The old way of doing SEO was pretty straightforward: people search using keywords, and the more of those keywords are found on your page, the greater the chances it will rank well. The problem is, it was a race to the bottom.

Competitors were piling on more keywords, trying to one-up each other. Over time, their content would be stuffed with so many keywords, it would become unreadable and create a poor user experience.

Then, black-hat SEOs would hide keywords or create redirects from keyword-stuffed pages to the better ones. Thankfully, Google caught on, and after a while killed off those surreptitious techniques.

Even today, some SEOs push still “keywords” as the main search engine tactic. Keywords are still important, but not in the same way we think they are.

Google is more intelligent than ever. Keywords are no longer the primary ranking factor and Google is smart enough to understand what the content is about, even when the content doesn’t contain the exact keywords.

Things like topics, context, related keywords, and the connection between them are now far more important than just keywords.

Are Long-Tail Keywords Better?

To give you an example of how topics are more important than keywords, take long-tail keywords, i.e., keywords that fall in the long end of the search demand curve. They may seem like worthless keywords because they have little search volume, but they can actually be quite powerful.

The demand may be low but also specific, so they’re also highly targeted. Bounce rates will be lower and conversion rates will be higher. For example:

Ranking for a broad term like “facelift” may be an attractive and audacious goal. But out of those 10,000 searches, you may get people who are interested in something else, like non-surgical facelift, “vampire” facelift (i.e., microneedling), the history of facelifts, facelift creams, etc.

But the more specific keyword, like “best facelift surgeon in New York,” the chances are high that the little traffic you get from that longer phrase will be quite targeted and highly motivated.

Long-Tail Derivatives

However, a common misconception is that all long-tail keywords are longer (they have multiple words). Or that long-tail keywords are highly targeted or that ranking for long-tail keywords is easy. Not quite.

For example, take the keyword “rhytidectomy” (80 searches per month), the medical term for facelift. Or “threadlift” (60), the less invasive facelift alternative. Both are short and broad, but both are also long-tail (low demand) and both serve two completely different search intents.

Here’s the issue: if a doctor in New York ranks well for “best facelift surgeon NYC,” chances are she may also rank high for “facelift surgeon” or even just “facelift.” In other words, if you try to rank for the longer tail keyword, you might still lose to the more topic-focused competitor.

Called “derivative keywords,” they’re basically variations that derive from or closely match a parent topic. Since Google is smart at understanding content and relevance, going after derivatives or variations of an existing parent topic that a competitor ranks well for may be tough.

For example, a plastic surgeon may rank for “best facelift surgeon NYC,” “best facelift surgeon,” and “facelift surgeon.” The parent topic may be “facelift” or “facelift surgeon.” Therefore, that plastic surgeon is ranking for multiple derivatives, which may make it hard to rank.

So not all long-tail keywords are created equal.

Long-Tail Subtopics

What I recommend is doing a SERP analysis.

Taking the same example, when you do a search for “facelift,” the top three results are two results from PlasticSurgery.org (ASPS, or American Society of Plastic Surgeons) and one from Mayo Clinic. The rest is pretty similar.

Therefore, this tells you two things: the search intent, according to Google, is informational. People are looking to learn about the procedure. They may not be in the market for a facelift and just doing research.

Next, if you search for “facelift surgeon,” you get a mix:

The first result is still PlasticSugery.org, but now it’s followed by a few plastic surgeons and private clinics. So either Google isn’t sure about the search intent, or the ASPS is ranking for both the parent topic and it’s close derivative.

Now, taking a step further, when you do the same thing for “best facelift surgeon NYC,” ASPS (PlasticSurgery.org) doesn’t appear in the results at all. This means that “best facelift surgeon NYC” is not a derivative of “facelift” and considered its own topic or subtopic. This may be an opportunity.

Also called “topical long-tail keywords,” these are specific long-tail keywords that are considered as topics in and of themselves. They may be better and easier to rank for, too, than derivatives.

Look at Other Variations

When I visit the topmost result, NewYorkFacialPlasticSurgery.com, it’s not an informative piece of content. I get a press release about the doctor who was mentioned in a magazine and voted “best plastic surgeon in New York City,” which clearly highlights the keywords and several variations:

Now, you might think that this site is ranking high because of keyword density. But I bet that, if you were a plastic surgeon in NYC and you wrote a helpful piece of content that provided an overview of all the criteria that go into choosing a facelift doctor that users can use, it would probably outrank this one.

My reasoning is, Google may feel the content is more relevant and helpful, and seemingly less self-serving than an award-winning mention in a press release.

(However, a better piece would be a comparison between multiple leading competitors, but that’s not ethically allowed as doctors are prohibited from claiming superiority. So providing users with helpful tools to determine how to gauge doctors may be the next best thing.)

Plus, you might still rank better if you had content addressing variations of the same long-tail keyword, such as: “Who is the best plastic surgeon in NYC?” “What makes the best facelift in NYC?” “Best facelift NYC before and after photos.” “Best facelift questions to ask a plastic surgeon.” And so on.

Stop Chasing Tails

Don’t go chasing long-tail keywords without first understanding search intent, learning who your competitors are, and discovering if the long-tail keyword is either a derivative or a subtopic. Because if you don’t, you will be like a dog chasing its own tail, going nowhere fast.

So go for subtopics, but don’t discount all derivatives, either. If you rank well with a recognized, authoritative piece of quality content for a derivative long-tail keyword that matches the search intent better than your competitors, you might eventually rank for its parent topic, too.