Long-tail Keyword

The first thing anyone looks at when trying to win traffic from search is volume. So a team building a meeting-notes tool starts with the phrase "meeting notes." At 50,000 searches a month there appears to be no better candidate.

The problem is that the first page for that phrase is already taken. Large publications and ten-year-old sites hold the ten slots, so a blog launched last year sits past page three no matter how well the article is written. Almost nobody looks below page two, which makes the traffic effectively zero.

Six months and twelve articles later, with traffic flat, the team concludes that search engine optimization does not work for them. What actually happened is that they picked an unwinnable phrase twelve times.

The observation that opened another route is that demand is not concentrated in a handful of short phrases. It is spread thinly across a far larger number of long ones, and that long tail is mostly uncontested.

Instead of chasing first place on one short phrase, you collect several long ones with low volume and weak competition until they add up to the same traffic.

The numbers make the difference plain. "Meeting notes" gets 50,000 searches a month at a difficulty score of 78. "Free team meeting notes template download" gets 210 a month at a difficulty of 12. On its own the second looks negligible, but twenty phrases like it come to 4,200 a month — and those twenty are phrases you can actually rank first for.

Who arrives is different too. Somebody typing only "meeting notes" might be looking up what the words mean. Somebody typing the longer phrase has written out exactly what they need. That is why the share who go on to sign up is higher on the low-volume side. The difference is called search intent.

Where you draw the cutoff depends on your own site. A site that just launched might keep only candidates above 100 monthly searches on search volume with a keyword difficulty under 30.

One phrase per page is the rule. Phrases with the same intent get grouped onto a single page. Because rankings take two or three months to settle, one published article is not enough to judge the approach by.

"We're never ranking for 'meeting notes.' Let's split it into twenty long phrases instead."

Give up the contested phrase and build the same traffic from a sum.

"This one is 210 a month at a difficulty of 12. Moving it up this month's list."

Low volume is fine when the ranking is reachable.

"Two of our articles are chasing the same phrase. Let's merge them."

Two pages on one phrase are cutting into each other's ranking.

At Pagedeck, Ravi keeps only the candidates under difficulty 30 out of a pool of 400, and writes the tool-seeking intents first. Of twenty-two articles published last quarter, fourteen reached the first page.