In recent months, long-tail keywords have created a buzz in the SEO world as webmasters devise ways of making sure that their sites are ranking high on search engine results pages. Some SEO professionals may advise you not to spend resources chasing rankings for competitive keyword terms. However, studies have proven that it is possible to enhance your site authority for such keywords by focusing on the long tail.
Well, focusing on the low-hanging fruits is a good strategy, but you should not do that at the expense of other highly competitive phrases that have the potential to drive more traffic to your site. The long-hanging fruit should give you opportunities to rank for the competitive phrases.
Optimize for the Target Audience Intents, Desires, and Topics
If you search for a given topic on Google, you will uncover hundreds if not thousands of keywords used by searchers. Every keyword represents intent or something that the searcher wants to learn about the topic. It is not possible to optimize a page for all the keywords that you find.
The secret to jumping this hurdle is grouping the keywords. That is group keywords that represent the same intent together. Every intent that you identify should have a unique page packed with valuable content that resonates with the needs of the searcher. Improve your keyword targeting strategy by distributing the short-tail keywords into the related groups of relevant long-tail keywords.
Practice Patience
Just like any other SEO strategy, you cannot expect instant results. Some of the strategies will only start to yield positive results months after implementation. Based on these facts, you need to be patient and have a set of realistic goals and expectations that you want to achieve.
Optimize a hundred long-tail phrases will not help you to gain traction on short-tail phrases that you are targeting. You still need to build the authority of all the target pages to achieve this goal. Concisely, without page authority, you will not succeed in ranking for the target short-tail phrases irrespective of how well you have optimized.
Final Thoughts
According to a recent report by Google, only 15% of queries used to search for information are 100% new and unique. This means that, out of 100 queries, only 15 have never been used before to lookup information on the web. Therefore, you should focus on the intent of the searchers if you are to succeed in ranking for short-tail keywords. Remember to market and promote your website to the target audience as well as provide value.
