Long tail keywords


Hello everyone - Today we will be talking about long-tail keywords. 

In our last post, I talked about keywords and today, we will be discussing about long tail keywords. This is the fourth post in this series on search engine optimization, and you can find the previous posts by clicking here. 

Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase.

Let’s take an example ─ to be ranked in the first page for a keyword like shoes is a long–sell. There is simply too much competition and clutter. It’s better to highlight your niche and your USPs through the use of long tail keywords and go for keywords like “handcrafted faux leather shoes for women” – more specific, more you. 

Now why are they called long tail? 

The concept of long tail has arisen from a concept in statistics - a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having a large number of occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution. 








Chris Anderson popularized the term in his book, The Long Tail – and evangelized the concept of looking at the tail itself as a new market of consumers. 

Now consider the search volume for the generic keyword “shoes” [head keyword], followed by a 2-3 word phrase “men’s shoes” and followed by a more descriptive phrase “red Nike men’s running shoes” [long-tail keyword]. The long tail keyword has more probability of conversion, low cost and competition. On the other hand, the generic keywords have high-cost and low probability of conversion [because of high competition]. 

So that is what long tail keywords do – taper out longer than the shorter head keywords, and increase the chances of conversion for you. 


If you are running paid search marketing campaigns, long –tail keywords are more valuable because they are unique to your product. 

What the customer is thinking: 

I need a travel package for group of women to a beach destination. 

In case you are optimizing your keyword strategy around the keyword “travel” or “travel packages for women”, you are going to face stiff competition from every travel operator, travel website, you need to focus on your niche in 

What you can do instead: 

Beach tours for women 

Special travel packages for women 

The more specific you get, the better the results. 

Why long tail keywords are important? 

1. Long tail keywords are actually closer to user intent – it is how users are searching the internet. Hence, chances of reaching potential customers with the correct set of long tail keywords is higher. 

2. They are considerably easier to rank for than their short tail counterparts. Imagine the time it would take to rank for “handbags” as opposed to “eco-friendly custom handbags” 

3. Better RoI - less competition, more conversion and hence more RoI


How to identify long-tail keywords? You may want to refer to this article on SEM rush, which captures this topic in detail.

That's all for long tail keywords - stay tuned for the next post in this series on Search Engine Optimization.

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