What is the Long Tail? Why is it Important to Your Business?

What Is “The Long Tail”?

The long tail in terms of keywords for your business represents the total accumulated mass of keywords that relate to a given niche area. That niche can be large – for instance, Sports. Or, that niche can be small – for instance, Badminton Raquets from Fiji.

Let’s talk about the short-tail first. The short tail for “Sports” would include keywords like: Football, basketball, running, hockey, college baseball, and others. These keywords have hundreds of thousands of searches in the search engines. These terms are general, unfocused, and may not lead to a good return on investment if you’re in a Pay Per Click program and targeting them. But, if you managed to get in Google’s top 10 for one of them you’d enjoy so much free traffic that some of them would convert for your offer – or click ads you have displayed, bringing you some income.

The short-tail keywords are quite hard to grab a top 10 result for in Google. If your niche is large it might prove impossible. For small, focused niches it might be possible. The short tail for a business website selling “badminton raquets from Fiji” might consist of 1 keyword. The long-tail might have a handful of keywords (phrases) like “kevlar badminton racquets from Fiji” or “extra long badminton racquets from Fiji”.

If you were targeting long-tail keywords in a Pay Per Click campaign you would be able to pay less for them (less competition) and you’d convert better because they are very specific phrases that people are razor targeted for. The person is telling you exactly what they want to see, opposite of short-tail keys where you’re not quite sure what subtopic they’re interested in.

Short tail keywords make up the first group of general keywords related to the niche. There are fewer keywords in the short-tail, and they are highly competitive because they drive so much traffic. They are general and unfocused. Their value is in the sheer numbers of people using them to find information about a topic they’re interested in.

Long tail keywords are those that make up the vast bulk of the keywords about a topic. They are the 90% of keywords that make up focused searches about subtopics within a niche. These are the keywords that can convert very highly in a Pay Per Click campaign, but usually there is small volume of people searching on them.

How can money be made with long tail keywords then?

In the case of search engine marketing – if you focused your site on the long tail keywords – many of them, you would be able to grab a subset of people that were interested in very specific things you have information about – and maybe sell them a product that would help them do something. If you wrote a lot of content that used long tail keywords in the articles you would enjoy a tremendous amount of traffic arriving at your site looking for info about those long tail keywords.

Long tail is a pure gold mine for search engine targeting – but, to get it you need to have a high number of content pieces (articles, product pages) that have these long-tail keywords in them. It makes a whole lot of sense to

In the case of pay per click campaigns… If you focused your campaign on accumulating thousands and thousands of long tail keyword phrases that are highly focused you will be enjoying high click through rates, sales, and high return on investment. There are numerous Pay Per Click players that have hundreds of thousands of keywords in their campaign and they make a very good living off the long tail.

As you start your online business website and you are trying to decide which keywords to focus on as you develop your site – what should you do?

Consider your business model. Do you want to target short tail keywords that you might be able to grab top 10 Google spots for in 3-10 years? Or, do you want to make money in the short term too? If you need money anytime soon you’re wise to target long-tail keywords and start building content that will get you recognized by Google for those long-tail keys.

If you have more questions you might want to have a look at our online training courses about various internet marketing topics like Pay Per Click, Affiliate programs, and Google SEO.