The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

How to Find Quality Long Tail Keywords in 5 Minutes or Less

by 

Zain Husain

Last updated: August 19th, 2014

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist in order to discover quality long tail keywords! Check out my video tutorial and you’ll be a pro in no time:

Thanks for checking out my video! If you need some more help, be sure to get in touch with us.

Video Transcription

Hey guys, how’s it going? My name is Zain and I work for Powered by Search. My role here is SEO Specialist/Account Manager.

Today I’ll be talking to you about long-tail keywords and the importance of them, as well as how to find long-tail keywords within five to 10 minutes of your day. It’s really easy and super effective.

What are long-tail keywords? Well long-tail keywords are generally just keywords, but with more words. Anything with three of more words is generally considered a long-tail keyword. Now this is a graph of basically the search demand curve presented by Moz, and basically the short-tail keywords, which are like one or two words, are pretty much right up here.

Generally even though it’s awesome that if we rank for the short-term keywords, we’ll get 5000 searches, or 10,000 searches, and that’s amazing. But, the reality is that short term only takes up about 30% of search traffic, while long-tail is actually 70% of traffic. So even though these long-tail keywords don’t get up to 5000 searches per day it’s still really important that we take this in mind when we’re doing our SEO or any digital marketing.

The reason that it’s actually really important is when people are searching for long-tail keywords, they are actually much further down the buying process. This is actually super targeted keywords that are actually asking when people are searching what are the best headphones to buy, for example. That is a keyword that has buying intent as well as if you create content that’s relevant to this keyword and you’re ranking for that, you are already further down the path of converting them for your page or for your product.

Another reason is that long-tail keywords actually have less competition than these short-tail keywords. It’s actually really not hard to rank for them if you were going to write really good content, and you optimize your web page with the right long-tail keywords in your title as well as in your content so it’s natural.

The beautiful part of long-tail keywords is that you can align yourself with what they need and want without them even knowing that you exist in the first place. This will be a solution for them and pretty much basically knowing that you’re out there and they’ll probably check out the rest of your site and the rest of your products once they see that it’s relevant content for their question and you’re actually providing them with really good value. Then they begin to start to trust you and go back to your website because you are able to answer their question or target them for their long-tail searches.

Okay, so let’s jump in and let me show you how to search for long-tail keywords. The first one is one you may be familiar with that’s Ad Words. A good thing for Ad Words is that you can actually just type in some of your keywords or some of your buying intent keywords, such as maybe best headphones or quality headphones, or cheap headphones, something that the buyer is trying to look for and they actually have an intent on buying it once they find this content or relevant page.

So I typed in a few words. I typed in best headphones, quality headphones, and cheap headphones, and I set my country to the United States, and let’s just see what Ad Words has for us.

Basically, when Ad Words comes up with all these searches you can do it two different ways. One way I like to do is actually just download all these ideas, have them in Excel and go through them and have a nice view of them all. Or if you have a few ideas that you already know, that I only want to look at certain ad groups, you can just go ahead and start clicking in and you can see all these long-tail keywords, the best quality, the best audio, quality headphones. What is the best quality headphone?

You can search for other stuff, for best in-ear, and there’s also best wireless. There are a lot of different kinds of long-tail keywords, and this could be inspiration for your long-tail content. That is the general purpose. When you find these long-tail keywords you want to write really good relevant content to these long-tail keywords.

It’s actually really good to just play around with Ad Words and try and see what you can find in terms of long-tail keywords. You can even get some brands, you can get a lot of really cool things with Ad Words. Even just Ad Words on its own could be enough for you to get all your long-tail research.

But, if you want to take it step further or you want to look at some other ways, you can actually just check in Google and you can even just type in your keyword or maybe your buyer intent keyword. Just type it in and go all the way to the bottom and you’ll see that you have these search related results. You probably noticed this for sure, and this is actually a really good area for long-tail keywords.

For example, you have immigration lawyer processing times. This could be a really good piece of content that people would want to know, like how long it’ll take and this could be a selling point for your client or for yourself that our processing times aren’t very long, and this is what the steps are. You could really cater to their needs.

It’s also really good to just try different keywords, because every search is not always going to be great, but if you try different keywords and even use some of the stuff that Google is giving you, you can get a lot of different ideas on the related search and sometimes Google will give you some nice gems that you didn’t really think about.

Another way you can actually find some more long-tail keywords is that you just let autofill just guide you on what kind of long-tail keywords. So you say, what are the best immigrations, and you’ve got a few things already. What are the best countries to immigrate to, what is immigration policy, immigration software, and you can just keep going with who are the best, and just keep asking questions to Google and let it fill out for you. Then just keep moving on, and you’ll find some really good pieces of long-tail keywords.

Another way you can search, and this is also a very quick way of doing it, is just typing in your keyword and then add form to it. Forums are really good places to find what people are actually asking, what they want, you know, what kind of questions they have if they actually want to buy your product.

Sometimes you might not even find it in the related searches and it depends on your niche, and it can be really tough for you. So the best place is just to go to the astronomy forums or any kind of forum that you’re looking for.

If I was buying a telescope for example and I’m saying, what are people looking for in telescopes, or what kind of content are they looking for. You can just go right to the astronomy forums or whatever forum you’d like to go to and generally if you poke around you can even just use some of the headings that are actually very good for long-tail keywords, like I can see that ME telescope is a really good brand. Or you can tell that some of these are really popular products. You can tell that there are a lot of questions in particular to the product as well.

This would be really good. This can provide you so much content for your site, and it could really just turn into converting them into buying your product.

So one thing I would try is not only just forums, but even the bulletin is another good search example. It might be something not everyone remembers, but V Bulletin was also a pretty good way of searching up forums. So you can even type in that, and you’re going to find lots of different ones pertaining to your long-tail keyword, or even just keyword in general.

The next thing I want to show you is Cobol. I believe I’m saying that right. You may have already seen this, you may have not, but a lot of digital marketers have been using this tool, and it’s actually a really, really interesting tool. For example Cobol will, as soon as you type in your keyword, it will actually show you all the search results from Google, Amazon, Yahoo. It will show you all the related keyword results for you.

For example if I want to type in catering for example, you already get tons of different kinds of keywords. You can even see that you’re getting services, supplies, companies, catering trucks for sale, catering supply wholesale. You get a lot of different things, catering business from home. You can definitely see that you can get a lot of different keywords, and you can just keep playing around with this and see what kind of keywords you can get.

Generally you will find lots of keywords from just Cobol itself. It’s a really cool little website that will help you find lots of keywords and also help you find what people are actually searching for.

The next one I’m going to show you is Google Trends. This one hasn’t really been used a lot from digital marketers, and the reason why I’m showing it to you today is that it actually will help you find if there are any breakout terms or if anything’s on the rise, or maybe you’re unsure if this long-tail keyword is really going to hit the mark for a lot of people, if people are even searching.

Because sometimes long-tail keywords don’t give you a lot of results, so it could be hard to tell if it’s something that you’re on the pulse or something that’s just in the past and no one is really searching anymore.

It’s always good to just throw in your keywords, just to see what kind of trend you’re seeing in Google. I put in ductless air conditioning, for example, and central air conditioning. I’m looking at the trends to see where we are heading right now. Teally cool thing with this is that you can actually see the kind of queries that are actually the top ones, which is also really good for long-tail keywords, as well as what’s rising, what’s coming up right now. This is really, really good to see what keywords are really, really popular and what’s on the trend, what’s trending upwards.

That’s actually really helpful in terms of targeting your long-tail keywords and essentially converting your viewer, user, or visitor into an actual customer.

In conclusion, just go back to this search demand, just remember this graph. It’s a pretty good graph and showing you the landscape of search demand. I mean, this is really important. A lot of us definitely go for these top 100 keywords, which is definitely important for staying on top of the first page and making sure you get a lot more visitors, obviously from there.

Also you position yourself as an industry leader. So that’s always really good to go after these keywords, but the long-tailed keywords are really a big chunk of search demand. The more you can target these, the more you’ll actually get more customers who will convert for your business.

Some things to keep in mind are when you have your long-tail keyword and you know that this is the one I’m going for and it checks off that there are people actually searching for it, that it has some really good buyer intent to it, as well as you know that you have this product or you have this service for your page, just make sure that you’re optimizing your title tags, that you’re optimizing your alt tags as well for your images, and also that in your content that you have this long-tail keyword spread out in your content. You want to make sure that you don’t over use it, you don’t want to over-stuff, just keep it natural. Don’t try to force it in there.

Obviously by now, Google picks up on that stuff, and obviously even the users will pick up on stuff that you’re trying to game the system. Just make it really relevant, make it really good as well. I mean, the important thing is that your content is unique, and it’s interesting. Even look at other people’s content who have created content for the long-tail, and to see what your competitors are doing and try to outdo them.

That’s the key with long-tail keywords, try to make sure that your content is the best out there, and if it is the best out there and you’re ranking for it, you’ll surely see lots of visitors and over time will build up and you’ll actually gain a lot of customers.

Make sure you have some nice ETAs at the bottom of your long-tail keyword content. From there you should be in business. Hopefully this was helpful for you guys. Please check out poweredbysearch.com for any more information on our services. We definitely have some awesome ideas and plans for long-tail keywords that we can help you speed up your business, or your own website. Check out our website, and I hope you have a great day. Thanks a lot guys. Bye.

Transcription by Speechpad.com.