Last month, my blog received a little bit over 1.7 million visitors that originated from Google organic search. More than 95% of this traffic came from long tailed keywords.

If you do not know what a long tailed keyword is, then here’s a crash course. In keyword research, there are two primary types of keywords:

These are your one and two word phrases that get loads of searches on Google. A few examples would be cars, credit score, and real estate. They are phrases that are very broad and are usually a top level category.

Then you have the long tail phrases that are made up of three words or more. A few examples of long tailed terms would be; red convertible sports cars, how to improve a bad credit score, and luxury real estate in upper New York. These terms are more descriptive and the searcher is usually closer to making a buying decision.

If you are just looking at the top 10,000 most searched phrases, then you will see mostly header terms. However, as you can see in the chart below, the top 10,000 searched phrases only make up 18.5% of all searches. The long tail terms make up over 70%.

Additionally, Search Engine Watch published the results of a Conductor study, which found that long tailed traffic converted to sales at a rate of 250% greater than head terms. 

I always tell the students of my online course that the battle for Google traffic is won with deep keyword research. It really is no different than gold prospecting. You have to dig through miles of dirt and rock to find the keyword phrases that are worth their weight in gold.

Here are the five keyword research tactics that will make your Google Analytics look like a hockey stick:

If your website is CNN.com, then you can write about anything you want. The reason why is because their domain authority is 94 out of 100. Domain authority is a scoring system, created by Moz, that is based upon the link profile of each domain name. The more quality links you have, the higher your score is.

Having the luxury of managing over 100 blogs of my own and my clients, I was able to statistically identify what type of keyword phrases (based on number of Google results) different domain authorities can effectively rank for on Google. 

When you type in a phrase to Google it will come back with a number of results. The number of results shows how many pages and posts are competing for that particular phrase. The higher the number, the harder it is to rank high enough to get traffic.

Here is the breakdown of what different domain authority sites can rank for.

My blog has domain authority of 44. If I spend my time writing posts on keyword phrases with less than 500,000 Google results, then I am going to consistently get high Google rankings for every post I publish. The screenshot below shows the simplicity of how to choose the right keyword phrase.

 

If you’d like to dive even deeper into keyword strategies, check out the “5 Long Tail Keyword Research Tactics that Every Blogger Should Master.”

Posted By

Brandon Gaille