What Are Long Tail Keywords?
Specific searches made by relatively few people, of which there are an enormous number. The usual argument is that they are easier to win. The more useful argument is that for a small business they are frequently the only searches worth pursuing at all.
Longer, More Specific, Fewer People
Somebody searches for a plumber. Somebody else searches for an emergency plumber who can come out on a Sunday in a particular town. The first is a head term and the second is long tail. The difference is specificity. Specificity always trades away volume.
Where the name comes from. The shape of demand.
Plot every search for a subject by how often it is made and you get a few enormous ones at the front, then a very long declining line of specific ones stretching out behind. That line is the tail.
What makes something long tail. Narrowness.
Not word count. A short search describing something very particular behaves the same way. A wordy vague one does not. We publish no word threshold, because any figure would be invented.
What you give up. Numbers.
Each of these searches brings few people. That is the entire cost and it is the reason businesses instinctively look past them.
What you gain. Two things.
Far fewer serious contenders, plus a searcher who has told you exactly what they need. Blocks two and three cover each.
Where the term originated. Retail, not search.
The idea came from businesses selling small quantities of a great many products rather than large quantities of a few. Search behaves the same way, which is why the borrowed name stuck.
Why the tail is bigger than the head. Sheer variety.
There are only so many ways to type a broad search. There are countless ways to describe a specific situation. Added together they outweigh the front of the curve considerably.
Why They Matter More Than The Big Terms
A small business will not win a one word search and does not need to. That is not defeatism. It is the recognition that the broad terms are occupied by national brands, directories and publishers who have spent years and considerable sums getting there.
Who holds the head terms. Not businesses like yours.
Look at what appears for a single word service search. Comparison sites, large directories, national chains. A local firm is not displacing any of them with a better page.
Why pursuing them wastes money. No middle outcome.
You either appear well or nowhere. Effort spent on an unwinnable search produces no partial benefit, which is different from most business investments.
What the specific searches offer instead. An open field.
Large sites write broadly because they serve everybody. That leaves the particular situations uncovered. Those are exactly the ones your customers are in.
The conversion argument. Better people.
Somebody typing a precise description of their problem is closer to acting than somebody typing a category. So the visitors are fewer and worth considerably more each.
Why this makes local viable. Geography is specificity.
Adding a place to a service narrows the field to businesses that serve that place, which is a contest a local firm can win. That is the whole basis of how the trade guides on this site are built.
What it is not. A permanent ceiling.
Winning specific searches builds the standing that eventually makes broader ones possible. It is the route rather than the limit.
Volume Is Not The Point
A search with modest volume and clear intent is worth more than a large one with none. That sentence overturns how most keyword lists are sorted. It is the basis on which every trade cluster in this programme was built.
Why volume dominates decisions. It is the visible number.
Sorting a list by volume takes one click. Sorting it by commercial value takes judgement about the business, which no column contains.
What a large number hides. Everybody at once.
A broad search contains researchers, students, people doing it themselves and buyers, all mixed together. A specific one is frequently almost entirely people in the situation you serve.
The comparison worth making. Not visits.
Ask how many enquiries a search could produce rather than how many visitors. Those two questions rank a list in noticeably different orders.
What a small figure frequently means. Nothing bad.
A local search showing barely any volume can still bring work every week, because the estimates are least reliable exactly where the numbers are smallest. Our local business guide covers that properly.
What we tell clients. Ignore the column.
Use volume to break ties between otherwise equal options. Never use it to choose between a broad search and a specific one, because it will always favour the wrong answer.
The figure that misleads most. A large number on a general term.
It looks like the prize and it is the search you are least likely to win and least likely to profit from if you did.
Where the numbers are examined. Their own guide.
Our metrics guide covers what search volume actually is, including that it is an estimate rather than a count.
They Are Where The Questions Live
Most long tail searches are phrased as questions or as problems. Somebody describing a symptom, asking whether something is normal, wondering what a job should cost. That is what specificity looks like in practice.
Why questions get specific. They contain the situation.
A question carries context that a category search does not. The noise the boiler makes, the time of year, the type of property. Every detail narrows it further.
What that means for content. Answers rank.
A page that genuinely answers a question is competing against pages that mention the subject. That is a considerably easier contest than competing on a broad term.
Where to find them. Your phone.
The questions customers ask you every week are almost always searched by somebody. That list costs nothing and beats any tool as a starting point.
Which ones deserve a page. Not all.
Some belong as a section within a larger page. Our guide to question keywords covers the test for deciding which is which.
The phrasing worth watching for. Trouble.
Searches describing something going wrong carry more urgency than almost anything else. A person whose heating has failed is not comparing options leisurely. The page that answers them plainly wins the call.
The connection to buying. Not immediate.
Many question searches are people working out what they need rather than ready to hire. They are still worth serving. They belong on informational pages rather than on the pages meant to produce enquiries.
You Cannot List Them All
The tail is effectively infinite. New phrasings appear constantly, an enormous share of searches made on any given day have never been made in exactly that form before. No export will ever contain them. Chasing individual phrases is therefore futile.
Why the export always falls short. It shows the known.
A tool reports phrases it has recorded. The genuinely novel search somebody types tomorrow, in their own words about their own situation, is not in any file.
What people do wrong here. Build a page each.
Faced with a list of variations, businesses create near-identical pages for each. That produces thin content competing with itself rather than coverage.
What works instead. Cover the subject.
A page that answers a subject completely gets matched to phrasings nobody listed, because the matching is done on meaning. Our advanced material covers the mechanism.
What that changes practically. The unit of work.
You plan subjects rather than phrases. Clustering is the exercise that turns a list of phrases into a manageable set of subjects.
How you know it is working. Unplanned queries.
Once a page is live, your own search reporting will show it appearing for searches nobody targeted. That is the tail arriving. It is the clearest evidence the approach works.
What to do with those. Read them.
They tell you what the page is genuinely good at, which frequently suggests a better page than the one you wrote.
Where They Fit In The Types
Long tail is one of several ways searches get classified. The classifications are independent of each other. A long tail search is also a type of intent, is either branded or not and may or may not be tied to a place. Holding all four at once is what makes the categories usable.
The classification it belongs to. Length.
Head terms at one end, mid tail in between, long tail at the other. That is a spectrum rather than three boxes.
What it says nothing about. Intent.
A long tail search can be somebody ready to buy or somebody idly curious. Length tells you about competition rather than about commercial value.
Why that matters. Two filters, not one.
Long tail helps with winnable. It does nothing for worth winning, which is the second and more important test in our method guide.
Where the full classification lives. The types pillar.
Keyword types explained sets out all four ways of classifying a search, with a section on each. This page will not relist them.
What to take from here. One idea.
Specific searches are where a small business competes. Everything sits on the keyword research guide.
You will not
win the one
word search,
and you do
not need to.
Broad terms are held by comparison sites, national chains and large directories who spent years and considerable sums getting there. Effort aimed at them produces no partial benefit, because you either appear well or nowhere. The specific searches are an open field. They are where your customers describe what they actually need.
How we choose what to target:
A large number on a general term looks like the prize. It is the search you are least likely to win and least likely to profit from if you did.
Every guide.
One subject.
What the words mean, what the numbers in a keyword tool actually are, how to find the searches worth targeting, how to turn a list into a publishing plan and what to do when a page you relied on slips.
