I am often asked, “how to target long tail keywords in your articles, blogs, or web pages?” by our readers.

Today, every small to medium sized businesses understand the importance of targeting long tail keywords in their SEO campaigns. Targeting long tail keywords not only helps them achieve higher rankings on search engines results pages, easily and quickly, but also drives plenty of “targeted’ (specific) traffic to their site who are more likely to convert – use your services or purchase your products.

Almost 80% of internet users use search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing to find information about a brand, product(s) or a service(s) before doing a business or purchasing anything online. Finding information through search engines is extremely easy, fast, and highly reliable. This is because search engines display highly relevant sites or blogs that are more likely to help their users find what they are looking for.

By targeting long tail keywords in your landing (sales) pages and articles, you are giving search engines exactly what they need – i.e. highly relevant content to their user’s searches. If their users find the content highly relevant, Google take notice of this and start rising higher in search engines and that is when you will start seeing more traffic, and more sales.

This is why, as a business owner, you number one priority should be to go after low hanging fruits, so to speak.

Before I tell you how to target long tail keywords in your sales pages and articles, let us explain:

What Long Tail keywords are Exactly?

Long tail keywords are highly searched terms that are specific in nature and hence they are likely to bring highly qualified traffic to your site to increase online sales. This is because when people become more specific in their searches, that means they usually know a lot about the brand, products, or services.

Long tail keywords are very long (phrases with more than 3 words) and highly specific. If searches are using long tail keywords to find a product or a brand, that means they are already aware of its existence.

Long Tail Keywords vs. Short Tail Keywords

Unlike long tail keywords, short tail keywords are broad in nature and have high search volume. But, the competition is extremely high. If you have a new site and you want to enter a highly competitive niche such as “weight loss,” you won’t be able to achieve higher ranking by going after competitive keywords, or short tail keywords, such as “weight loss”, “how to lose fat”, “weight products,” etc.

You will have to go after less competitive, specific keywords with high search volume.

In other words, you will have to go after long tail keywords.

It doesn’t make sense a new startup trying to rank for short tail keywords because there are plenty of others who have spent years of effort, time, and resources to be there.

I am not discouraging you not to use short tail keywords in your articles, blogs, or pages. In fact, it is important that you learn how to target short tail keywords, but it is less likely you will achieve 1^st page ranking on Google very fast.

It would be a good idea to learn how to target long tail keywords because many people have not used them in their website. Plus, there are less competition but still high searches every month to bring ‘targeted’ traffic to your site to increase online conversion.

Related article: How Not To Do SEO

How to target long tail keywords 

Once you have identified the long tail keywords for your niche site, here is how you can target long tail keywords into your landing pages, articles, ad copies, press releases, and social media posts.

Meta title tag: –

Include your long tail keyword in the Meta title tag.

The long tail keyword itself becomes a good title itself, but if you want to get even more specific, you can include additional phrases. Just make sure it reads natural and not as if you have stuffed keywords just for the sake of ranking in search engines.

Meta description tag: –

Meta description tags are brief summary of the whole post, usually less than 160 characters, that is displayed under the title in search engine result page(s). It has to be specific and relevant to the title/topic. That is why it makes sense to include your long tail keywords in it. For best result, include them twice, which most SEO expert suggests to make it SEO-friendly.

Page title: –

Page title is another main section of the web page that most people will read first. Having long tail keywords in the page title will make your visitors clear what the page is about. Make sure to insert them naturally and try to make it catchy.

For example, if the long tail keyword is “how to find long tail keyword phrases,” you can create a catchy title that will grab the attention of searchers, and hopefully, make them click through it and land on your website.

Introduction: –

You can also target long tail keywords in your introduction.

Introduction usually summarizes the whole body of the content so that visitors will know right away, what they will find throughout the content. It gives them a quick to way to decide whether they should keep on reading or leave the page.

Making your introduction relevant to the topic, or the long tail keyword you used for the page title, is extremely important. Include your long tail keywords right in the first few sentences will make sure that readers are on the right place and they are not swindled into landing the page.

Body content: –

Once you have summarized the whole body content, here is how to target long tail keywords into your body content: for every 100 words, try to include your main keyword.

This will make sure the keyword density (number of times your long tail keyword appears in the whole document) is sufficient to make the content revolve around the topic, and prevent the topic from veering itself into unknown territories, a nightmare for the readers as well as the authors.

While targeting long tail keywords on the body content, make it as natural as possible and don’t just try to fit in the keywords just for the sake of fitting it.

Headers and Sub-headers: –

Headers and sub-headers are certainly the most important element of a page. It does contain a major point that is being described in the paragraph following it. Google and other major search engines consider headers as well as sub-headers an important element of a page. So, it stands to reason that anything that is important has to be on headers like H1, H2, and H3.

Related article: How to Use Long Tail Keyword Phrases

Conclusion – How to target long tail keywords

Finally, you may want to offer conclusive points, or offer additional resources that your readers could be interested to learn more about the topic you just discussed. If you are not sure how to target long tail keywords into your conclusion, then you will probably want to insert it in the first and last sentences, which will hopefully close the article with a thoughtful question and so on.

Over to you: Do you use long tail keywords in your blog articles, post(s), and pages? If you had to teach us how to target long tail keywords, how would you do it (please comment below)?