Hands down, search traffic is the best traffic source anyone can use to build a profitable blog that makes money.
But there’s one issue with getting more traffic from search engines: it usually takes a lot of time (especially if you’ve a new website). Here’s where long tail SEO comes into play.
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve a new blog or an authority site, you can use long tail keywords to generate more organic traffic to your sites really fast. Do you know why? Long tail keywords have low competition and easier to rank for.
In this post, we’ll talk about how to find long tail keywords and use them within your content to drive more traffic even if you’re new to SEO. Are you curious? Let’s get started.
How to Find Long Tail Keywords to Drive More Search Traffic
To find long tail keywords, you need to get access to keyword research tools as they make the whole process much easier and faster.
Personally I use and recommend premium tools like SEMrush for keyword research (but it’s bit expensive which costs you $100 per month), so for this tutorial, we’ll only discuss a few free tools. You can consider using any of the tools mentioned below for finding long tail keywords:
- LSI Graph
- Keywordtool.io
- Ubersuggest
Quick note: Although Google’s Keyword Planner is also a great free keyword research tool but it’s used by too many people around the world (so you’ll mostly end up finding highly competitive keywords) and doesn’t provide highly accurate data. For beginners, you can give it a try as it can help you better understand keyword research and it’s completely free to use.
Let’s pick Ubersuggest (by Neil Patel) tool for finding better keyword ideas for your next blog post. Let's assume that you want to target the keyword “fitness apps.”
To find long-tail variations for that keyword, go to the Ubersuggest tool and enter that keyword. Here’s what we get.
Ubersuggest gives you an overview of your seed keyword (in our case, it is “fitness apps” by giving you all the necessary details such as;
- Search volume
- SEO difficulty to rank for that keyword
- Paid difficulty (to buy ads and get traffic)
- CPC value of the keyword
If you look at the search volume for our example seed keyword, it has over 60,000 monthly searches (it may be mostly even more), so that kind of keywords you should avoid because of too much competition from big brands or authority sites.
When you scroll down the Ubersuggest tool, it also shows you various keyword phrases that you can rank for.
As you can see from the above image, you’ll notice that the tool is also showing us some nice long tail keyword phrases such as;
- Fitness apps under armour (Under armour is a big brand that manufactures footwear, sports, and casual apparel)
- Fitness apps for apple watch (with around 1900 monthly searches and looks like a nice long tail keyword that you can target)
Likewise, you can use any of the other tool such as LSI Graph, Keyword Planner, Keywordtool.io for finding a ton of long tail keyword ideas for your seed keyword.
If you’re still wondering about why you should target long tail keywords, let me explain.
Long tail keywords are;
- Easier to rank for (no matter what industry you are in)
- Less competitive when compared to short tail keywords
- Helpful for lower website bounce rates, higher average time (dwell time) on site and give you better conversion rates
- Helpful for increasing your overall traffic (as you can rank for multiple keyword phrases)
Have a look at the illustration below to understand even better.
So what did you understand? Long tail keywords often have less search frequency and it costs less to rank for such keywords (as you can see from the above image).
Above all, long tail keywords help you increase your overall website sales as the people who use long tail keywords in search engines like Google are mostly tend to buy stuff from you.
How to Use Long Tail Keywords to Drive More Search Traffic
So far we’ve talked about how you can find low competitive long tail keywords, let’s now talk about the most important aspect of bringing more organic visitors through long tail keywords.
There are basically two most important steps involved in increasing your search traffic through your website’s content.
- Finding better keywords (preferably long tail keywords with low search volume) and
- Keyword optimization
Let’s now talk about the second important task which is using long tail keywords to drive more search traffic to your sites in 2019 and beyond.
Always start with the RIGHT title: Whether you know it or not, your title tag plays a HUGE role in bringing you more search traffic. There’s a reason why almost every SEO expert uses their primary keyword within their title tag.
If possible try to include your primary keyword at the beginning of your title so it adds more weightage in increasing your overall organic traffic. You can also use headline generator tools like Portent to easily get a ton of compelling headline ideas for your next blog post.
Your meta description is vital: Your meta description is as important as your title tag and it also shows up in search results. So by using your primary seed keyword or long tail keyword phrase within your meta description, you can better optimize your content for search.
Images are golden: Don’t publish another blog post without using images as they not only make your blog posts appealing but you can optimize them with alt tags (by using your primary keywords) to generate more search traffic.
Keep your URL well optimized: Always keep your URL short and sweet and ignore stop words (such as “and”, “the”, “a”, “an”, and so on) and make sure to include your primary keyword within your URL so it gives more exposure to your content.
Don’t ignore meta keywords: While optimizing your content with long tail keywords, don’t ignore the importance of meta keywords such as subheadings including h2, h3 and so on as they play a vital role in boosting your organic traffic.
Pro tip: If you’re a WordPress user, you should definitely use a free plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast as it helps you with all the above mentioned things and you can use it insert your primary keyword in prime locations like title, meta description, image alt tags and so on.
Essential tips to remember while finding long tail keywords
Let’s now discuss about some of the most effective tips you can use to find low hanging fruits i.e long tail keywords.
Keep an eye on the keywords your competitors are ranking for: This is probably one of the most easiest and effective tips to find traffic generating keywords. If you find out the keywords that are bringing your competitors the most amount of search traffic, you too can give a try to using similar keywords to create better content and get more traffic.
Find the seasonality of keywords: Seasonality simply means the short period of time each year when things pick up and get interesting such as black Friday deals that usually come only once a year and offer huge discounts.
By targeting such keywords you’ll not only get seasoned traffic but most importantly you can increase your overall website sales (by promoting affiliate programs). So always be prepared for such days if you want to find profitable keywords that increase your bottom line.
Don’t ignore the keyword difficulty: One of the most effective ways to increase your search traffic is to find keywords with less difficulty. There are so many tools out there such as Ahrefs, KWFinder, Ubersuggest and so on that provide you keyword difficulty score so you can easily filter out all the keywords that are difficult to rank for.
As a rule of thumb, you should always target those keywords with a keyword difficulty below 50 so that you will have higher chances of getting into top 10 search results even if you’ve a new site.
Find LSI keywords: LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are simply those keywords that are semantically related to your primary keyword. For example, “Apple” and “iPhone” are LSI keywords because they share the similar context and they are often searched together.
You can use tools like LSI Graph or “Searches related to” (Google results that you can find at the bottom of SERP) to easily find LSI keywords related to your primary long tail keyword.
By using LSI keywords, you can easily optimize your content without actually stuffing the same keywords again and again. Not only they help you optimize your content better but they provide you additional traffic.
Keyword research is a marathon: Just like any other thing that brings you long lasting results, getting better at keyword research takes time especially if you’re new to SEO. So don’t get confused or panic when you hear most of the things explained here for the first time.
Remember that, keyword research is a marathon and not a sprint. So give some time, analyze how your competitors are optimizing their primary keywords within their blog posts, read more content around keyword research to get better at it.
Also make sure to avoid the following mistakes while doing keyword research.
- Relying heavily upon free keyword research tools like Keyword Planner. Whether you know it or not, most of the free keyword research tools don’t provide you accurate data as they don’t get updated frequently (when compared to premium SEO tools that spend literally thousands of dollars in updating their databases with frequent crawling and keyword data). So it’s always better to invest in premium tools if you want to really increase your search traffic through keyword research.
- Not finding LSI keywords which are related to your primary or seed keyword. This is one big mistake most bloggers make as they often find one primary keyword and use it everywhere within their content. Instead of keyword stuffing with one keyword, you can get better results by using LSI keywords sparingly within your content.
- Not focusing on the searchers intent while doing keyword research. Remember that, not all keywords are the same. If you target keywords without knowing your audience intent, you’ll struggle with conversions on your site. Find out whether they are looking to buy products or just researching more about the product before making a purchase.
- Not considering the CPC value (also known as the keyword value). If you’re aiming at low competitive and high CPC value keywords, you can make much more money even if you get less traffic from search engines. So keep an eye on picking high CPC keywords.
Final thoughts about long tail keywords
Long tail keywords send you the most qualified visitors from search engines like Google and they are really easier to rank for no matter what industry you are in.
Just make sure to find long tail keywords with low search volume (below 1000 searches) and find out how your competitors are ranking for those keywords.
Do you still have any more questions related to long tail keywords?
Thanks for the tips Anil. These will be very useful for the newbies like me.
Great explanation regarding the long tail keywords. I realized is not easy, some blogs give an automated solution, but it takes knowledge how to analyze properly – thank you!
Hi Lena, yes, long tail keywords work like a charm. Just make sure to find low competitive long tail keywords to get more search traffic.
Thank you so much Anil for these information. This is so much helpful for beginners likes me. Is internal linking necessary for ranking?
Yes, internal linking plays a big role. You can link to relevant posts from your existing posts. They not only help you in relevant ranking but also helps search engine crawlers to crawl deep into your site.
Hi Anil,
You did remarkably well and I can’t add more to it. But I’ll say that I make sure to create a list of LSI keywords for any blog post I want to write. I use KWFinder, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to find related keywords that will increase my content visibility and search rankings.
Hi Moss,
That’s awesome, creating LSI keywords list for every post you work on is a great strategy. Just make sure to add LSI keywords naturally in your sub headings instead of stuffing the same keywords.
Excellent article Anil!
Many people actually underestimate the SEO power of long tail keywords because of the search volume and CPC, therefore, they focus on keywords with much higher search volumes and higher CPC. But the truth is that focusing on long tail keywords makes it easier to appear on the first page of SERPs, and also gives the possibility of ranking for multiple keywords.
Hi Ronald,
True, most beginners underestimate long tail keywords and often go for short tail keywords with high search volume. They don’t realise the competition. It’s impossible to get first page rankings for high volume keywords especially when you’ve a new site with no links.
Thanks for sharing your valuable information, this info much helpful for beginner, they’re more specific and often less competitive than generic keyword terms.
Love this! I’ve been diving into LSI Graph lately and it is so helpful when coming up with keywords. I’ve also really been enjoying the Keywords Everywhere chrome extension for coming up with LSI keywords.
LSI keywords are great and useful to get more search traffic to your sites. Use tools like LSI Graph to find the right LSI keywords and also focus on the search volume to use those keywords naturally within your content. Hope it helps!
I found there are lots of accuracy difference in ahrefs and ubersuggest. Ubersuggest showing difficulty 16 where ahref showing 2 for a particular keyword. So my question is which one is more accurate?
Hi Neeraj, difficult to say as both these SEO tools various databases and metrics to determine the accuracy. Personally I would go with Ahrefs data as its more accurate than Ubersuggest.
I agree with everything here, but I will add to the benefits for the long tail. The longer you build content around a variety of related long tail phrases, the better your website will eventually rank for the medium and short tail phrases. As you said, it’s a marathon.
Hi David,
You’re right on the point when you said “the longer you build content around a variety of related long tail phrases, the better your website will eventually rank for the medium and short tail phrases”. I completely agree. Thanks for the comment.
This is amazing article by Anil bro..
I was a lil bit confused about some points but now everything got clearance.
One thing i liked most is to use LSI keywords in post. It really helps a lot.
Thankyou for this amazing article.
Glad it helped you Rahul. Let me know if you have any more questions.
I’ve just started my blog about a year ago. I have been using some of the suggestions you make here. Thanks for the tips!
I also recently bought the premium version of the Yoast plugin when it was on sale for Black Friday. Great advice!
Would you suggest or recommend a paid subscription for something like Ahrefs? I’ve had a chance to use it and think its good, but I am not sure if it is worth the price. What do you think?
Ria
Definitely Ria. Going for a premium SEO tool like Ahrefs can give you a lot of ROI in the long run. We’ve been using SEMrush for over 3 years and the results are just amazing.
Hi Ileane,
I have following you on Instagram but did not know that you have a wonderful blog. And this post by Anil is real for the beginners as long tail keywords are key to getting some good traffic.
Will be happy to share the blog with my friends.
Keep up the good work.
And have a good year in 2019.
Hi Robin, surprising to know that you didn’t know Ileane’s blog all this while. She has been blogging for a long time now and BBT is definitely a great source for blogging, social media and SEO.
Thanks for stopping by!
Ubersuggestion tool looks really good, some niches are extremely competitive so Long Tail Keywords SEO s the best option for free traffic in theses niches. Let’s see if I will find some keyword with the tool that was suggested in the post!
Hi Fernando,
Yes, Ubersuggest is a great tool and recently acquired by Neil Patel and he’s making it even more incredible by spending more money into it.
Hello Ileane,
Happy New Year…!
Every one needs traffic but no one knows how to drive more traffic using long tail keywords…you have nailed it in your style…Thanks for sharing with us..
This is a very good introduction to optimising for long-tail SEO. You can expand this also to talk about voice search, which will have a massive impact on long-tail because voice searches tend to be more conversational than your standard keyword searches. I think voice might actually make long-tail more competitive, so it’s worth starting to optimise for this now 🙂
Hi Matt, that’s a great suggestion considering the fact that voice search is increasing rapidly. 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020, according to comScore. So yes, you can apply these long tail keywords to voice search too.
Hi Anil,
When it comes to using long tail keywords in the blog post, most of the time bloggers fall in the trap of keyword stuffing. Adding keyword without relevancy can only harm the reputation of your blog.
When using long tail keywords on your blog, one should always focus on making them relevant to the sentence or paragraph.
Target the high readability score and then optimize the content with long tail keywords.
Writers will learn a lot about how to use long tail keywords from this post.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Gaurav,
That’s so true, keyword stuffing is bad and a black hat SEO technique everyone should avoid. That’s the reason why finding LSI keywords help you to naturally optimize your content.
Long tail keywords are gold if spot one.. thanks for sharing the right tools to use on how to find long tail keywords..
Hope to try them asap.
Nhick
Hello Sir,
It is good to see a great post on a great tool. As I am using Ubersuggest since the beginning. I must mention here this is the first tool which strongly recommended to the beginner level content creators. I am still loving it and using to find the best longtail keywords along with LSI Graph.
Thank You!
Hi, Ubersuggest is definitely a great free tool for finding keywords. I also recommend you to give a try to other free tools like LSI graph, Keywordtool.io as they give you exceptional results as well.
Thanks for stopping by!
Hi Anil, Read this as well as your another article on bloggerspassion on LSI keyword, there a reader pointed out that its useless to search for long tail keyword after RankBrain update. Is it so, if it is so then how long tail keywords still work to drive more traffic and sales.
Hi Rakesh,
Glad you’re reading my blog posts around keyword research and hope you’re learning new things to use keywords to generate more search traffic.
Long tail keywords always matter as that’s what people use when they are looking for some information on Google. And they will never go outdated. That said, RankBrain update helps Google to process search results and provide more relevant search results for users, so if you’re targeting the right keywords with great content, you will get better rankings.
Love the idea of using Magazines.com website for juicy headlines, that’s awesome.
For our startup we’re very focused on putting out content a few times a week, but this is an area we really need to focus on for the search benefits. We’re getting tons of shares via Social Media, just haven’t started to rank yet (though it’s only a month). Will definitely be implementing these tips!
I have been using long tail keywords for my blog and they worked like a charm. Long tails keywords are easier to rank and bring targetted traffic. Thanks for writing this amazing post.
Hi Anil,
This article is really helpful for beginners who want to start a blog to make their dream fulfill.
I was searching on the google and find this article and happy to see you at basicblogtips.
You always share detailed article as you do at your own blog. Thanks for sharing such an informative content.