Marketing / SEO

5 Easy and Effective Ways to Find Long-Tail Keywords

Irina Weber

Updated: Oct 14, 2021 · 4 min read

Toolkit for download in this article

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In the SEO world, everyone talks about the value of long-tail keywords. Most often, the long-tail phrases you discover are valuable and generate high-targeted traffic to your website. 

Read on to uncover five great ways to find long-tail keywords for your marketing campaigns. 

1. Professional tools 

If you’re serious about keyword research, in particular, long-tails, you should pay attention to different tools. The Google keyword tool is a good place to start, but the results can be too general (long-tail keywords by nature are not general). If you’re looking for a tool that can do a deep dive consider:

  • SE Ranking: This site offers a variety of SEO features including keyword research, competitor research, including a backlink checker, keyword rank checking, and page changes monitoring, among others. SE Ranking offers several plans, from $7 per month to $189 per month, so there is something to fit every small business budget.
  • Ubersuggest: While a bit more basic (and free!), Ubersuggest has some interesting features. It only covers keyword research, but you can break your searches down by type (the web, images, YouTube, shopping, and news) and you can search by country and language. So while one keyword ranks high in the United States, you may need to tweak it for Ireland and Ubersuggest is here to help you.
  • Long Tail Pro: With offerings including Adwords data and keyword profitability, Long Tail Pro helps you monetize your SEO efforts. It can also determine the competitiveness of keywords and helps define the level of keyword difficulty you should target. Prices start at $25 per month.

It may seem like overkill to use multiple tools (and there are plenty more beyond the three mentioned), but it doesn’t hurt to use more than one since the more keyword tools you use, the more long-tail alternations you get. On top of that, many offer different features so you can maximize your SEO efforts. 

But remember, any keyword research won’t end in simply identifying long-tail variations. Try to integrate them into your content and you will be very surprised with the results. Be very picky as you touch on keywords with a lower search volume. 

2. Forums, e-mails, Q&A sites, comment threads

People’s search queries or questions offer great insight into what they need and look for online. One of the best ways to pick out long-tail keywords is to browse forums, comments threads, Q&A sites, or even emails sent to your business. However, many SEO specialists don’t use these options to their advantage. If you have a blog with a certain level of regular commenting or a place where people ask questions, you can view a steady flow of long-tail keywords that may be beneficial to you.

3. Competitor analysis

No matter what niche you are in, you will always have competition. Most likely, your competitors have also been using long-tails that will really simplify your job. All you need to do is to check out their keywords they target and implement them on your own site.

You can find them in the titles, the snippets, the meta tags from keyword checking tools, or from scanning the content on the competitors’ website. This way you will most likely uncover these keywords. To speed up your competitor analysis, you can check out the professional competitor research tools on  SE Ranking or SpyFu.

4. Browse eHow

Websites like eHow.com get a huge amount of traffic each month which means this website is crammed with traffic from long-tail keywords. In other words, eHow is a treasure trove of valuable information. They integrate powerful algorithms that help you find long-tails that you can use for promoting your hyper-targeted content.

Even if you don’t know their content algorithms and data sources, you can learn from their methodology.

5. Browse Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the most optimized website on the internet, so you can learn a lot from the methods there. A lot of its titles translate into long-tail keywords. For example, look at a fairly broad term like “marketing strategy.” As you scroll down, you’ll see the subheads in the article, which translate into long-tail keywords, including “developing a marketing strategy” and “marketing management versus marketing strategy.”

You can also check out a page search using your primary keyword in order to view different variations that appear via the text. The “See also” section can be useful to find blocks of related search queries. Take the page for “social media” for example. The “See also” section includes “online presence management” and “list of photo sharing websites.”

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