There’s a major shift coming to the world of search. Along with Google’s antitrust lawsuit, artificial intelligence (AI), and changing consumer behavior, we’re seeing how people search for information facing a monumental paradigm shift.
In this post, we’ll cover new trends, such as the drastic rise of long-tail keywords and optimizing for voice search, and look at some of our favorite free tools for keyword optimization.
The Rise of Long-Tail Queries
Long-tail keywords are essential for driving organic traffic and improving search rankings. They have lower search volumes but higher conversion rates due to their specificity. Using long-tail keywords in your content strategy can save on paid advertising costs and provide more valuable, sustainable organic traffic. You can use tools like Ubersuggest, AnswerThePublic, Google Autocomplete, People Also Ask, and related search terms to find effective long-tail keywords. It’s also essential to ensure that your content matches user search intent by understanding the four main types: navigational, informational, commercial, and transactional.
With that said, don’t overthink this. Consider what you would search for if you were looking for a product or service like yours. What would you put into a search engine (even alternatives like YouTube and social) to find content around that product/service? For example, if you’re a digital marketing team in Portland, users may be searching for “How can I improve my website ranking in Portland?” or “Top-rated digital agencies near me.”
Long tail queries give you more flexibility to find and exploit a niche within a search rather than a single term. Use a bit of consumer psychology to determine what it is your audience is looking for and how your offering fills that need.
“Keyword optimization is making sure your content is dressed to the nines and turns every head in the room as it makes its grand entrance at the ball.”
According to Ahrefs, the search demand curve noted below includes three distinct parts: the “fat head”, “chunky middle,” and “long tail.”
- The fat head is a very small number of keywords that have a huge search volume. Fatheads would be keywords like “Taylor Swift” or “Apple computer.”
- The chunky middle would be millions of different possible queries with solid monthly search volumes. These might be succinct versions of long-tail queries, such as “Taylor Swift concert,” “Apple computer sales,” or “Fed lowers rates.”
- The sweet spot is the last category – long tail. These include billions of possible search queries with relatively low competition to find that perfect niche. As we mentioned above, these are specific, like “Taylor Swift concert in Jacksonville this weekend,” “baseball bat deals on Amazon,” or “Jacksonville copywriters for my business.” Long tail may have lower search volumes but that’s because you’ve pared the audience down to a very specific group searching within a narrow segment. The result is delivering the right message to the right audience at the perfect time to elicit action.
Pro Tip: A great way to naturally incorporate long-tail keywords is with frequently asked questions (FAQs). Any web page you create is a fantastic and natural place for a full list of relevant FAQs that incorporate the most pertinent long-tail queries your audience is using for that particular subject.
Keyword Optimization for Voice Search
According to a study in Backlinko, one-third of all internet user say they use voice search on at least a weekly basis. It’s no coincidence that this increase coincides with access to voice search growing exponentially with the widescale adoption of smart speaker devices with AI voice assistance like Alexa and Google Assistant. In fact, in 2024 somewhere around 98 million people in the US own a smart speaker in their household, reports Edison Research. Another fun fact from the Backlinko study, the average word count for top-performing voice searches is just 29 words.
Along with “Hey Google” or “Siri” queries, voice search has become the norm for quickly accessing the information you need, particularly on the go or while doing another activity. This is why optimizing your content for voice search is so important. Going to the source, according to a Google Search Labs voice search, trends in voice search in 2024 include:
- Local searches: The number of voice searches for local information is expected to triple in 2024, with 76% of voice searches being for nearby or local things. This trend will benefit businesses that optimize their online presence for local search concepts.
- Voice-commerce market: The voice-assisted shopping market is expected to grow by 54% in 2024, reaching a value of $19.4 billion.
- Smart speaker sales: Global smart speaker sales are expected to surpass $30 billion in 2024.
- Voice search usage: 31% of smartphone owners worldwide use voice search at least once a week.
- Voice search devices: The top three devices for voice assistant usage are smartphones (56%), smart speakers (35%), and TVs (34%).
- Voice search for restaurants: 51% of consumers use voice search to research restaurants.
- Voice search for businesses: Consumers research a broad range of businesses on their voice devices, from hotels to doctors to insurance companies.
- Voice search and featured snippets: Over 70% of voice search results pull information from featured snippets and “People Also Ask”.
- Voice search and privacy: There is an increased concern for privacy and security.
Tools that Make Keyword Planning Way Easier
Now, making sure to optimize content for today’s audiences and mediums would be moot if we don’t find the right keywords and phrases. One of our favorite free keyword generator tools in the world is from Ahrefs. The tool is super intuitive giving you a search box to look up keywords and phrases across Google, Bing, YouTube, and even Amazon. All of these are platforms are search engines in their own right and make their bread and butter by steering users to the most relevant sources.
After you input a proposed keyword, for example, “business copywriters,” you see a new box pop up with phrase matches, as well as questions. There you’ll see the analytics for searches containing “business copywriters,” including keyword density and search volume.
- Keyword Density: gives an estimation of how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a keyword on a 100-point scale. We love that Ahrefs makes it easy with a color-code system on how much competition there is for certain phrases.
- Volume: An estimation of the average monthly number of searches for a keyword over the latest known 12 months of data.
In the screenshot above, you can see that “small business copywriter” is a relatively easy phrase to target, with a descent search volume of over 100 searches. This means if you start targeting this keyword with blogs, social, podcasts, videos, and other media, you have a good shot of landing in the top 10 search results on Google.
Keyword optimization pays dividends in making sure your content has the best chance possible of being discovered by audience members who are specifically looking for a source like yours. It’s also one the best ways to contribute to positive ROI for the digital marketing budget spent in producing the content
How a Copywriter Can Help Your Business
Having content that’s plug and play ready is what we deliver to every client. We help account executives at marketing agencies, creative directors, digital marketing directors, marketing VPs, marketing specialists, and everyone else who finds themselves responsible for posting content with ready-to-post content that delivers results.
Whether it’s ghostwriting an article for a Forbes placement we helped land your CEO or crafting attorney bios that instill confidence, premium human-generated content is what we do best. In looking at AI vs human generated content, research shows that hands down human generated content performs better. We produce content that reaches the audience on deep and personal levels because we exhaustively research demographics, find keywords and phrases that are top-performing in your specific industry and location, employ SEO integration across the board, and utilize Bizwrite’s two-proof process before content is ever shared with clients. When we deliver content, it’s ready to post.
We fill up our client’s content calendars so they can sit back, relax, then get back to all the other urgent tasks on their plate. Call us today to let us take over managing your content pipeline with content that gets noticed and builds authority for your brand.
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