Why your startup SEO strategy should focus on long tail keywords

If your startup is trying to increase its web traffic, you should know why and how to find long-tail keywords. Long tail keywords are phrases that are longer than typical keywords. They are often closely related to your business, and they are also more specific which means they have a higher chance of converting. But why should you focus your startup SEO strategy on long tail keywords? Let's take a look at the reasons to show you why long-tail SEO is worth the effort.

1. Creating an SEO strategy for your startup

SEO is one of the most important work done inside a startup. If you do not have a proper SEO plan, your business might never make it to the top. When you are starting a startup, the last thing you want to do is spend money on something that isn't going to give you results.

You are probably thinking about hiring someone to handle the SEO, but this is not always the best idea. If you want to save money, but still have an effective SEO strategy for your startup, you should do it yourself. Creating an SEO strategy is in fact quite simple if you follow these specific steps:

1. Decide on a niche

The first thing you need to do is to decide on a niche. This is very important as it will determine your strategy and which things you will be targeting. If you are starting a blog, for example, you should focus on writing content that will be valuable to others within that niche.

It can be tempting to write content for everyone and so to target a very broad audience. Bad idea.

2. Focus on quality

Your content has to be of the highest quality possible. That is the only way you will be able to convince people to visit your website. Search engines are very smart, and they can recognize poor quality content very easily, which is why you have to make sure that everything you publish is top-notch. Always make sure to proofread all of your work. Your readers do not care about your startup SEO strategy, they want to read quality content.

3. Start small and don't try to compete with big players

‍

The SEO strategy for a new business should never be to compete with big players. There are tons of better opportunities out there. That's why you should write content on keywords that have low search volume or low competition. What are the benefits of this startup SEO strategy ? You will rank faster on some keywords and will start getting small traffic quickly rather than hoping for tremendous traffic after years of waiting.

‍

2. The importance of keyword research

Before diving into the details of keyword research, it is important to understand that a keyword is not a search query. Search queries are the words people type into a search engine to find information. Keywords are the words and phrases that make up your content. Your content is what you provide in response to those search queries, not what people type into a search engine. For example, when people type “how to lose weight” into a search engine, this is a search query. The content that Google delivers in response to this query is the answer.

The correct choice of keywords is one of the most important factors when optimizing a website to increase visibility in search engines. The search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex and long process that can be very time-consuming and expensive. This is why it is important to choose the right keywords for your website; keywords that will be relevant and popular with your target audience. It’s not enough to just choose some words that you think will be popular with your audience; there is a science behind choosing those keywords.

You need to take into account multiple factors to find the right keywords:

• Difficulty/competition: is there many and strong websites targeting the same keyword ?
• Search volume: is this keyword going to bring a lot of traffic ?
• Trend: is there more and more people looking for this keyword in the past months ?
• Relevancy: is this keyword relevant to your content/service you deliver ?

Fortunately there are tools to help you. Mark for example lets you do keyword lookups and then sorts results such as you can easily pick the best keywords. What I mean by "the best keywords" is those that will help your blog post land on the first page of search engines.

3. What is a long-tail keyword?

I wouldn't be surprised if the question "what is a long-tail keyword" came to your mind by now. No, keywords do not have tails. A long-tail keyword is a phrase that is usually longer than two words. In SEO, long-tail keywords are the types of phrases that people type into search engines when they are looking for a specific answer to a question.

For example, if you have a business that sells dog collars, a short-tail keyword might be "dog collars". A long-tail keyword example might be "dog collar with name tag and leash for a golden retriever puppy ". As you can see, this long-tail keyword example is more specific (maybe a little over exaggerated but you get the idea, right ?).

You can also see that the keyword "dog collar" is included in this long-tail keyword example. Therefore, it is no surprise that the keyword "dog collar" has much more search volume and so that our long-tail keyword has a *very* low search volume. This is because as the number of words in a query goes up, the number of searches for that query will go down. In the next part, we will find out why it is surprisingly a very good thing for you startup SEO strategy.

4. The importance of long-tail keywords

Opportunity. If I could resume this part into one word, it would be "opportunity". Imagine that you are conquering a part of Google or any other search engine that has never been explored by your competitors. That's what you can do with long-tail keywords.

‍

These keywords do not have a high search volume but it still does and the queries are so specific that most people who see your website on the top of the page will probably click and are also probably very interested by your services.

5. How to find long-tail keywords

There are multiple tools online that will help you find keywords. These tools will also give you a tremendous amount of data for each keyword that you have to analyze. It's great if you want to spend time creating your own SEO strategy.

However Mark came up with an easier method to find long-tail keywords. Simply make a keyword lookup, any keyword related to your content and Mark will give you the most relevant keywords based on the topic, the competition, the search volume, the trend and a few other parameters.

‍

Now you don't need to find long-tail keywords anymore, your only task is to place them in your text!

‍

6. How to rank for your long-tail keywords

There is only one way to rank for your long-tail keywords, which makes it quite simple. The first and only way is to create content that contains the right quantity of long-tail keywords. As I mentioned in the keyword research part, your keywords must be extremely well related to your topic. Not just for the search engine to understand your text but also because it will be much easier to write your long-tail keyword a dozen times or so.

One important note here: you shouldn't exceed a certain density of keywords. This could even penalize your text. It's estimated that a good density for your focus keyword should be around 1% to 2%. That means you should write your focus keyword at least 10 times but no more than 20 times for a 1,000-word text.

That said, long-tails keyword can be tricky as you should also add secondary keywords related to your topic. It will help your article get more traffic from very specific queries. However, you have to keep a focus keyword and to insert it in the most important parts of your text (e.g. the title).

All these best practices should be further explained in a complete guide, which will be available on our blog as well.

Mark also has a set of features that helps you get the ideal quantity for the keywords you have selected and according to the length of your text. That can save you quite some time and some headaches!

‍

Conclusion

Your startup SEO strategy has to be well planned in advance. On thing is sure, is that if you are a new business with a tight budget then creating an SEO strategy based on long-tail keywords can be highly beneficial and provide quicker ROI than any other startup SEO strategy.

‍

‍