Best keywords for a small business: Focus on the ‘long tail’
Posted April 5, 2009 – 7:06 pm
Choosing the best website keywords is a crucial starting point for an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Small businesses face special challenges when choosing keywords because they can never expect to achieve the kind of SEO traction that big companies can.
As a result, small businesses must be more calculating and deliberate in choosing keywords – they need to choose terms which can get them to the top of Google SERPs (search engine results pages) without a big investment of time or money.
The first step is to do some analysis to figure out what keywords are the most likely to help you gain search engine visibility on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and other search engines. By ‘keywords’, I mean both individual words as well as short 2-5 word phrases that are relevant to describing your business.
Your goal is to achieve search engine ‘visibility’. Seach engine visibility happens only when you are able to break into the top 10 results of a search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or other search engine. If your website is not in the Top 10 results – meaning on page 1 of the SERPs (search engine results pages), then your chances of someone finding you drop significantly.
In fact, even on page 1, your chances of being clicked on drops sharply from postion #1 to position #10. Ideally, you want to be in the top 3, perhaps the top 5, for the best possible search engine traffic generation.
What Are the Best Keywords?
Getting into the top 5 search engine results sounds pretty hard. What are the best keywords to get you there?
Counter-intuitively, you want to focus on narrower and more specific terms, rather than broader and more general terms.
Which is to say that the ‘best’ keywords for small businesses are almost always in what’s called the ‘long tail’ of search. The ‘long tail’ of search refers to words and phrases that are not the most commonly used terms, but rather are less commonly used ways of saying the same thing.
Usually, these less common, and generally more specific, terms are not individual words, but rather are phrases consisting of 2-5 words. So, as a small business, you should be more concerned with finding and targeting highly specific keyword phrases vs. unspecific individual words.
Long Tail Keywords Example
‘Long tail’ keywords (or keyword phrases) can usually be found in varying degrees of long tail-ness. You want terms that are ‘long tail’ enough to be distinctive, but not so long tail that nobody would use the term.
Here’s an example from the remodeling industry which illustrates the concept. As we go down the list, the terms become increasing ‘long tail’ – meaning more and more specific.
| Alternative Search Terms |
| remodeling |
| kitchen remodeling |
| kitchen remodeling atlanta |
| luxury kitchen remodeling atlanta |
This specific long tail keyword pattern above applies to most any locally oriented business where you can use geography to help focus the meaning. But there are other types of patterns – for instance, the ‘luxury’ variant – where other types of modifiers help distinguish a specific type of thing from a more general class or category of thing.
One of your big challenges is to figure out the ‘long tail’ patterns that apply to your business.
Easier to Make Google Page 1 SERPs with Long Tail Keywords
As a small business, you want to use more precise ‘long tail’ search terms for 2 major reasons:
- There are fewer websites competing for the top slots for those terms
- Many Google searchers are going to use these terms to try to find you because more general terms don’t yield what they are looking for
Regarding the first point, in the table below you can see how as the keyword phrases get more specific, a smaller and smaller number of search engine results is found.
| Search term | No. of search engine results |
| remodeling | 30,100,000 |
| kitchen remodeling | 6,600,000 |
| kitchen remodeling atlanta | 335,000 |
| luxry kitchen remodeling atlanta | 69,000 |
As the number of results declines, your chances of being able to make it into the top 10 search engine results increases. Still not easy, but much more workable.
Long Tail Keywords Produce More Qualified Visitors
At the same time that the number of competitive search engine results declines, it is also true fewer and fewer searches are done as a keyword becomes increasingly long tail. In other words, there are going to be more searches done for a popular generic word than for a less popular 3 or 4 word phrase. Sometimes the drop-off is really precipitous; at other times, less so.
The table below shows how search volume declines from 2.2M searches per month for the generic term ‘remodeling’ to just 28 searches per month for the term ‘luxury kitchen remodeling atlanta’ (Note: All figures are approximate. Source: Google keywords analysis tool)
| Search term | Searches per month |
| remodeling | 2,200,000 |
| kitchen remodeling | 40,000 |
| kitchen remodeling atlanta | 880 |
| luxury kitchen remodeling atlanta | 28 |
While it may seem like you’d rather be competing for 2.2M searchers than for 880, keep in mind that those 880 are a lot more ‘qualified’ than the 2.2M. A searcher for ‘remodeling’ could be looking for any number of things from anywhere in the country – and is highly unlikely to be a serious buyer. A searcher looking for ‘kitchen remodeling atlanta’ is probably a lot more promising as a potential buyer.
Long Tail Keywords Will Yield More SEO Traction
As a small business, you stand a much better shot of getting into the Top 10 search results when you are competing against 335,000 or 69,000 other websites than you have when competing against 30.1M sites. Since being in the Top 10 is crucial for SEO success, you can see that going with a long tail keyword strategy reduces the competition and offers a more realistic shot for your website to get search engine visibility.
Of course, beating out 335,000 other search results is still no layup, but 99.999% of those results are complete junk and pose no real obstacle. The only results that you really care about are the existing results in the top 10 – your job is to figure out a way to displace one or several of these guys to get yourself onto page 1 of the Google SERPs (search engine results page).
As you start out, it is worth looking at these existing sites one-by-one and see what they are doing. Do this by using Google to actually run a bunch of your possible long tail keywords. With each term, take note of how the top websites are using these terms on their pages and figure out ways you can do it a little bit more or better. Sometimes, it can be surprising how, with a little elbow grease, ingenuity, and time, you can be displace pages in the Top 10.
In fact, if you choose your keywords right and tune your site accordingly, you may be amazed how quickly you can pop to the top if you play your cards right.
Integrate Long Tail Keywords into Your Website
Once you’ve put some thought into what long tail keywords are going to give your site the most search engine traction, your next challenge is to carefully sprinkle these keyword phrases throughout your site. This means ensuring that your keywords are strongly represented in your website’s ‘meta’ (i.e., page titles, page descriptions, urls, etc.) because these form the foundation of your SEO performance. It also means reworking and tailoring the content of all your web page to emphasize these terms in your page headings, boldface text, etc.
In fact, once you’ve figured out what keywords you are targeting, you may well find yourself creating some additional pages specifically designed to showcase these terms. Of course, you must do this in a judicious way that doesn’t appear ’spammy’ to Google, but such purpose-driven pages can often gain outstanding search engine traction.
Integrate Long Tail Keywords into Your Google Adwords Campaign
If you are also doing some pay-per-click advertising using Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or other program, you should seriously consider integrating your long-tail keywords into that effort.
Doing so will yield several inter-related benefits. One is that there are generally fewer companies competing for long tail keywords and so prices are going to be (somewhat) lower. Second, because Google AdWords incorporates elements of search engine optimization into it’s placement and pricing algorithms, you may be able to save further by using well targeted ad text that utilizes your long tail keywords. And lastly, if you point targeted AdWords ads to highly relevant web pages in your site, you are going to drive higher conversion rates. Higher conversion rates means more customers for less ad spend.
One Comment
Nice to see you blogging. This is a great example of playing the long tail to find a nice blend of traffic vs competing indexed pages to earn search rankings. Also remember that a majority of the traffic is in the first 3 natural search listings. So even if you can get a #10 ranking on a more competitive term. It might be worth more to hit a variety of long tail keywords to earn a top 3 ranking.