What are Long Tail Keywords?
Keyphrases with 3+ words tend to be less competitive in Google, but the more interesting fact is that long keyphrases make up for 90% of the total searches on Google. This is more prominent even today with the advent of voice search where people tend to ask long and descriptive queries.
Why Worry About Long Tail Keywords?
Now obviously these keywords have extremely low search volumes but don’t let that obstruct your SEO instincts. If you are clever you will understand, that adding these up strategically in your content marketing could earn you a sizeable number of high intent traffic.
I say high intent since according to studies people making long-tail queries have a higher conversion intent than other keywords, as shown by the below graph from SEMRush.
Keyword Search Volume to Conversion Rate Graph by SEMRush
While you have searched some good keywords with decent search volumes. You may have also ranked your website for some of those keywords and may be happy and relaxed knowing that you might be dominating a chunk of the traffic on Google for your niche.
If you think like that, perhaps this report would change your mind.
Source: ahrefs
As you might have just realized over 92% of the keywords searched in Google are long-tail keywords with low search volume. And since it’s true for Google overall it must be true for your niche too.
That is a tremendously huge number of keywords considering the number of searches that happen on Google every minute. So you are not only missing out on a sizeable chunk of traffic but potential conversions since as pointed long-tail keywords drive the highest intent.
So What are the Exact SEO Benefits of Long Tail Keywords?
Let’s summarize them:
- Long Tail Keywords have low competition
- Higher Conversion Intent.
Long Tail Keyword Analysis In Google Search Console
We are all well-known for the most effective architectural tool offered by Google which is Google Search Console. It lets you manage all the technicalities for your website. Inside GSC, there are several advanced features are available. One of them is Regex (Regular Expression).
To assist users to find and analyze data depending on the queries and pages Google rolled out a new feature called Regex in Google Seach Console. It also assists to filter data according to the user’s needs.
Long-tail keywords are a perfect way to optimize for higher intent search queries and increase conversion from Google.
You can use the following expression to find Long tail keywords you are currently ranking for.
- Open search console
- Click “performance”
- Click “new” and then “query”
There is a bunch of stuff you can do with REGEX, but I’m just going to focus on one specific strategy I created.
We’re going to use the regular expression:
([^” “]*\s){4,}?
Type this into “query” “Custom (regex)” and it will show you all the keyword with 5 or more words in them.
If you want keywords with 10 words or more change the 7 to a 9.
If you want to find keywords with 4 words or more, change the 7 to 3.
