Long tail SEO is not very popular, but still is a powerful strategy for building up natural search traffic for your website. various studies shows that using long tail keywords makes it easier to rank, bring in more targeted traffic, and convert more audience to customers, as compared to "head" keywords. In this article, you will know about what long tail SEO is and whether you should use this technique as a part of your keyword strategy.

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What Is Long Tail SEO?

Let’s first go into the depth for different keyword targeting strategies.

When researching keywords, most SEOs consider the following three core keyword qualities:

·    Search volume– what depicts the search volume is the approximate number of times people search for a keyword in a particular time period. Generally, a keywords potential to bring in more visitors depends upon the larger search volume a keyword has.

·    Competition – For a given keyword, how easy or hard it is, to outshine rivals.

·    Relevance – how much a keyword is relevant according to your product, service or website. The more the keyword is relevant, the more will be chance to convert the user into a customer.

Early SEOs, around the beginning of the Internet were only focused on targeting keywords those have high search volumes. Actually, during those days there wasn't much competition among websites that makes it comparatively easy to get into the Top 10 of the search engine results page (SERP) virtually with any type of keyword.

But things have changed since those days. Now, the total number of sites across the Internet has reached more than a billion (1,003,887,790). As compared this to only 603,367 sites that have been registered in the late 1996.

Such a drastic hype of the Internet space has raised the competition between products, websites, services, and online marketers struggling for the most popular keywords.

In parallel, there was another funda going on behind the curtains which was the birth of search engine algorithms. In the late 90s you could buy a few links and get into the Top 10 indexing just like that. Today, these kind of techniques may be considered as SPAM and will come under black hat SEO. It will not move you up towards the Top 10 but instead do more harm to your website.

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These two processes have changed tactics and plans used by SEOs. Nowadays, it is just like impossible for SMBs (small-to-medium business) to get their new sites into the Top 10 of Google search page having highly competitive and high search volume keywords where prominent corporate company’s websites locate.

SEOs then began focusing more on the other two keyword qualities described above i.e. relevancy and competition. And that is how the long tail SEO came into existence.

Long tail SEO is a technique of targeting highly specific categorized search terms and phrases i.e. long tail keywords that generally comprises of more than 3 words and are much easier to rank than single word keyword due to less competition.

A small disadvantage only here is that the individual long tail keywords generally have much lower search volume in contrast to so-called "head" keywords that consist of 1-2 words. But the good thing about the long tail SEO strategy is that it can be successfully applied by businesses of any size and virtually in any market type. 

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