “cold-brew vanilla coffee beans” or something specific or niche.

Chances are, there’s not much competition over words like that, so your website can appear on the page more often and in great positions.

Longer Keywords Make You More Accessible

It’s not a well-known fact, but our Houston SEO experts know there’s another hidden side-effect to targeting long-tailed keywords. You can make your site and business more visible to those using voice search!

The keywords that people use for voice searches tend to be more conversational. That means the keywords also tend to be longer, making them fit under long-tailed keywords more often.

More than half of the people in the US use some type of voice feature to surf the internet. Rather than missing out on these opportunities, it’s better to optimize your website for these searches.

If you’re not sure where to start, get in touch with our team now. Although Actual SEO Media, Inc. is based in the greater Houston area, that doesn’t stop us from helping you optimize your website’s keywords. Let us show you how it’s done.