My SEO Journal: How I Have Achieved & Maintained Top Rankings — Part #6

• Long-Tail Keyword Phrase Ranks #8 In Google •
• What’s The Benefit of Long-Tails For Your Site’s Traffic? •

Today during some research for my own site, and out of complete curiosity, I typed the search term ’seo consultant small business prices’ into Google. Lo-and-behold, there was my consulting website’s home page, www.SEO-Innovation.com ranking #8 out of 348,000 SERPs!

Can I be honest with you? (“Yes Claudia … please be honest!”  you say). I was surprised to see I hold a top-ten ranking position for this phrase. Why? Because I never optimized the home page for that long-tail keyword phrase! But, due to the actual content on the page, and the fact I had done a very good job at optimizing the Title tag and meta tags, and the content for “seo consultant” and “small business”, the term ‘price’ was also found by the Google spiders on that page, and with all the other factors taken into consideration, Google deemed my page was extremely relevant for that search term, and awarded me the #8 position.

So, as can often happen, you might very well discover that you rank very nicely for many long-tail keyword phrases that you never set out to specifically optimize a page of content for. And hey, that’s great! I won’t argue unplanned occurrences like that. And in addition, you may also find that you get a nice trickle of traffic from these “unplanned” keyword phrases, too.

What Exactly Are Long-Tail Keyword Phrases?

Long-Tail keywords are those 3 and 4-keyword phrases which are very, very specific to whatever you are promoting or selling. You see, whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy. In virtually every case, these very specific searches are far more likely to convert to sales than general generic searches that tend to be geared more toward the type of research that consumers typically do prior to making a buying decision.

Examples of more generalized searches in my particular situation would be along the lines of “seo consultant” or maybe “small business seo”.

Here’s another example that might make this long-tail concept even easier for you to understand:
    Generalized term: mountain bikes
    Long-tails:
      –cross-country mountain bikes
      –hardtail mountain bikes
      –full-suspension mountain bikes
      –freeride mountain bikes
      –dirt jump mountain bikes

The beauty of taking advantage of using lots of long-tail phrases in your pages of content or blog articles, is that you not only broaden the opportunity to have more targeted keyword phrases that can be used for more pages of unique content, but you also increase the likelihood of attracting more visitors who are really more interested in what you have to offer.

They’re looking for specific information or products or services, and your very targeted information is at their disposal. If you’ve done an excellent job of over-delivering quality content as I always encourage people to do, then I’ll bet you will find that you are truly increasing the opportunity to make more sales.

To learn about the value of targeting long-tail keyword phrases to help grab more visitors for your site, I’d like to point you to this great article: Three Good Reasons To Target Long-Tail Keywords!