Keyword Research: What Advantages Does a Long-tail Strategy Have?

You’ve launched a new online project and created your targeted buyer persona.

The question ‘who am I actually writing this for?’ should be the basis of any content project. It helps immensely when writing if you can imagine a concrete person as the addressee. The buyer persona represents a visualization of your target audience, so to speak. But how can you now make sure that the right visitors also become aware of your page?

As we all have experienced, the Internet has brought about a change in the sales process. Potential customers now inform themselves about a product or service online before they even contact the provider.

The primary goal of a long tail strategy should therefore be to ensure that potential buyers find you. It is therefore necessary to find out or imagine which questions and problems the buyer persona is confronted with that can be solved by your company. In this context, the so-called long tail keywords play an important role.

What are long-tail keywords?

In online marketing, we often talk about long-tail keywords, meaning search terms that are relatively specific and therefore not searched for as often, but which are also less competitive and can be used more effectively for online marketing purposes. This includes, for example, combinations of several keywords. The traffic generated by long tail search queries is usually proportionally higher than that generated by individual search terms.

What are the advantages of a long-tail strategy?

1. Less competition: more top positions in search results

On the Internet, there is no limit to the store space. Instead, there is merciless competition for attention. It makes little sense to optimize a post for a keyword like marketing — the competition is simply too great to get on the first page of search results here.

This is where the benefits of having your own blog come into play. In contrast to a static company presence with about five to ten web pages that can only be optimized for a small number of keywords, with a regularly managed blog you have the opportunity to go almost unlimited in breadth.

Each blog entry produces a page — optimized for a long-tail keyword — that can be indexed by Google. If you manage to rank first for 50 different keywords that are perhaps only searched 200 times a month, you will gain more traffic than if you rank 40th for a top keyword with 200,000 queries.

2. More qualified visitors to your website

However, it’s not only about simply getting more traffic. The goal should be, first and foremost, to have the right people landing on your site, as determined by lead scoring. In this context, another advantage of the long-tail strategy becomes apparent — more specific search queries indicate a more precise expectation of the searcher. That is, the better a page matches a more specific search query, the more qualified the visitor automatically is.

At the same time, the more specific the query is, the greater the chance of conversion. Thus, long tail optimization can also have a positive effect on the conversion rate.

3. Impact on top keywords

Since more detailed search queries usually include a top keyword, a long-tail strategy simultaneously impacts your ranking for top keywords. If you link from several highly ranked blogposts to a page with a more competitive keyword, you can give it an extra boost.

4. Ranking losses have less dramatic impact

Google is continually working to improve the quality of its search results and is constantly tweaking the way its search algorithm works to that end. Smaller changes are usually not even noticed.

So if you optimize your site for only a few top keywords, a drop in positioning can have dramatic consequences that can only be reversed with a lot of effort.

A broad positioning with long-tail keywords makes you much less susceptible to this danger. If your positioning deteriorates for a few search phrases, it does not mean that your company will disappear from the search results. Due to the lower competition on these terms, it is also much easier to counteract a deterioration of the position.