depends on the keywords.
Most SEO newbies confuse long tails with low search volume and with low competition. These 3 are different to each other, and should not be confused.
Long tail keywords can be as easy or hard to rank for as normal keywords. For example, in the health & medical niche you will see a lot of long tail keywords (8-9 words long) that are not easy to rank for and which get several 100s of visitors per month. I've seen many such keywords last week when I did some research in a medical sub-niche.
Low volume keywords means keywords that receive little traffic and - again - these keywords can be as easy, or as hard to rank for as non-long tail keywords, or keywords with higher search volume (be it long tails, or not)
And finally, there's the keyword difficulty, which is actually what most newbies mean when they say "long tail keywords". The competition is actually the most important part in keyword research because if you find keywords with low competition (long tails or not, low search volume or not) you can rank for them within a couple of weeks with an expired domain, and within a couple of months with a new domain. Some people on this forum have shown examples of their websites ranking for low competition keywords (not sure whether or not they've been long tail keywords cause they didn't say) with a new domain after just one week, without building a single backlink.
But again, we are talking about low competition keywords, which has nothing to do with low search volume or long tail keywords. And to assess the real competition of a keyword you need to analyze the websites ranking on 1st page of google. Only after taking a close look at those websites (their backlinking profile, their content structure and on-page SEO, how well their content addresses the intent of the keyword, how topically-relevant those websites are, and so on)... only after looking at all these things will you be able to say with certainty "yes, this is a low competition keyword and I'm gonna rank for it within a week if I write slightly better content than these guys and I have a more topically relevant website".... either this, or use an expired domain and stolen content to outrank your less authoritative competitors because google doesn't give a crap about quality anymore. Nowadays it's all about backlinks and money. The more you have of these the more traffic and money you're gonna make. If you're poor and only want $100 a month don't even think about doing SEO or ranking in google. If you're filthy rich just scratch your balls, pick your nose and the bank account will fill itself over night. Sad, but true, this is how google works nowadays....
