Many keywords are almost impossible to rank for if you’re just starting out. Profitable niches like DUI lawyers is so competitive it doesn’t make any sense to go after it — too many other sites are out there looking to solve the problems faced by those charged with a DUI. Law firms smell the cash from these people and so they devote considerable resources to getting high rankings for their own sites.

A direct attack makes no sense in this scenario. The market is simply too blanketed to break into. Instead, you have to approach it indirectly through the long tail. Long tail keywords will get you higher rankings and targeted traffic for much less cost and effort.

The term “long tail keyword” refers to a very focused search phrase consisting of at least three keywords. The really good long tail keywords consist of at least 4 or 5 keywords in them. The search volume for a long tail keyword is not very high, because it’s so focused, but the traffic it generates is definitely extremely targeted.

Look at this example. According to Google’s own keyword tool, the phrase DUI lawyers is searched for about 75,000 times a month. A quick look at Google shows that there are 6 million sites that match that keyword. Hyper competitive!

Change the phrase by adding a place name to create the term Los Angeles DUI lawyers and you’ve drastically removed competition — only about 400,000 sites match that term. The search volume is less, too — about 1500 searches per month — but it’s a much more realistic market to break into. Good SEO techniques are more likely to work with long tail keywords than high-volume, saturated keywords.

Remember, though that with long tail keywords you need to target more keywords to make a real difference. It’s a volume game — the more long tail keywords you rank for, the more traffic you’ll get. This can require a lot of effort. Over time, though, you’ll also find that your sites get better rankings for the main (short tail) keywords, a nice side effect of targeting long tail keywords.