What are long-tail key words?

The best performing online content is when someone has taken the time to really get inside the head of a target audience.

And when I say target audience, I mean just one segment or persona. Yes, that’s right – one size most definitely won’t fit all! In fact, before you even start on keywords you need to identify all the different types of customers you have.

For a B2B audience this will be job role, sector, size of company, who they report to, their biggest concerns and even identifying the next step for them in their career! Everyone’s motivations are different – even when you’re talking to a business customer – try tapping into the motivations behind their purchases. You may want to read our blog about Building your customer profiles.

Read our blog about Building your customer profiles 

What’s so special about ‘long-tail keywords’

You will no doubt have heard the term ‘long-tail keyword’. This basically means a highly specific phrase of more than 3 words. Your aim is to identify long-tail keyword phrases that are relevant to the audience segments (or personas) you want to target. To make things even trickier, the long-tail phrase must have a solid number of searches and a low competition index!

Long-tail phrases tend to have a lower number of monthly searches than keywords – but they often convert better because they catch people later in the buying/conversion cycle. A person searching for “air conditioning units” is probably browsing, and not ready to buy. On the other hand, someone searching for “what’s the best price for an air conditioning unit for an office” has already identified the requirement – now they’re comparing prices!

Read the next Article

Define your long-tail keywords  →