Why focus on long tail searches?

Posted by Mike on September 24th, 2007

Most bloggers out there make one of the worst mistakes they can do. They try to get involved in a very, but very very competitive niche, and try to get those lucrative top positions in SERPs for the most important keywords in their domain.

Come on dudes, that’s not the way to do it!!! How in earth do you think you might be able to compete with those already over powerful sites out there and even beat them? Well, you just can’t, considering that Google is putting so much weight on IBLs and domain age. That’s why you have to be smart, and focus on long tail searches. As in strings containing several words, that are not as lucrative taken each by one, but might give you a decent traffic from the various combinations of terms…

Long tail searches
Even though you won’t be able to compete for the red words, the big orange tail will get you a good amount of traffic

Let’s take my blog for example. It’s an Internet marketing Blog. OK, then i should try rank well for marketing? No, even though this terms gets searched almost 800.000 times monthly in USA alone (if you’re wondering how i get these numbers, it’s simple: by using this nice SEO tool). Not even for Internet marketing, with over 600.000 searches. Because i would not stand a chance. First of all, because it’s way harder to optimize your site for a single word search, and second, because of the fierce competition: over 600 million results.

So, that’s why I’m focusing on this string: Internet Marketing Online + Blog. It only has 60K searches monthly and a smaller competition, of 300 million results. It’s still a very tough fight, and I’m not expecting to get on the home page sooner than an year or more. But if i manage to hit those top 5 places on at least some of the combinations of these 4 words…… BTW, now I’m ranked number 71 for Internet Marketing Online (the main focus term), and 16 for Internet Marketing Online Blog, according to the tool i use. Lots of links with the correct anchor, good content and patience will get me where i want, eventually…

Remember, this is a long time target. For the daily posts, you have to use that tool above and search for good combinations of words, and focus on those long tail searches. Want another example? Here it is: Google search .

I hope you got the idea from what supposed to be just a scrub but managed to become quite a nice article… For young sites/blogs, long tail searches are the key to success.

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Tags: long tail searches, Marketing