The importance of longtail keywords cannot be overestimated. It is not unusual for a site’s traffic from long tail keywords to exceed that which comes in through its main keyword.
Therefore, the key question becomes how to exploit the use of long tail keywords for various niches to get the greatest amount of traffic without being perceived as spamming.
The longtail keyword, for the uninitiated, is a keyword (really a phrase) that is not searched for as often as the main keyword, but that also suffers from far less competition. For this reason, a longtail keyword is far more likely to show up on Google’s first page of results (few searchers will ever venture beyond the crucial first page).
Longtail keywords usually contain the base keyword along with a few additional words. For example, if the base keyword were iPod, the longtail might be “handmade leather iPod cases.”
Even though longtail keywords suffer from less competition, you may still wonder what’s so great about a keyword that hardly anyone searches for. Well it certainly is essential that at least some people are searching for your longtail keywords. Low competition means nothing if no one cares about a particular term. This is why you should not guess at what terms people may be searching for, but instead use a keyword search tool such as WordTracker.
You may argue that the search volume for longtail keyword is nevertheless inconsequential. But consider this: if a search brings in only 100 visitors a month, and you have 50 other terms bringing in the same amount of traffic, this adds up to 5000 unique monthly visitors.
Since it’s much easier to rank for a longtail keyword than a short one, you may find that a page that is targeted towards the longtail may start ranking as soon as it gets indexed by the search engines.
This is not to say that you should forget about your main keyword and merely target the longtail–after all, you will likely have some pages, not the least of which being the home page, that focuses on your main keyword. However, drawing traffic for a high competition keyword will require a great deal of SEO before you can expect to see results. Therefore, you might as well open multiple windows to your website.
You may argue that you don’t have time to write all of this content. This is where PLR content may come in. It can allow you to exploit the longtail keywords in any niche–or in multiple niches. After all, most PLR articles are written to exploit longtail keywords.
While you should probably do your own keyword research to make sure that the keywords that an article targets still have low competition, it will not be hard to modify the PLR content to make it suit such a keyword.
In this way, you can build multiple pages that are optimized for specific longtail keywords. Unique content will always be best, but judiciously altered PLR articles that target effective longtail keywords in sufficient quantities can build up traffic over time resulting in substantial visitors to your website.
