So if you stumbled across this blog post then you probably have an idea as to how important the use of long-tail keywords are to your SEO and inbound marketing efforts. Top-ranked long-tail searches can be up to 25% higher than for those for top-ranked general searches. Meaning those searching with long-tail keywords are looking for specific things and are driven to find it. Most users who are using the long-tail searches are much further along in the customer journey than those that are using general searches. They also tend to be more informed users than others.
In order to get a better understanding of Long-tail keywords and how they can affect your website, imagine that your website is a physical store. Let's say that you own a shoe store and that you specialize in high-heel shoes for women. If you put a sign outside your store that reads "SHOES," you would probably get a ton of foot traffic, but what types of visitors to your store would you get? You could get men looking for work-boots. You could get teenagers looking for tennis shoes, and yes eventually you may have a couple who are looking for high heels.
Out of that list of visitors how many do you think would purchase high-heels from you? What if instead, you put out a sign that read "High-Heels for sale?" Your number of men looking for work-boots would probably drastically drop. However, your number of women looking for high-heel shoes will go up. This batch of visitors will be much more likely to purchase your shoes.
What if you're wanting to get even more specialized and only offer Stilleto Shoes? If you used a brand in your sign or even colors, then you would see visitors who are already in the mind frame that they will be purchasing those shoes, which puts your little store and your shoes you have to offer exactly in the right place. So our keywords list looks like this:
- shoes
- women's shoes
- women's high-heeled shoes
If you did a search for women's high-heeled shoes now you would notice that heels.com is the first website to come up. That is because they have developed their whole site around that series of long-tail keywords.
What this does for Heels.com is making sure that the traffic coming to their website is looking for Heels. This allows them to focus the marketing efforts on a niche market and dominate that market. You should aim to do the same when it comes to your marketing strategy for your website. You may have a much smaller budget than Heels.com, but if you start with targeted long-tail keywords your budget dollars will go a lot farther and you are more likely to increase your sales and lead conversion rates.
If you are looking for ways to power up your Search Engine Optimization or just curious about what long-tail keywords would be best for your online store, then contact us today to have used provide you with a free long-tail evaluation report.