It is a widely held belief that ranking for longtail keywords is easier than ranking for head terms, however, this is not necessarily a universal truth.
What Are Longtail Keywords?
Longtail keywords are longer search queries than Head Terms and aim to address more complex or narrowed-down topics of interest. For instance “Longtail Keywords” is a Head Term while “Ranking for Longtail Keywords” is a Longtail keyword.
Although not without exceptions, a meaningful difference between the two is that Head Terms are normally used to search for a service directly, which makes them appear either navigational or transactional when it comes down to Search Intent. Longtail Keywords normally fall under the conversational or informational intent, one that seeks to start a conversation or seeks more in-depth information on a topic of interest, respectively.
The Search Demand Curve by Ahrefs
According to Ahrefs, Longtail keywords got their name from their position on the search demand curve. If we put together a list of all search queries that people have performed in a search engine over the course of a month and order them by their search volumes on a graph, it’ll look like this:
Thus, at the left side of the curve, we have a tiny number of keywords with super high search volumes which fall under Head Terms, while the right side consists of billions of keywords with very low search volumes, referred to as Longtail keywords.
Although we describe Longtail keywords as keywords comprised of a number of words which have limited search volumes, it’s neither of these qualities that make a search query a Longtail keyword but rather the comparison to its’ Head Term.
Why Use Longtail Keywords?
There are a number of reasons why you should consider making longtail keywords an integral part of your Content Marketing Strategy.
1. Keyword Competitiveness
Let’s say you’ve just launched a blog about SEO. There are loads of popular keywords with high search volumes that could potentially drive a lot of traffic to your blog:
Understanding Search Volume vs Keyword Difficulty in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
Although these keywords are quite tempting to target, you have to be realistic about your chances of establishing organic rankings for them. All of the below keywords have a high Keyword Difficulty score which means it’ll be incredibly hard to rank on the first page of any search engine for any of them, especially if your website is brand new.
For new websites it is a good idea to target search queries with a low Keyword Difficulty, giving your landing pages a real chance for ranking.
Understanding Keyword Difficulty in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
As you can see on the right-hand side, the Keyword Difficulty (KD) score for these keywords is low, but they still receive some traffic every month. This means that even a new website has a chance to rank on the first page of search results and get a few visitors from those keywords.
The next step would be selecting the keywords that have an adequate balance between Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty. Thus, you’d be interested in targeting keywords that first and foremost appeal to your target audience and then have a higher Search Volume with a low Keyword Difficulty score.
2. Keyword Targeting
Because the competition is low, Longtail keywords are generally easier to address. Due to their low competition coupled with low search volumes, the landing pages that compete for these keywords tend to have a lower word count.
In other words, the more generic a search query is the more content you would have to provide to fully address the search query. On the other hand, if the search query is very specific and narrowed down, you can often answer it rather briefly and still satisfy the Search Intent. To put it simply creating content for longtail keywords generally requires less work.
Other than that, you can actually look for groups of similar Longtail Search Queries and address them with pages that only have a few differences. This is often referred to as Content Scaling. For instance, you could use similar content for targeting “SEO services for SaaS” as you would for “SEO services for e-commerce”, allocating only a part of your content to outline the differences or key reference points.
3. Keyword Inventory
It may be true that an individual longtail keyword won’t bring a plethora of traffic to your website. However as you address more and more of these search terms, the search traffic will eventually compound to a pretty substantial amount. Considering there are lots of longtail keywords in almost any industry, you’re unlikely to suffer from a shortage of them.
Longtail Keyword Discovery
There are a number of ways you can use to find longtail keywords.
1. Use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
Longtail Keywords in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
Just search for any search query that defines your niche in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and select the search engine and country. You will then be presented with the choice for your keyword ideas:
- Matching Terms: includes keywords that use your exact match search query.
- Related terms: presents a list of keywords which are related to the entered keyword
- Search Suggestions: presents a more manageable list of search suggestions
In the case of new websites that barely have any authority, it is recommended that you use the Keyword Difficulty filter that helps you find the least competitive keywords. You may also filter your suggestions by Local or Global Volumes, Traffic Potential, Word Count and SERP Features. It is also possible to include or exclude specific words from the search, along with some paid search metrics.
“Questions” and “Parent Topics” in Ahrefs
Among other things that are possible to achieve in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer is switching the Question toggle on to be presented with a list of questions you may want to answer with your search query. In cases where the presented head term is quite broad, it is possible to further split the results by Parent Topics. This allows a more clustered approach to targeting your desired keywords.
The question is what are you actually trying to achieve with these controls? The answer to this question is that you are trying to refine your list of keywords in a manner that allows you to find Low Keyword Difficulty Keywords with an acceptable Search Volume. By setting your Keyword Difficulty to a relatively low level, and your search volume to an acceptable level, you can accomplish exactly that.
Next, you can browse through the results and when you find a keyword that piques your interest, you can directly add it to a keyword list right inside the Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
2. Check Competitor Keywords
Check Your Competitor Keywords in Ahrefs
Another great source of longtail keywords comes from your competition. The easiest way to explore the keywords your competition is ranking for is to use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer which will help you see the full list of keywords they are ranking for.
Simply take a website belonging to your competition, plug it into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Organic keywords report to see which keywords are bringing traffic to their website. From there you can filter Longtail Keywords by playing with the Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty fields. Repeat this process with 10 of your competing websites, and you’ll mine enough longtail keyword ideas to keep you busy for months.
Using Ahrefs Content Gap Tool
You may speed up the keyword research process whereby you extract competitor keywords by using the Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool. The Content Gap tool automates a process that was originally accessible only to advanced users of Excel. The tool enables you to take all the keywords your competition ranks for and subtract the keywords that your own website ranks for. The result is a list of keywords that you should be targeting. The tool allows you to do that with 10 competitors at the same time, giving you a massive list of keywords that you should be targeting.
Depending on how broad you want to go with evaluating your competitors’ keywords, you can choose from the following filtering options:
- The keywords that any of your competitors rank for
- The keywords that at least x of your competitors rank for
- The keywords that all your competitors rank for
3. Analyse the SERPs
Before you start creating content for the found keywords, it’s recommended to understand what searchers are looking for. The first step of this is to analyse the top-ranking pages on three aspects:
- Is there a more popular keyword that points to the same result?
- What is the Search Intent?
- What is the Ranking Difficulty?
Firstly, some of the search queries can have more popular counterparts while still being long tail, and others can be just wrong, as for instance are misspellings.
Secondly, the Search Intent is about learning what search engines recognise as the primary reason behind the search. In most cases Longtail Keywords fall under the Conversational or Informational intent, one that seeks to start a conversation or seeks more in-depth information on a topic of interest, respectively. However, it must be noted that Navigational or Transactional Search Intent can also occur for Longtail keywords.
Matching search intent in case it makes sense for your website would prove the keyword to be a good choice. However, you must ensure to further optimise your content for Search Intent. If you can not match the Search Intent or it doesn’t make sense for your website, it may be best not to target the keyword at hand.
Finally, estimating the ranking difficulty, as previously explained, can be achieved by filtering your results using the keyword difficult score. However, if you want to take your estimates to the next level there are several considerations you may lean on to make your final call.
Among the most important things to look for in SERPs when analysing them for ranking difficulty is the presence of popular brands, the wider their presence the more difficult it will be to outrank them, as search engines place a considerable amount of importance on Branding.
Topics in the transactional niche notorious for their competitiveness, such as Finance, Health and Education will be nearly impossible to outrank with a website with limited Topical Authority, as brands in these sectors have spent decades on building it.
Lastly, pay attention if the topic you are targeting is covered in detail by a page in the SERPs. If you find a considerable number of search results which show slightly off-topic information, you stand a reasonable chance of ranking for those keywords.
4. Browse Niche Forums Including Reddit And Quora
Whenever people visit a search engine and fail to find a good answer to their question, they ask it in places like Reddit or Quora. The good part here is that these forum threads may have some good discussions, which can be useful when creating a piece of content on that topic.
The downside of this process is that mining Longtail Keywords on forums is a rather tedious process and you’ll still have to use an SEO tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to check for the search volumes and KD of your keyword ideas.
Longtail Keyword Categorisation
Not all longtail keywords are born equal. Some of them represent a unique search query, while others are merely a less popular variation of a more popular search query. Hence the first can be called Topical Longtail Keywords and the second Supporting Longtail Keywords and there is a big difference between them.
A Topical Longtail Keyword means that the keyword is actually the most popular way of searching for a result, be it a product or any other kind of solution to a problem. You can safely target this longtail keyword with a dedicated page. Once you manage to rank for this Topical Longtail Keyword, you’ll automatically rank for all the less popular “Supporting” search queries. In Ahrefs a Topical Longtail Keyword is often marked as a “Parent Topic”, while the Supporting Keywords fall under that said Parent Topic.
However, even Ahrefs themselves say you shouldn’t always blindly trust whatever the Parent Topic in Ahrefs tells you. At the end of the day, it’s just a computer algorithm and it has its flaws and limitations. It is always a good idea to analyse the top-ranking pages for your keyword and figure out if your search query represents a distinct topic or is a part of a broader topic.
As mentioned earlier, how Supporting Longtail Keywords are different from Topical Longtail Keywords is that they tend to have a much lower search volume and in other words are a less popular variation of the same keyword. As it often happens when you search for each of the two longtail keywords (Topical and Supporting) in search engines, you’ll discover the same pages ranking at the top for both of these keywords.
Search Engines have learned to understand that different people phrase their searches differently while they look for the exact same thing. Therefore, it often ranks the same set of pages for all these Keyword Variations, including the Topical Keyword and its Supporting Longtail Keywords.
What this means is when one of your pages starts ranking for a popular search query which is also a Topical Keyword, you will likely in time see that it will also start ranking for Supporting Longtail Keywords. So you should not create individual pages for each longtail variation but rather target them all with a single page.
“Parent Topic” in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
The question is how do you know if a Supporting Longtail Keyword you’re looking at is part of a Topical Keyword? Ahrefs has developed a unique feature just for that, called Parent Topic. Whenever you enter a keyword into Keywords Explorer, they check the top-ranking page for that keyword and see if there’s a more popular search query this page is ranking for.
Longtail Low Volume Keywords
Most low-volume or zero-volume keywords get some searches, but one shouldn’t be expecting tons of traffic from them. It can happen, but it will probably be limited. Most advocates of zero-volume keywords are aware of this, but they don’t need a 100% hit rate and are likely in a position where they’re struggling to get any traffic at all.
Low Volume Keywords Study by Ahrefs
It must be noted that according to an in-house study performed by Ahrefs, the chance of a low-volume or zero-volume keyword getting significantly more searches than estimated is extremely low. The conclusion they reached is that many claims from SEO Managers that pages targeting zero-volume keywords can get lots of traffic likely happen because the keyword is a longtail variation of a popular search query.
One argument in favour of low-volume or zero-volume search queries is that they have relatively low competition, which makes them easier to rank for. However, the same argument persists that although many low-volume or zero-volume keywords are indeed much easier to rank for, many of them are unpopular ways of searching for something popular. This is pretty much the only way they actually bring traffic.
Keyword Difficulty and Traffic Potential for Low Volume Keywords in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
If you’re still uncertain on this topic Ahrefs provides two metrics namely the Keyword Difficulty score and the Traffic Potentials score, that may help you in addressing your concern. In Ahrefs a zero volume keyword with a low Keyword Difficulty score is likely to represent its own topic.
On the other hand, Traffic Potential is the estimated monthly search traffic to the current top-ranking page for a keyword and if it is much higher than a keyword’s estimated search volume, it shows that there are other more popular ways of searching for the same thing. Hence some SEO Managers may find more traffic coming into individual pages that target zero-volume keywords.
Another argument in favour of this theory is that low-volume or zero-volume keywords can normally be addressed with inferior content and backlink profiles. Thus in the short run for relatively new websites, targeting low and zero-volume keywords may in fact bring traffic they wouldn’t possibly be able to get out of Shorttail Search Queries.
If you take a Shorttail Keyword, creating content for it may involve a high number of variables designed to appeal to different users. Thus the amount of input required to target a Shorttail Keyword can be extremely high, as it’s virtually impossible to please all users coming from different backgrounds or with different requirements for settling their search query.
Lastly, one argument in favour of low-volume and zero-volume search terms is that not only is it easier to create content for more specific searches, but they also often convert better. Although low and zero-volume keywords are more likely to be bottom-of-funnel keywords, meaning that they are more likely to require a specific solution to a problem, it’s not a given.
In conclusion, there are a couple of times when targeting a zero-volume keyword may make sense, namely when you stumble upon a trending topic that you think is legitimately important or when you stumble upon a lucrative topic with the potential to convert visitors.