her. If, for example, you’re a furniture retailer, you’ll be up against your competitors if you invest budget in the search term “coffee tables”. For a broad search term like that, demand will always outstrip supply, making it prohibitively expensive to secure the top position. Which is where long-tail keywords can help. Long-tail keywords are more specific and niche than broad terms. For a furniture retailer, an example of a long-tail keyword search could be “round coffee table” or “round wooden coffee table”. The more specific a long-tail keyword, the lower the search volume. For example, “round coffee table” has a search volume of 7,800 while “round wooden coffee table” has a search volume of 450. But don’t be deterred by smaller search volumes because what these keywords lack in search volume, they more than make up for with purchase intent. With a clear search intent comes a better conversion rate. Targeting long-tail keywords Retailers can take this theory and apply it to their websites to further minimise the cost of paid search. Once you identify the long-tail keywords relevant to your business, you can create collection landing pages. By aligning specific landing pages with these long-tail queries, you won’t just get cheaper clicks; you’ll also improve the Quality Score of your paid campaigns, which will, in turn, lower your bids. Quality Score is a diagnostic metric that shows how relevant your keywords and ads are to what someone is searching for. It helps indicate whether search engines are likely to reward or penalise your ads based on the overall user experience you provide. Create a campaign targeting people searching for “round coffee tables”, but lead them to a search page that gives them something else entirely, and you can watch your Quality Score plummet. Meanwhile, create a collection page where you bring together all of the round coffee tables in your range, and you can expect your Quality Score to increase. Other factors such as page load speed, mobile-friendliness and historic click-through rate will come into play, but the biggest boost you can get for your Quality Score will come from the content you serve and how you serve it. The benefits of long-tail collection pages Long-tail pages are easier to rank for organically. They build your site’s reputation as an expert, which helps your main pages perform better too. In addition to upping your Quality Score, creating long-tail keyword collection pages will maximise conversion rate and minimise wasted spend as the customers coming to your site are highly relevant and normally closer to making a purchase than someone searching for broader search terms. In the example of the furniture retailer, creating landing pages that focus on material, colour and room-type variations that match the user’s intent could significantly reduce ad spend while maximising organic search performance. A one-to-one match between a search and a landing page converts way better than a “one size fits all” page. Get it right, and it wouldn’t be out of the question to halve ad spend within six months. Putting this into practice The biggest barrier for retailers to implement this strategy is bandwidth. The manual labour of researching niche keywords and then building out dozens (or hundreds) of unique pages requires resource that’s hard to justify when you’re already spread thin. There’s also the “bloat” risk. If you start pumping out pages for queries that have zero search volume, you’re just cluttering the site with low-value junk that does nothing for your SEO or the user experience. The good news is that you don’t have to do this by hand anymore. There are programmatic SEO tools that can automate the heavy lifting. They can even cross-reference search demand with your actual product inventory to find the sweet spots. From there, they can auto-generate long-tail keyword pages, complete with the right product listings and optimised metadata. The retailers that don’t adopt this strategy risk losing high-intent traffic. If you don’t have a specific page for your customers, they’ll find a competitor that does. There’s a quick win in the offering you’d be crazy not to pursue. Rachel Harvey is an SEO Director at the integrated marketing agency Impressive.