Article Writing – How To Switch To Longtail SEO

If you haven’t switched the focus of your SEO articles to longtail SEO yet then not only are you making life much, much harder for yourself, probably with less and less result evident for your effort, but you’re missing a real trick as far as rapid, effective success with the search engines is concerned, quite apart from the increase in targeted traffic you could be enjoying.
If you’re not entirely sure what longtail SEO is, how it can be hugely beneficial, and how to optimise your article marketing for longtail keyphrases then here’s a quick rundown on the basics you need to know in order to jump on the bandwagon before you either get run over or left behind staring at the tracks and wondering where everybody went.
Many article writers and article marketers tend to be a little unsure about what longtail SEO really is, and for that reason alone, shy away from it. Yet the truth is that longtail SEO is not only laughably easy to understand, but more and more of us are searching online in a way which makes it inevitable.
Think about it. You search Google for ‘kitchen utensils’ and you get 3 and a half million results. You become more specific and search for ‘cheese graters’ and receive half a million results, and change this to ‘left handed cheese graters’ which produces only 23,000 results, finally opting for ‘left handed cheese graters with rubber handle’ for which you find a mere 17,000 results. By becoming more specific you narrow your results, thereby increasing the relevance of those results to your search.
But inevitably by making your search queries more specific you’re searching for long phrases rather than single keywords or short phrases. Longtail SEO differs from traditional SEO in that rather than optimising content for the main keyword or keyphrase, you optimise your content for a long, highly specific keyphrase. Longtail SEO is simply long keyphrase optimisation.
But why would you want to do this? Surely optimising your articles for a longtail phrase is a waste of time, because so few people will ever be searching for it? This may be partly true, but the real logic is considerably smarter than this assumption. If your keyphrase is ‘kitchen utensils’ then since there are 3 and a half million results it stands to reason that there is a heck of a lot of competition out there.
That means that it will be virtually impossible for you to ever gain a page one listing without a phenomenal amount of hard work, time, effort and expense. With your listings lower down the results you’re going to receive far fewer hits, and those hits may not convert to sales.
On the other hand if you happen to be selling left handed cheese graters with rubber handles, then anybody searching for that phrase will be much more likely to find the content which you have optimised, because there’s much less competition. If you invest a little effort optimising your web content or your SEO articles you’ll almost certainly find it very much easier to gain a #1 listing on Google.
Whilst it might be true that there will be fewer people searching for that phrase, almost every one of them will find your listing at the top, and almost every one of those people will be likely to place an order. You might only have 50 people a month searching for a phrase, but if every one of those places an order, isn’t that better than the one or two orders per month which might creep in from your traditional SEO?
Switching to longtail SEO doesn’t mean abandoning your existing SEO techniques, keywords or approaches. But by spending some of your time optimising for longtail keyphrases you’re more likely to see a dramatic improvement more quickly, for less effort. Choosing long keyphrases requires no more than a little imagination in determining specifically what it is you’re offering rather than using the general terms so many of us tend to resort to and rely upon for SEO success.