The economics of starting up a boostrapped online business today are brutal. In this article, I’ll introduce 5 solid resources for finding quality Long Tail Keywords. By targeting them carefully in your Content Marketing campaign, you stand to boost your website’s rankings.
Search-Engine Optimization is a Winner-Takes-All game. If you’re at the top of Page 1 of the Google.com SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for your main keywords, you’ll get a huge proportion of the organic traffic for those keywords. The fall-off in traffic as you move down that first page is dramatic.
Your chosen keywords often mean you’re competing with large companies. Often, they’ll have huge marketing budgets and big Content Marketing teams. This means a strong SEO ranking is *extremely* difficult to achieve. If you’re on page 2 or below, you’re fishing for traffic breadcrumbs. Given this crazily lop-sided playing field, long tail keywords research has become a vital weapon in the Bootstrapped Startup’s arsenal.
By focusing your Content Marketing on the long tail of keywords in your product domain, you can rank higher in the organic SERPs. This is because competition for these keywords is lower. You can create content that addresses them directly and specifically. Try these 5 methods for finding long tail keywords to target in your Content Marketing campaign.
1. The Ground-Zero Keyword Research Tool
Do you have an AdWords account? If not, you should probably sign up for one. This is worthwhile even if you never intend to fund a paid-click campaign. The primary reason for this is that AdWords has a built-in (and free) Keywords Tool. It’s a great jumping off point for doing long tail keywords research.
- Log into AdWords. On the top menu bar, select Tools -> Keyword Planner.
- On the page that appears, select “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas”.
- In the top text-area, where is says “Your product or service” type a keyword you are currently targeting. Multiple keywords are ok. Later, you can rinse and repeat this for any other keyword phrase you wish to explore.
- Click the blue “Get Ideas” button further down the page.
- Select the “Keyword Ideas” tab and explore the results for lots of related keywords, including how competitive they are. Here, column-sorting is your friend. The default sort-order is keyword relevance. This is a good place to start. But you can view top related keywords by Average Monthly Searches and Competition by just clicking on the column header. Also, the tiny drop-down at the bottom-right of the results table can be used to show more rows of keywords on a single page.
Note that the Competition column here relates to paid clicks: it’s a rough indication of how many other parties are bidding on this keyword for paid AdWords campaigns. As such, it has no direct bearing on how easy it would be to rank for this keyword in organic search results.
2. Do Keyword Research based on Landing Pages.
You can also do long tail keyword discovery based on your actual website and – just as importantly – the websites of your competitors. (You do maintain a great big list of the competitors you’ve discovered for your startup, right? And that list grows almost by the day … yes? Cool.)
- Going back to the AdWords Keyword Tool: to the right of the text-box for keywords near the top of the page, click the “Modify search” button. In the dialogue that appears, delete any previously-entered keywords from the “Your product or service” text area.
- In the “Your landing page” text-box just underneath it, paste in the URL of your startup’s main landing page.
- Click the “Get Ideas” button.
- Select the “Keyword Ideas” tab. This will show you keywords Google believes are relevant to your website. Even performing this step on its own can be a big eye-opener. Is Google finding the keywords you’re intending to target on your own landing page? If not, a revision of your site’s most basic content and message might be required. Targeting the keywords that appear here can strengthen your ranking.
- Explore down the list for lots of ideas of more nuanced – but still relevant – keywords. Some of these will be niche searches, which should have less competition. Again, note the columns to the right, which show Monthly Searches, Competition Level, Suggested CPC etc – all useful.
Repeat the 5 steps above for each landing page on your website. Again, check that each landing page is targeting the expected keywords, and make a note of any promising new long tail keywords to optimize for.
Next, repeat these steps AGAIN, but this time for the landing pages of any competitor websites you know about. This shows what your competitors are ranking for, and gives you hints about new potential keywords for your site. Maybe you can pinch their traffic? Analysing the landing pages of your competitors in this way is usually a big eye-opener. And sometimes a reality check, too 
3. Google Analytics
Do you have a Google Analytics account? Of course you do. And you installed the required Javascript Snippet on your website on Day 1, right? Excellent, then we’re good to go.
Login to Google Analytics. Go to Acquisition -> Keywords -> Organic.
Explore the list. Hopefully it will be long. These are the keywords that people are typing into Google which lead to your website *TODAY*. So strengthen your site content on these keywords to draw in more traffic. Also, enter these keywords themselves into the AdWords Keywords Planner tool as per step (1) above to generate even more related long tail keywords.
4. Google Webmaster Tools
Like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools is a useful base-level validation of your website. You should ensure it is connected and that your website validates correctly as soon as possible.
- Log into Webmaster Tools.
- If you have multiple websites connected to Webmaster tools, select the site in question.
- On the left-hand column of the next page, select Search Traffic -> Search Queries.
- A graph should appear, under which will be another table of keywords. Again, these are queries which users are typing into Google which lead to your website *today*. They should match up with what you see in Google Analytics, but there may be some missing from each list.
- Again, use each of these keywords as the seed keyword in Step (1) above to find even more long tail keywords.
5. A Bonus Long-Tail Keyword Generator
Take each of the keywords you’ve discovered in the steps above and enter them on the KeywordTool.io homepage. This will yield a results page giving yet more related keywords based on your seed keyword. I found the results to be nicely laid out and quite useful.
KeywordTool.io won’t give you search volume, competition etc. But you can certainly take the keywords it suggests and enter them into the AdWords Keyword Tool to gain these insights as needed.
I hope the above suggestions yield some good new keywords for you to target. How do you find Long Tail Keywords for your website? Please comment and let me know!
(Kind thanks go to Ralph Corderoy for reading a draft of this post.)