Page 2 - Are long tail keywords hype?

If you're a fresh, brand new site, and in a competitive market which you need to work your way up in, you need to aim for longtails. If it isn't done like this there will be a long period to wait until the more generic, higher traffic keywords begin to rank in the SERPS.

Obviously, long tails will have much less traffic, which you will have to wait for. However, some people are petulant and make alterations before they have any chance of seeing results. And as ClickyB says, the skill comes in planning effectively, identifying the right phrases that convert, then implementing, which isn't really that easy.

If you can plan and implement everything correctly, I believe you can make good money, but it will take high levels of concentration, time and lots of patience.

I have one site which is purely dedicated to 'event management and planning' and still i get maximum traffic for the keyword 'event management'. According to Google analytics report 99% of my top traffic keywords are 2 or 3 words long. There are only one or two keywords which are more than 3 words long and for which i get yet again less than 1% of the site total traffic. According to ur theory my site should rank for large number of long tail keywords but this is not the case.

I have one more question.On what basis i should target long tail keywords for my sites specially when i see no or very less search volume. Google trends and insight fail to show any reports for majority of such keywords.

According to SEOMOZ and the posts above, if i start getting majority of organic search traffic through long tail keywords, i will have highest chances of conversions. Am i right?

Sure we speak from our own experiences but sometime while our experiences are likely true... I don't think we convey them accurately.

Flowers... Roses... Red Roses... Bouquet of Red Roses, Bouquet of Long Steam Red Roses... Bouquet of Long Steam Red Roses Orlando Florida...

Dominating at the Roses or Red Roses or Bouquet of Red Roses level doesn't seem all that dominating... but you don't need to "dominate in primary" terms to dominate in longtail.

In fact, even if you target accounting services [as oppose to accounting] as a primary phrase "not being dominate in account services" doesn't prevent you from dominating longtail terms... e.g. add a page about a "state" and you rank rather easily for "STATE" accounting services... not because you are "dominate on your primary phrase of accounting services" but because you have accounting services information in your website [and links that use that term] and you have a page specifcally for the state itself.

If you didn't have a "A PAGE" specifically about the "STATE" you wouldn't dominate for any state terms... [and that's the problem I see with you explanation] EVEN IF you are domainate for accounting services...

While you can argue the every state + accounting services are all considered your primary terms... I would think "primary terms" are directly associated with you main page title or you main nav links.... and not some sub-sub-not-so-primary website info.

That depends on what the longtail queries are... or what you class as a conversion...

If for example the longtail queries evolved around "free event management download"... the "conversion" would be the number of downloads that occurred rather than the number of sales you generated because people arrived looking for something free and instead bought something.

...but yes if the longtail term has a commerce aspect... your conversion rate tends to be higher.

[Assumption: assumes your products and/or services are in fact appealing to potential buyers.]

Fathom... If I own a restaurant in Podunk, Arkansas... I could care less about any higher SERPs root other than "restaurant podunk arkansas" and subsets of that.

...and this is why you philosophy doesn't work... If this guy [and a few more] focus on ranks for "restaurant podunk arkansas" and you are targeting restaurant & restaurants and general restaurant types like seafood restaurant or family restaurant...

You'll never dominate "restaurant podunk arkansas" or any other city or town restaurants without having a page specifically for that OR targeted links for each city.

It works perfectly in that "Podunk, Arkansas" is where the restaurant is.

Why would the restaurant owner looking for customers to visit his restaurant want to compete with restaurant searches in other locations. The owner may have "seafood restaurant podunk arkansas", "home delivery restaurant podunk arkansas", etc. I want to place well in the SERPs for logical geographic searches for potential customers not some esoteric global search within "restaurant".

As a local restaurant owner looking for online orders or reservations, if I also place well for other terms... fine, but my focus would be for people searching for restaurants and food in the Podunk, Arkansas geographic region.

I searched... but didn't find a single restaurant listed in the top 10 for "Podunk Arkansas Restaurant"... so since there isn't anyone [a real restaurant] dominant... it doesn't seem to work great for them.

Actually, I would want to have my Restaurant website on the first page of google for "Podunk Arkansas".

I agree... get enough links including "podunk arkansas" and you are likely there.

Speaking as an economist who loves stats (ok I lied about the latter), the purpose of longtail is to capture unrealised or undersearched terms. Fact is, Longtail is HUGE, generally you can't target it specifically because the terms are unique everyday, AND to make it REALLY profitable you need a massive (and unique) data set specific to your industry/web site.

Amazon, Wiki, etc., all great examples because they are HUGE, have their own data sets of KW they can try to target, and hope that those longtail, 1-2 search frequency words cash in when someone searches for a KW similar and Google returns your result.

Same goes with PPC, you need a huge and unique data set for it to actually convert. The point is if you have a huge data set then you'll get 1 - 2 sales but from a million different keyword possibilities, (Size does matter).

IF you are merely targeting longtail in a small subset market you've likely missed your opportunity to cash in b/c ppl search for major KW's more frequently in smaller markets.

If that's not true, then try this: longtail in uncompetitive markets is useless because without competitors you should theoretically rank for all iterations of the major keyword making the tactic of targeting longtail markets unnecessary.

LOL http://www.podunkarkansas.com/

...what's the population of podunk arkansas... are you sure they have a restaurant... maybe it's a chicken coop and just spammed as a restaurant.

loflmfao...

Your questions are summed up in the last few lines. You really need to delve deeper into analytics if you're going to ask about conversions. Presumably we are talking most of your targetting is PPC based?

It's your website that converts. If your visitors are landing on your homepage for example on a longtail search then it needs to convert within the first 10 seconds otherwise most visitors will bounce. Are you sending your visitors to a different landing page in adwords? The most common mistake is having all your PPC ads landing on your home page.

We get phenomenal conversions on longtails - but our websites convert brilliantly and we spend hours redesigning and tweaking our clients sites.

You need to be looking at and reading up on designing for conversions.

What are your bounceback percentages like on your longtails? If you are high then it's pretty safe to assume your website is making life difficult for your visitors. Get this fixed asap.

Design "calls to action" into your web page above the fold of your most common browser resolution from your visitors. Typically within 420px height. Get heat maps - these are worth their weight in gold and you will be surprised just where your visitors are clicking. Then look at A/B or "multivariate" split testing for your landing pages. Your split testing should be an ongoing process. It could be as simple as a one word change or a bold word.

Once you've got all this down pat you want to start reducing your costs per aquisition.