How Long Tail Keywords Took Over SEO
It’s no understatement to acknowledge that SEO’s have had to radically adjust their keyword strategies in the past several years. The first blow to the traditional methodology of using Google Analytics to see what keywords were driving traffic to your site—and thus get a clear picture on which keywords to better optimize—occurred a few years ago when Google made all keyword data private.
However, while SEO’s scramble to work around this issue by using the keyword data culled from Webmaster Tools, Google continues to complicate the search landscape as users are now relying increasingly less on basic keywords and keyword phrases in favor of longer queries—often of three words or longer in length.
Why are users searching for longer queries? One key culprit is Google’s embracing of “semantic search” in which the search engine analyzes the intention of the user and producers search results with sites that match the user’s intention. Thus, users are finding traditional short keyword-based queries to be inefficient at generating better results quicker.
In addition, with the massive amount of information on the internet only increasing, one- or two-word keyword searches are proving less effective than they once were and users are changing their search behavior accordingly.
Finally, with voice search on the rise with applications like Siri becoming more popular, more people are using the voice functionality, making search queries much more conversational and in the form of sentences.
So how you do augment your search strategy going forward? First and foremost, you can jettison your keyword-based SEO strategy and not focus as much on stuffing site titles, descriptions, and articles with keywords to rank better as Google does not take keyword matching into account as a ranking algorithm factor anymore. On top of that, keyword stuffing can actually harm your site’s ranking if you overdo it.
From there, your next step is to start optimizing for long-tail keywords. However, this isn’t a matter of simply having a keyword match in your site’s content—if a user searches for “Where to find the best tacos in LA?” and you have that exact text on your page, that won’t necessarily mean you will rank for that phrase. Rather, you want to start writing topics and articles that address these phrases and queries so that Google understands what your site’s purpose is to better match you with searchers.
Finally, since we are talking about long-tail keywords here, in formulating your content strategy going forward, it will behoove you to focus on a niche within your industry so that you have less competition and can stand out in the search results.
It is the nature of SEO to change and evolve and Google will continue to keep SEO’s on their toes for the foreseeable feature. But by recognizing that the future of search lies in phrase-based searches, one can get a leg up on the competition by optimizing for long-tail search ASAP.
