Long Tail Keywords: How to Find Easy to Rank Keywords for SEO

Are you striking gold with your long tail keywords tactics– or striking out? Seeking long-tail keywords with low search volume might seem like a waste of time and effort.

Why not focus your efforts on ranking for trendy keywords with high search volume? Well, everyone else is trying to rank for those trendy keywords, too!

What Are Long Tail Keywords? 

Long-tail keywords are extremely targeted search phrases that specifically serve searcher intent. These keywords have low search volume, intense competition, and typically have huge conversion rates.

We call these keywords long-tail because if you were to outline your keywords by their search volumes, these would be on the “long tail” end of the search demand curve, which indicates few people are searching for these terms each month.

However, despite the lack of search volume, long-tail keywords are often simpler to rank for and result in higher conversions than seed keywords. This is because long-tail keywords reach a clear customer need that you can solve — they’re intent-driven.

When you understand search intent, you can create content that explicitly addresses queries and converts.

For example, a user hunting for days of play gold PS4 price indicates a clear intent to purchase. Similarly, a search for “PS4” is a lot less clear; the user might be looking for more information about the video game console, searching for recent news from Sony, or seeking out a list of games.

Note that the exact length of these keywords technically doesn’t matter. Long-tail keywords tend to be at least three words long due to their specificity, but particular low-volume searches that are only one or two terms long are also considered long-tail keywords, such as many brand names.

Why Long-tail Keywords Are Important in SEO

Let’s do a social practice: log into your Google Search Console account right now and scroll through the search terms. What do you see? I’m willing to bet that most of the words you rank for are long-tail.

Up to 70% of all search traffic stems from long-tail keywords — and many that you rank for will be particular to your business.

Now imagine what you could do if all those highly-targeted queries funneled fresh leads directly to your high-converting assets. There are three main privileges to targeting these particular keywords:

Less Competition 

Long-tail keywords are precise to your business and your niche, and as a result, search volume is low. The upside of this is that it doesn’t take almost as much work to rank well for your targeted long-tail keywords.

Some simple on-page SEO and link building should catapult your landing pages into a point of prominence if your targeted terms are specific enough.

Higher Conversions

A little long-tail keyword sleuthing will support you discover search intent. With search intent, you’ll be able to identify queries that indicate the buyer’s purpose (e.g., “buy Canada 150 collector’s coins”) and a need for additional information (e.g., “how to target long-tail keywords”).

You can apply this knowledge to usher extremely qualified leads into your sales funnel and complement your content marketing efforts.

It Helps You Optimize for Semantic Search

Long-tail keywords are an essential part of optimizing for semantic search. We live in an age where 55 percent of millennials use voice search daily, and talking to bots is commonplace. When these users query these programs, they use long-tail keyword phrases such as questions (e.g., what are the best sushi restaurants nearby?) and commands with clear intent (e.g., compare the cost of the dresses from Blush and Sherri Hill).

Try to predict the intent behind naturally spoken questions so that you can give answers about your business and services and better target these long-tail keyword phrases.

Remember, if you target high-converting long-tail keywords even when search density is low, these keywords can yet be expensive for your business.

How to Find Long-Tail Keywords

Ranking for the right long-tail keywords might be more suitable than gold. Discovering new long-tail keywords is easy, and you can build a substantial list in minutes.

First, grab the long-tail keywords that you remember you rank for: open your Search Console, click Search Traffic > Search Analytics, and then select Clicks, Impressions, and Position (we’re not worrying about CTR for this step). Next, scroll to the bottom and click Download to receive the entire list.

Now download the same data for your PPC campaigns, Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube videos, Instagram, and any other metrics you can think of that might reveal new terms. Now plug all these words into a spreadsheet so that you have all of your potential long-tails in one place.

Next, try to find new long-tail keywords in your niche that you could rank for. Here’s how to build a list of potential long-tails manually:

• Prepare a list of seed keywords. Use a keyword planning tool to create a list of seed keywords, but try to stay away from Google AdWords. While this free tool is excellent for developing a list of commercial terms to target, it intentionally steers away from long-tail terms with lower search volume, making it not very useful for our purposes.
• Write down Google’s autocomplete suggestions. Type all seed keywords into Google and write down its autocomplete suggestions.
• Write down Google’s related search suggestions. Scroll to the bottom of each SERP and write down the associated searches.
• Rinse and repeat for Bing Search Suggestions and any different search engines you want to optimize for.
• Add these potential long-tails to your spreadsheet. Group all your terms and get ready to start pruning your list.

The thought of manually discovering and entering all of these potential keywords sounds painful. But today’s software performs this entire research step easily! The best programs will even sort through various search engines for you, and they may discover long-tails you overlooked.

Once again, don’t use Google AdWords. Many other programs intuitively discover and sort through long-tail keywords on your behalf.

Now that you have a comprehensive list of all of your potential keywords, it’s time to start pruning your list. First, weed out any terms that don’t communicate user intent. For instance, in the long-tail keywords-related search results listed above, the query short-tail keywords aren’t specific enough.

When you’ve trimmed your list down to the most powerful candidates (anywhere from half a dozen to a few hundred long-tails), you’ll be ready to start optimizing your pages and adding them to your content.