Long Tail Keywords and How They Affect Your SEO Budget

The long tail was originally offered as a model for describing how the Internet opened up a flood in the entertainment industry for sales of niche titles.

Beyonce would be in head of the curve with all the other big name artists who sell a lot of records, get their songs played on the radio once per hour and have albums for purchase at every music store. Lesser known artists, like Andrew Bird, would be found further down in the curve – the long tail.

What are Long Tail Keywords?

Of course, the long tail concept isn’t limited to just entertainment. It applies to many industries, even search engine marketing, which is why you’ll often hear SEOs talking about long tail keywords.

The keyword phrases at the head of the graph are those that individually get a lot of searches. These are usually categorically broad in nature and consist of only one or two words. As you move to the right, the keyword phrases become more specific and tend to be longer (three or more words).

For example, let’s say your business sells dog training products. “Dog training” would be a top-searched keyword phrase at the head of the curve, while “the best way to train my dog” would be part of the tail.

Why are Long Tail Keywords Important?

While there may only be a handful of keyword phrases at the head of the curve, there are likely thousands (or more!) of them in the long tail.

Even though the keywords at the head offer more potential search traffic individually, long tail keywords tend to offer more potential search traffic cumulatively.

The fact of the matter is, long tail keywords offer boatloads of potential search engine traffic and are also a lot easier to rank for than head keywords. And, as I’m about to illustrate, easier = cheaper.

How Do Long Tail Keywords Affect Your SEO Budget?

Since keywords at the head of the curve can potentially provide oodles of traffic, these tend to be the most competitive – i.e. everyone else in your industry who is aware of SEO will be trying to rank for those terms.

More competition = harder to get ranked for = more expensive to get ranked for.

Why more expensive? Because it takes a lot more resources to get a good ranking for those terms. You’ll need better, more relevant content that attracts natural links. You’ll need more content to prove that you are the top authority on that subject. You’ll need to devote more time to PR or link building or deal-making or whatever else. Or you’ll need to pay your SEO provider more than usual to do all that for you.

The long tail keywords, on the other hand, are generally much easier to rank for and, naturally, much less expensive to rank for. And this is why you need to make long tail keywords an integral part of your SEO strategy.