Congratulations on the new website! It’s branded, provides a great UX, looks clean, and in your (unbiased) opinion, is the best overall website in your industry. Now what?
Most people want to get started on SEO, as they should–but where exactly do you begin? If you’re in an already crowded industry, your expectations shouldn’t be to immediately rank for keywords that are high-converting, high-volume. For example, if you’re a divorce attorney, expecting to rank for “divorce attorney” immediately isn’t realistic, but you might be able to rank for something like “what are my rights during divorce proceedings?”.
Keywords like those are what we call “long-tail keywords.” There is a common misconception that all long-tail keywords are three or more words, however, this is not necessarily the case. They are called long-tail because in a chart showing keyword volumes, they represent the long tail at the end with lower volumes.
Why Long-Tail Keywords?
You might be asking yourself why you would intentionally be targeting keywords with lower search volume–after all, lower search volume means lower traffic, right?
You wouldn’t be wrong in making that assumption, however, you need to start somewhere. The purpose of targeting long-tail keywords is to establish yourself as an authority on topics that not many websites are offering insights on, which builds your reputation up in Google’s eyes.
You might have to live with the fact that you’ll never be able to outrank certain companies for high-volume keywords, and that’s ok–there’s room for everyone on Google when you play the game by their rules.
Of course, you don’t need to know any of this when you have a seasoned SEO expert on your side. Contact us today to get started on your journey to the first page!
