How To Find The Best Long Tail Keywords For Your Next Blog Post

Last Updated on January 5, 2019 by Fabrizio Van Marciano

In this post, we’ll take a look at some powerful ways to find and use long tail keywords to use in your blog posts

If you want people to find your blog post in search engines, it needs to rank well.

Short tail keywords are often too competitive for smaller sites to own: instead, use long tail keywords to easily boost inbound traffic to your blog.

It’s easy to target a whole range of popular long tail keywords in your next blog post — only if you know where to find them…

Google, your own blog, rival sites, discussion forums — these are just a few good places to go long tail keyword hunting.

Now, here are some pro tips for finding the best long tail keywords to use in your blog content.

Recommended reading: 11 Critical Blogging Mistakes To Avoid In 2019

A short summary of long tail keywords

‘Keywords’ have probably been part of your blogging vocabulary for a long time. They’re the words that matter to your readers, and the key terms that are most relevant to your industry.

But what are long tail keywords, really? Let’s take a quick look.

  • Short tail keywords are shorter and more general terms. For example, “business blog” is a short tail keyword — this will get a lot of search volume, but it’s also a very broad and competitive term to bid on or try to target.
  • Long tail keywords are terms with three words or more. They’re more precise and are often closer to what you would say. Examples of long tail keywords: “blog tips for newbies”, “beginner business blogging tips”. While they have low individual search volumes, they cumulatively comprise a large number of overall user searches.

So why should your blog focus on targeting long tail keywords?

Because, essentially, they’re easier to rank for (and more helpful for users).

You might also find this statistic quite interesting – long tail keywords now account for 70% of searches!

search demand

OK, here’s how you can find the best long tail keywords to use in your next blog post.

seo marketing cat

Start by getting the most from Google

It sounds like obvious advice, but Google is the first place you should look for the best long tail keywords.

It’s where your readers are already inputting a lot of keyword data — data that is easy to leverage to your advantage.

Let’s begin:

  1. You need to start by thinking like your readers – what problems do they have? What questions do they need answers to? Start making a list.
  2. Once you’re happy, type your key phrases, questions, and seed words into Google.
  3. Then, use the Autocomplete,People also ask’, and ‘Searches related to’ functions to flesh out your key terms with more ideas and information.
  4. Enter as many different relevant searches into Google that you can think of. Once you’ve got to the end of this, you’ll have a comprehensive cluster of long tail keywords (and probably a pretty decent blog post and subheadings structure).

Using the example of “blog tips for newbies,” this is the sort of data you’ll find:

Autocomplete

goog 1

People Ask

goog 2

Searches related to

goog 3

Crawl your blog data to see what keywords are working already

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it: so goes the old adage, and it’s relevant to your blog too.

The way to find out what’s already working is to trawl your blog’s user data — there will be some useful insights hiding in plain sight.

Find what your readers are currently searching to arrive at your blog posts. You can do this easily in Google Analytics, all you need to is follow these simple steps:

  1. Go to Acquisition
  2. Select Channels
  3. Hit Organic Search

Once you’re here, you’ll have some data that you can turn into long tail keywords. See image below.

long t 1

Now, sadly, a lot of the data won’t be accessible since Google Analytics uses the term ‘Not Provided’ to hide a lot of the keyword data, which also renders this feature close to useless.

Another method to consider using would be Google Webmaster Console using the following steps:

  1. Go to Performance
  2. Search type: Web
  3. Navigate to: Queries
long t 3

Take the most popular keywords and create variations and mashups so that you can target phrases that really work. Validate your ideas by plugging these seed words into a tool like Long Tail Pro, or Ahrefs and use their Keyword Explorer tool to get even more ideas!

Use these new longtail phrases to update, upgrade, and improve old blog posts, as well as using them as a basis for fresh new content.

Use your long tail keywords competitors as inspiration

Your competitors? Start by borrowing their keyword successes. Go to their blogs to see what long tail keywords are working for them… and steal them.

If you’re concerned this will take too much time, have no fear, I have the answer. Simply use one of the many great tools available to do your dirty work.

My personal pick is a free tool called SEOquake. It gives you the one, two, three, and four-word phrases used by a web page.

Another great tool to consider using to analyze competitors keywords is SEMRush, though, this is a premium tool.

traffic semrush v2

After punching in the articles from your competitors blogs, you’ll have a list of long tail keywords that are already ranking for your blog topic. All you need to do now is to create variations and use them in your next blog post. Simple, right?

It’s also the perfect tactic if you’re thinking of buying a domain or website and boosting its profile by writing quality blog posts.

Why?

Because it’s a variation on the skyscraper technique, an SEO approach that piggybacks off high-ranking content by taking what’s working already and tweaking it. Making this a quick and dirty way of boosting your ranking and driving up your revenue.

Look through discussion forums

Good keyword research is about naturally incorporating the terms your readers use into your blogs. What’s a great way for you to find these terms? By looking through discussion forums.

Your first port of call should be these forums:

  • Answers.com
  • Askville
  • LinkedIn Answers
  • Quora
  • Reddit
  • Yahoo Answers

But don’t stop there. Find the niche discussion forums relevant to your blog.

Once you’ve got your list of forums, search through them and find the conversations most in-line with your subject matter.

After you’ve done that, all you need to do is run them through a keyword analysis tool. This will give you a list of valuable terms to use as inspiration when creating your own long tail keywords.

Unless your blog is super well-known, there’s not a great ROI with trying to rank for short tail keywords. That’s not the case with long tail keywords, you just need to find the right ones. So now that you do, make sure you use them in your next blog post!

The very best of luck!

Recommended Posts

  1. Track Your Local Google Rankings With These Awesome Tools
  2. 6 Technical SEO Tricks To Beat Your Competitors In 2019

Recommended Tools

  1. LongTailPro – Keyword research tool.
  2. SEMRush – All-in-one marketing toolkit and competition keyword analysis.
  3. SEOMator – Tool for improving SEO performance.
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