You may already know that keywords are words or phrases that people type into their search bars to search. A person looking for gaming headphones will use keywords like” Gaming headphone,” “Headphones for gaming,” “Bluetooth headphones.”
Keywords are the gateway to your website. For generating organic traffic, your website should rank well for certain keywords. The more keywords your website is ranking for, the more organic traffic your website will generate.
On average, 53.3 percent of the traffic on a website is organic.
Keywords have long been a part of SEO strategy for almost all websites. However, the one thing that content creators are overlooking is that the internet is already filled with content on almost all the topics that people search for.
Why keywords are important?
Your entire SEO strategy lies in the keywords, and it is most important piece to research for keywords. To get most out of your SEO efforts, start with keyword research.
But do you know, ranking for the keywords is becoming more and more difficult every passing day and competition on the keywords is growing much faster rate. Yes, for keywords like “Headphones,” there are already hundreds and thousands of articles and blogs present on the internet.
How to find profitable keywords?
As a newcomer competing with established websites for similar keywords will be ineffectual. You’ll end up utilizing all your time and resources for nothing. All your efforts and hard work will go to waste.
So what can you do to attract an audience when all these big websites take away most of the traffic? Find the keywords that are easier to rank and with traffic potential.
In short, Long-tail keywords are the answer to your need and lets start learning.
What are long-tail keywords?
Long-tail keywords can be described as keywords with three or more words. Long-tail keywords are used to target a more specific audience.
69.7 percent of all the searches contain more than three words.
“Laptop” is a short tail keyword. “Laptop for office” is a long-tail keyword.
“Headphones” is a short-tail keyword. “Headphones for gamers” is a long-tail keyword.
Many people will search for “Headphones” because it is a general term and covers a lot of other searches under its umbrella.
A person searching for headphones can get results ranging from “Best headphones under $500” to “How headphones are manufactured.”
Since short tail keywords cover such a large variety of content under their umbrella, their competition is very high.
Compared to the keyword “Headphones,” lesser people will search for the keyword “Headphones for gamers.”
“Headphones for gamers” will be searched by people who are specifically looking for headphones that are to be used by gamers.
Since fewer people will be searching for this keyword, not many web pages will be targeting this keyword as their primary or secondary keyword.
Let’s begin with an example
You own a tech blog where you share your personal experiences with products like laptops, gaming PCs, Gaming headphones, or any other tech-related product. You also give product recommendations to your website visitors and earn commission through an affiliate program.
You live in the United States of America, and your blog is also targeted towards the American audience.
You are researching keywords for your next blog. Using a keyword research tool, you find the following results
The keyword “Headphones” has almost 300,000 searches per month from American users.
And a website that ranks in the top 10 for this keyword has almost 146,502 backlinks.
To rank in the top 10 for the keyword “Headphones,” a website should also have a domain authority 87.
You also notice that this keyword has an SEO difficulty of 90.
This keyword has a paid difficulty of 100.
The cost per click for this keyword is $1.09.
Now you search for a longer keyword that is “Headphones for gamers.”
You notice the following things
The keyword” Headphones for gamers” has 27,100 searches per month.
An average website that ranks in the top ten search results for this keyword has 0 backlinks.
The domain authority of the websites ranking in the top 10 search results for this keyword is also zero.
The SEO difficulty for this keyword is 52.
For this keyword, the paid difficulty is 100.
The cost per click for” Headphone for gamers” is $1.03.
Now that you have noted down all these important factors regarding these two keywords, you are still unsure which keyword is right for your website.
You know that the keyword “Headphones” is being searched almost ten times more than the keyword
“Headphones for gamers.”
But you know that you cannot base your decision solely on the volume of searches for a certain keyword.
There are other factors that you have to consider for choosing the perfect keyword.
Out of all the web pages,90.63 percent generate zero organic traffic from Google.
A huge number of these web pages are targeting highly competitive short-tail keywords.
Factors to consider when choosing a keyword
Search volume
The search volume typically shown on keyword research tools represents the amount of times a keyword is searched within a month. Search volume also represents the popularity of keywords among people. If a keyword is generating a good number of search results every month. It means that this keyword is quite popular.
As opposed to this, if a keyword is generating only a few searches per month. Then, this keyword is not popular among internet users of that area.
Search volume can also vary depending upon different regions. For example, a very popular keyword in the USA will not be as popular in Turkey because of language and cultural differences.
Let’s look at our previous example of “Headphones for gamers” for both the United States and Turkey.
The search volume for “Headphones for gamers” is 27,100 in the United States.
And the search volume for the same keyword in Turkey is only 880 searches per month.
Search volume is very important when considering a keyword for your content. In addition, search volume helps you in figuring out the worth of a particular keyword.
If you choose a keyword without looking at its search volume first, you can end up creating content on a keyword that no one is searching for.
Search volume is very important, but it is not the only factor to consider when choosing a keyword for your content.
Let’s compare the search volume for the keyword we researched earlier.
The keyword “Headphones” has a search volume of 301000 searches per month in the United States.
The keyword “Headphone for gamers” has a search volume of 27100 searches per month.
If you were to choose a keyword-based solely on search volume, you would have chosen “Headphones.” But as we discussed earlier, there are many factors to consider when choosing a keyword.
SEO/keyword difficulty
SEO/keyword difficulty is represented with a number between 1 and 100. It shows up along with search volume when you research a keyword.
SEO difficulty means how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword. The closer to 100 the number is, the more SEO difficulty the keyword will have.
Keyword or SEO difficulty can be based on several factors, including Backlinks, domain authority, quality of content, etc.
If you choose a keyword with low SEO difficulty, you’ll be able to rank in the top searches with considerably less effort than if you choose a keyword with high SEO difficulty.
Short tail keywords have higher SEO difficulty than Long tail keywords.
Let’s continue with our example above.
“Headphones” is a short tail keyword, and it has an SEO difficulty of 90, which is very high.
“Headphones” for gamers is a long-tail keyword, and it has an SEO difficulty of 52.
When we compare the long tail keywords with short tail ones, we discover that long tail keywords have considerably less SEO difficulty than Long tail keywords.
Targeting these long-tail keywords can generate good results fast.
Looking at our example for “Headphones” and “Headphones for gamers,” it becomes clear that the keyword “Headphones for gamers” is a better choice because the keyword difficulty is considerably less.
Backlinks
Backlinks are another important factor that you should consider before choosing a keyword. You should look at the average number of backlinks for top-ranking websites for the keyword you want to target. The more backlinks these websites have, the more difficult it will be for you to rank your content for that keyword.
Backlinks are also a factor that Keyword research tools consider when deciding the SEO difficulty of a keyword.
The more backlink you are required to build to rank in the top 10 searches for a keyword. The more SEO difficulty will the keyword have.
How targeting Long-tail keywords can be a good SEO strategy for you
As we have assessed from the figures above, Long-tail keywords are easier to rank for. There is a miss conception that targeting long-tail keywords is not a good SEO strategy. Still, both Ahrefs and Neil Patel say that targeting long-tail keywords has immensely helped them increase organic traffic for their website.
It is better to rank on the first page of search results for a keyword with low search volume than ranking on the second or third page for keywords with high search volume.
Only 6 percent of website clicks are generated on the second page of search results.
Since long-tail keywords usually have low competition, you’ll have a much better chance of generating organic traffic through them.
Finding Long tail keywords for your website
Now that we have concluded that targeting long-tail keywords can help increase organic traffic for your website, let’s go through the process of researching Long tail keywords.
Google autocomplete can be a good tool for generating long-tail keywords.
Just type in a short tail keyword like “Headphones,” and the autocomplete will give you many suggestions. You can choose one of these suggestions as your Long tail keyword. For example, “Headphones with mic” can be a good option when considering the image above.
You can also use Google’s related searches for this purpose. In addition, many keyword research tools like Ahrefs free keyword generator can also be helpful when looking for long-tail keywords.
I typed in “Gaming headphones” in Ahrefs keyword generator, and below are the results it generated
As you can see, this keyword generator has generated many long-tail keywords that you can target.
Bottom Line
You might get tempted to target keywords with the highest search volumes thinking that some of that traffic will trickle down to your webpage. But it is far from the truth. As we have discussed earlier, most organic traffic goes to websites on the first page of search results.
As you move farther away from the first page in the search results, your chances of generating organic traffic decrease considerably.
To avoid this kind of situation, targeting Long-tail keywords can be a good strategy.
Long-tail keywords may not have a high search volume compared to short-tail keywords, but they have substantially less SEO difficulty than short-tail keywords.
Targeting Long-tail keywords can help your web page in appearing on the first page of search results. In addition, this will increase your chances of generating organic traffic.
What kind of keywords do you target for your content?
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