You should conduct keyword research before the website is designed and built. Therefore, we recommend undertaking keyword research in the design planning stages of your website.

This is because keyword research will tell you exactly what words and phrases you should optimise your website for. It will dictate what content marketing is written and which keywords your business wants to optimise the website for.
Thankfully there are some excellent SEO tools on the market to help you with this work, such as:

– Ahrefs
– Moz Pro (we highly recommend this SEO tool)
– Majestic

 

What exactly are longtail keywords?

SEO consultants consider long-tail keywords to be those with three or more keywords in length. These keywords describe the product or service and usually have buying intent, meaning that the shopper wants to purchase it right then and there.

These may sound like the holy Grail when it comes to improving your SEO because they are more straightforward to optimise for, but they have a downside: They don’t have anywhere near the same kind of search volume as keywords.

 

 

So, for example, we here at this agency focus on optimising our business for “Cardiff SEO,” which is the main keyword. An example of a long-tail keyword would be “SEO agencies that specialise in law firms.”

Sure, both terms are really good, but one term will likely have a much higher search volume than the other.

What to look for when you’re choosing longtail keywords

 

Create a picture: Apple laptop, and someone is using Google Search Console to improve their SEO

 

Often, it is not enough to work out the search volume for one keyword, with one day’s worth of SEO data from Google Search Console. Therefore, we recommend looking at a month’s or perhaps six months’ worth of data to determine which terms are gaining the most clicks.
Once you have worked this out, it is often a matter of creating a “content calendar”, improving the on-page SEO, and writing content marketing targeting specific keywords.

 

Weigh up the competition.

There is no point in targeting high-volume keywords or competitive business sectors if your business has a relatively minuscule marketing budget.

So, for example, if you’re going to be competing with car insurance firms, and they’re putting 1 million into their digital advertising every year, if your digital marketing budget is, let’s say, 1000 per month, then this often won’t cut the mustard.

Therefore, you must be serious about which keywords to optimise the website for and whether you can get the business on the first page if your marketing budget is simply just massively competitive.

 

Good in the short term

So, let’s say you just had your website designed. The agency you hire might say it can take over 12 months to start seeing meaningful results from your SEO. You might be scratching your head, thinking, how on earth are we getting in business in the short term?

This is where longtail keywords come into their own, and you can often get some keywords on the first page in a shorter timeframe. Don’t get us wrong. In terms of seeing results, this doesn’t happen in the blink of an eye because SEO moves at a snail’s pace if it’s done right.

However, with that said, you can get longtail keywords sometimes on the first page in six months or less (if you pick the right SEO business).

This could give you some cash flow in the short term while also working on improving the website for the main high-performance keywords, which typically take much longer to optimise the website.

 

Location

Sometimes, the business will optimise its website for long tail keywords plus numerous location names.

This can effectively draw in customers from different locations; for example, you might sell aluminium ladders and design a landing page for the central business locations where your businesses are based.

 

 

Topic clusters

Topic clusters and content calendars are a rather fancy way of saying what you will write about when writing the business’s content marketing. However, before you start typing up any blog posts or main pages for your website, read about Google E-EAT as this will tell you precisely the type of content marketing that Google wants. Also, while you’re at it, have a good read about Google’s Helpful Content update, as this will inform you that Google wants the written work to offer helpful advice to shoppers.

So, for example, let’s say that you sell high-performance car tyres; you might write more articles that shoppers are likely to find useful. For example, “What are the best high-performance tyres to use in wet and snowy weather conditions”?

 

 

Therefore, topic clusters allow you to think about the content marketing you plan on writing. You might devise a timeframe for writing and the topics you will write about.

So, how do we find which longtail keywords to optimise our website?

There are various SEO tools for finding longtail keywords to optimise your company website. We really like Moz Pro, which we think is a brilliant tool. It is simple to use and one of the best SEO tools available.

National SEO and need longtail keywords
Talk to any good consultant, and they will tell you that national SEO takes much longer to see results than local SEO.
Therefore, you might use longtail keywords to bring you into business in the shorter term.

Therefore, we recommend creating a content calendar to optimise the website for longtail keywords, especially when working with a marketing agency to improve the business’s national SEO.

 

Ahrefs

Then there’s Ahrefs, another brilliant SEO tool that millions of businesses use. It can help you find which long-tail keywords to optimise your website for. It also has a brilliant backlink checker, which will improve your business backlinks. You might use this tool as well.

 

 

Google Search Console

Our SEO team uses Google Search Console daily, and our SEO consultants at this agency use It practically every hour of the day. This is a brilliant tool offered by Google for absolutely free. Using it, you can work out where your keywords are ranking; you can also see the impression data, which gives you an idea on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis of how many impressions searches that particular keyword is obtaining.

Our final thoughts

Your business, therefore, has to make sure you have the proper marketing budget and are setting a realistic time frame to get the business on the first page of Google.co.uk.

For example, in a competitive business sector, say, divorce solicitor practices, setting the goal to get the business on the first page of Google in less than three months for a brand-new website is just massively unrealistic.

It will will take a lot longer. Businesses need to think carefully about whether they want to appear on the first page for longtail keywords. This can sometimes help improve their cash flow, bringing in sales in a much shorter term.

 

How we can help

We are a massively experienced SEO agency based in the heart of Cardiff city centre. We are a forward-thinking agency that uses the best white hat methods, which Google approves of. We have some of the best SEO minds in Wales working for us. Call us, and we will tell you how we can help your business get onto the first page of Google.