"Long Tail" Keywords

"Long tail" keywords

Trying to rank for "pizza" or "plumber"? Good luck competing with Pizza Hut and billion-pound brands. This video explains why longer, more specific search phrases are your secret weapon - stuff like "vegan pizza delivery in Prestwich" where local businesses can compete.

Want to understand keyword strategy in more depth? Click here to read my comprehensive guide (10-minute read).

When someone searches "solicitor" they could want anything, but "no win no fee cycling accident solicitor Manchester" - that's someone who knows exactly what they need. I'll show you how to find these long tail keywords for your business and why they're really useful for getting actual customers, not just random browsers. It takes the fight away from the big boys and lets you compete where you've got a chance. For finding the phrases yourself, the query data in Google Search Console is the honest place to look.

The two searches

In the video I search for "pizza" on Startpage.com, which queries Google anonymously so you see what a stranger sees rather than results personalised around where Google knows I am - and the first page is all the big international names: Pizza Hut, Domino's, Pizza Express, the Wikipedia page. Then I search "vegan pizza in Manchester" and every entirely vegan pizza place in the city turns up on page one, because there's only a handful of them and they're exactly what that searcher is after. Same city, same pizza, completely different fight.

Searcher intent is the other half of it: "what are vegan pizza toppings" wants information, "Pureza opening times" wants to visit, and someone typing a long, specific phrase is usually close to a decision. If you've got accreditations or qualifications that mark you out as good at what you do, the video covers why it's worth hammering those home - the ideal visitor knows exactly what they want, and long-tail searchers are the most likely to be that kind of visitor. It's the keyword strategy behind the client sites in my examples, a fair few of which rank locally.

Quality over price

The accreditation bit comes from real work: the company that did my own solar panels, Renegade Solar, is MCS accredited - an accreditation some people specifically search for because it says something about the quality of the installer. Search "MCS solar installer Prestwich" and their site, the one I help with, comes up first, and the person who searches for MCS is usually savvier than the one who just searches "solar installer", and happier to pay. That's competing on quality rather than price, which I think is the right fight for a small business to pick - my opinion rather than data, for what it's worth.

A few tactics from the video work just as well. On the static Eleventy sites I build, a speciality gets its own page - Renegade's Prestwich solar page lives at /services/solar-and-battery-installations/prestwich/, and my site structure guide explains why that URL shape works so well - and question-shaped phrases get an FAQ section ("how much does a boiler repair cost?" is the example I use in the video). Case studies work too: the Renegade one is written by me, about the fitting they did on my house. And quoting your reviews works, because customers write long-tail phrases for you - Renegade's reviews mention things like "removed an EV charger" and "updated light switches and moved a ceiling light", which is exactly what someone with that problem types into Google. One honest note: Google puts an AI summary above a lot of these results now, I'm not sure how much I trust it, and plenty of people click it all the same.

Mistakes worth avoiding

The video covers mistakes too. Keyword stuffing is the obvious one - there's a whole keywords video on it. Near-duplicate pages are another I see a fair bit: house painting in Chorlton, home painting in Chorlton, residential painting in Chorlton - when one solid page that happens to mention all three phrasings beats three thin ones. And use the words your customers use: nobody in the UK searches for "bouncy castle rentals", because renting is what you do with a house - they search for "bouncy castle hire", which is the sort of thing you learn from a decade in that industry.

If you'd like help identifying profitable long tail keywords for your business and creating content that ranks, use the contact form below and I'll reply within 48 hours.