kimfisher•4d agoMost Upvoted

The SEO ranking difference from switching to long-tail keywords was night and day in 4 months

I've been running my own little affiliate site on the side for about a year now, and honestly, I was getting nowhere with the generic keywords I was targeting. Stuff like "best coffee maker" or "cheap running shoes" just got me buried on page 8 of Google, and I was pulling my hair out. Then I read a post on here about going after long-tail keywords, so I switched things up to things like "best drip coffee maker for a family of 4 under $100" or "trail running shoes for flat feet on a budget". After about 4 months of consistently writing content around those specific phrases, my organic traffic jumped from maybe 200 visits a month to over 1,500. The real kicker was the conversion rate went up too, since people searching for that specific stuff were basically ready to buy. I'm still not an expert by any stretch, but it just clicked for me that I was trying to compete with big sites that have been around for years. Has anyone else seen this kind of shift after changing their keyword strategy?

2 comments

2 Comments

aaronsullivan4d ago

Yeah I feel you on that @the_olivia, the "night and day" thing really depends on where you're starting from. My site was basically dead before so even that jump felt huge to me, but I get how it's not a magic bullet for everyone. You're right that fixing page speed and getting backlinks probably did more heavy lifting on your end.

the_olivia4d ago

Gonna have to disagree with you a bit here. I tried the same long tail approach on a home improvement site I run and saw maybe a 20 percent bump after six months, not the kind of night and day thing you're describing. The real game changer for me ended up being fixing technical stuff like page speed and getting some decent backlinks from local blogs. Long tail keywords are fine but I think a lot of people oversell how much they can do on their own without the basics in place.