TL;DR

It’s a sign that SEO has professionalised that what used to be referred to as the ‘fat head’, ‘chunky middle’ and ‘long tail’ are now ‘head term’, ‘medium tail’ and ‘long tail’, but the biggest shift – and probably the biggest shift in SEO entirely as a marketing technique – is how important each of those are. 

Back when many of the people that work with MMC Digital started out, the trophy terms were the focus, we were making tables to manually track one word searches before most SaaS platforms were a gleam in a developer’s eye.

Now, however, the smart estimates are that up to 90% of all searches are longtail and, from experience, many of the trophy terms that were so highly prized have become informational rather than commercial searches. That’s why we seek to help our clients with keyword strategies that make a difference to the balance sheet, not the visibility graph.

Pain points

If you’re having issues with any of the following, a longtail keyword strategy may be what you need:

• Low or dropping site traffic
• Trouble improving share of voice
• Difficulty ranking new pages
• Irrelevant or poorly converting traffic
• Issues with crawled vs. indexed ratios
• Struggling to rank in new search environments (such as LLMs)

What we mean by longtail

For as long as MMC Digital’s roster of experts has been working in search and digital, there has been a common misunderstanding that longtail just means longer searches by wordcount, but it actually refers to the search volume of specific groupings of keywords. While there’s some correlation between the length of the search and the volume, it’s not causative. 

In addition, because of a major shift in how people search, many of the head terms that were vital to businesses fifteen to twenty years ago have gradually drifted in intent from commercial to informational terms – meaning that while they might once have shown clear purchase intent, they’re now searched at a much higher level of the funnel.

MMC Digital’s longtail keyword strategy service

Clients choosing MMC Digital to help them with their longtail keyword strategy will initially receive a full keyword performance audit that identifies issues and opportunities and reviews current keyword performance in advance of ongoing work. 

As with the majority of our service offering – once we’ve completed agreed audits, we can then be as involved as your brand needs in the suggested work. We can complete it on your behalf, or liaise with your team or a nominated third party, to make sure you’re competing for the terms that will move the needle.

Auditing

Every business is different, so we’re firm believers that a thorough audit is required before undertaking a full strategy review – not every brand in a set vertical speaks the same. The customers of a highstreet chain and bespoke custom jeweller, for example, will search differently even if they’re looking for the exact same thing. 

For the best results, therefore, we get to know your business, audit performance against your aims and establish a proper understanding of your niche and positioning before moving on to strategy. One size fits all services don’t fit anybody very well.

Strategy

Once we have a grasp of your market position and your current keyword performance, we can then move on to developing a longtail strategy that will help you to better satisfy a broader array of search queries; reach a larger (and more relevant) audience; set your brand up for long term success both in traditional search, as LLM search develops and in a potential agentic future.

With inhouse, or access to, a full spectrum of vertical specific experience and specific marketing technique knowledge, we can offer a holistic strategy that covers the technical and creative to make sure that you’re set up for success in both the short and long-term and for the present and future of search.

What can longtail keyword strategy do for your business?

The whole ‘leaving money on the table’ line is used endlessly in business – especially by consultancies. We’re supposed to tell you that there are endless ways to grow, but that they’re all secret, and you need us to grant you access to the special sauce. This, however, is one of those times when it’s true – most brands are leaving money on the table, but we’re not going to pretend like it’s secret knowledge. 

Despite the fact that most visibility tools are hugely skewed by the volume of trophy terms, despite the fact that many agencies will still insist that those trophy or head terms are the key to vault, the absolute majority of searches are longtail, and the many of those may only be searched once – but the way you rank for them is establishing authority and by making sure your site is a rich source of well cited (inbound and outbound) information.

Where we add value is in knowing fantastic ways to achieve this and people that can help, but either way, whether your brand is large or small, service based or ecommerce, a longtail keyword strategy can provide the following benefits and more: 

• Increased visibility through satisfying a greater proportion of searches
• Improved ratio of highly relevant, commercial intent traffic from a larger query base
• Develop content capable of addressing conversational queries, LLM and voice queries
• Better address consumer problems, pain points and levels of intent