“Long tail” is a big buzzword in marketing these days. Long tail keywords are less-searched and often overlooked words and phrases that can often get more traffic combined than a broader, more general keyword ever could. Understanding the concept of long tail keywords and applying it to your business can open you up to new visitors, and new profits as well.

For example, let’s say the keyword “dog training” gets approximately 2,420 searches per day. Start looking at the lesser-searched keyword phrases for that niche – dog training collars, dog potty training, dog training careers, and so on. When you add up all of the long-tail keywords, which are easier to dominate in the search engine results pages, it equals more traffic than you might get if you simply went after Dog Training.

If you have 10,000,000 websites competing for the term “dog training,” but only 361,000 competing for “dog training DVD,” then you have a far greater chance of reaching the first page than you would if you were competing against 10 million pages.

Being ranked number one for a broad term like “mp3″ would probably take a truly exceptional SEO expert many months of very hard work and a very large budget for buying backlinks to accomplish. But, ranking for a term like “1970s rock mp3s” might be much easier – because it’s a long tail keyword. If the term gets 50 searches per day, and you rank number three, then you might get 20 or 30 hits to your website per day.

If you rank number 30,714 for the term “mp3,” you probably won’t get any traffic from that at all. Finding good long tail keywords is very important, because you need those long tail phrases to bring in traffic… especially when it’s harder to get placement with more popular keywords.

While some marketers shun long tail keywords, believing they have to rank well for the prime keyword phrases, others are using it to reach a demographic that has money in hand. Rather trying to get traffic from people searching the word “golf”, it’s much easier to attract someone who types in “Taylor Made R580XD Titanium Driver,” and could be potentially much more profitable.

The searcher who gets more specific with their searches is often someone who’s more ready to buy, because they know what they want. The person typing in “golf” may want to know its history for a project, might want to take a golf vacation, or could be interested in attending a local tournament. That won’t do you any good if your site sells golf clubs, but the long tail phrase will cater to the right crowd specifically.

Therefore, pick your keywords and phrases carefully. Separate your broad, generic terms from your long tail phrases so that you can monitor your search engine positioning and see how your keyword list is performing for you.

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine
Home Small Business Coaching

P.S. Here’s another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Traffic Siphon: Get More Traffic And Make More Money Now!