If you’ve never heard of long tail marketing, then you are missing out on a golden opportunity for getting some truly great traffic to your website. Not only that – the traffic you’ll get on your website is also going to be much higher quality traffic than what you would get with more traditional search marketing.

So What is Long Tail Marketing Anyway?
Rather than tell you, I’ll show you what long tail marketing is. I run a blog about personal finance in addition to writing this blog. Let’s say I want to attract people who are interested in finding a quality tax preparer.
I could target the keyword “taxes,” which, according to Google AdWords has around two million searches a day. Of course, I’ll be competing against millions of others who also want to attract searchers for the word “taxes.” This makes it virtually impossible to get to the top of the SERPs without spending a tremendous amount of time and effort on it.
Now let’s assume that my blog wanted to target people interested in tax preparers in Columbus, Ohio for whatever reason. Instead of targeting the keyword “taxes,” I’d target “tax accountant, Columbus, Ohio” as my primary keyword.
Suddenly, two things have happened: One, my competition has decreased dramatically since there are relatively few people targeting that keyword phrase. Second, the people who are searching for that keyword phrase are much more likely to actually purchase the services that I have to offer.
How to Do Long Tail Marketing
I like to go to AdWords and look for a keyword that I can think of on my own. For example, I recently wrote an article for my blog on commonly overlooked tax deductions. I put in the word “tax deductions” and out pops a list of variations of the keyword.
I then look for phrases that number in the high hundreds or low thousands for searches. I then check the competition on those keywords. I’ll try to throw in around 3-5 long tail keywords for my blog post so that it picks up organic searches for those phrases. Then, even though I’m targeting fewer people as a whole, I’m actually getting better results.
The Best Part About Long Tail Marketing
Now, as if that wasn’t enough to get you excited about the possibilities of long tail search marketing, here’s an even better reason to consider it: the majority of searches are actually long tail searches. Think about it: yes, people target “taxes” and yes,” taxes” gets more hits than “tax preparers in Columbus, Ohio.”
However, as a whole, more people will be searching for a long tail keyword than will be searching for a shorter keyword. Take a look at the picture above and you’ll see exactly what I mean. Ultimately, long tail marketing is going to make you more money and get you better searchers than any short keyword you could think of.