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In this post, you’ll learn how to use Long Tail Pro to research and find potential keywords to use in your blog posts and pages.
Two of my current favorite SEO tools right now is Positionly and Long Tail Pro.
I use Positionly to help me track my website’s keywords, search engine rankings and the general health of my off-page SEO.
I love to use Long Tail Pro to help me find relevant keywords or long tail phrases to target when writing long-form content for my blog.
Currently, I am using the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.
This is a free plugin which I recommend to anyone interested in making light work of their on-page SEO.
There is another popular plugin which I also use on my other niche website called SEOPressor. This is a premium plugin and offers a ton of useful site-wide SEO options.
You can compare the above two plugins here if you wish to.
OK, so back to Long Tail Pro… If you’ve been blogging or doing internet marketing for some time, you’ll already be familiar with this tool.
If you’re not familiar with Long Tail Pro, do read on.
What is Long Tail Pro?Long Tail Pro is a desktop long-tail keyword research software for bloggers, marketers and SEO specialists. You can learn more about it here if you wish to.
Anyway, if you’re a regular visitor or reader of my blog, you’ll know that usually, I don’t care too much for writing content for the search engines.
My strategy has always been to write for people, for you.
I don’t claim to be an SEO expert either because really I’m not.
In fact, when it comes to doing SEO, most of that stuff goes straight over the top of my head, which is why I don’t write about SEO too often.
That being said, I appreciate the importance of optimizing my content for search engines.
I appreciate the importance of doing keyword research and other essential on-page stuff.
Whether we like it or not, we just can’t ignore the fact that good quality and relevant search engine traffic is vital.
Vital for any blog or online business to be successful at least, right?
You can deny it all you want, because if you’re getting most of your blog traffic from Google and other search engines. You’d better be sure that you’re making the most of converting as many of those visitors, into either subscribers or buyers right?
OK so let’s get back to using Long Tail Pro.
When it comes to doing keyword research and analysis, but more specifically, finding blog post topics to write about, I just love, love, love using Long Tail Pro.
It’s so simple to use, it has a ton of cool features and I think every serious blogger or marketer should have it in their marketing toolbox.
So in this short tutorial post, I’m going to share with you 6 very simple steps that I take for finding relevant, low competition keywords to target for my blog posts, using Long Tail Pro.
Once again you can find more about this tool here.
Let’s get stuck in.
Open up Long Tail Pro and enter some seed keywords you want to research. You don’t need to get too specific with it. See image below.
Once you’ve found a few, the first thing you want to do is check the score under Keyword Competitiveness.
I should mention that this feature is only available to bloggers who use Long Tail Platinum. So if you have LT Platinum, you should try and aim for a score of around 35 or less. See image below.
It is said that any higher means that you might have some difficulty ranking on page 1 of Google for what the keyword.
As you will see in the image below, our example keyword “blogging for money” has several listings in the top 10 search results with a score of 35 or less. This is a good start.
If you’re using Long Tail Pro and not Platinum like myself, just skip to Step #2.
The next step is to check how many titles in the top 10 search results have the exact keyword you want to target.
If no titles have the exact keyword present, consider this as another good start.
If more than 2 titles are using the exact keywords you want to target then avoid if you can.
So for our example keyword “blogging for money”, if you look at the image above again, you’ll see that the exact keyword we want to target is NOT in any of the titles.
That being said, we have the keywords “Money Blogging”. Perhaps “for” is not considered to be a keyword…
I’m not sure on that one, so for argument sake let’s assume that the exact keyword “blogging for money” is not present.
Do exactly how that sounds.
A root domain is simply just www.domain.com
So if the domain has an extension such as www.domain.com/target-keyword-1/ then that should OK.
However, if more than 2 or 3 at a max websites are using the target keyword in their root domain, for example, www.SomethingTargetKeyword.com, then I would avoid if possible.
If we go back and look at the image above, we can see that none of the root domains in the top 10 is using our example keyword “blogging for money”.
The weaker the competition the better right?
In this case, check to ensure there is at least 2 or 3 sites in the top 10 search results for your target keyword, that have a low trust score of 25 or less. See image below.
Do exactly the same as in step four, only this time with website citation flow. Check to ensure there are at least 4 or 5 sites with a citation flow score of 35 or less. See image below.
Check to see the age of some of the websites in the top 10 results.
If there are at least 2 or more domains that are only 2 to 3 years old present, then that’s a good indication that you have a chance of ranking high too for that target keyword. See image below.
As you will see from the screen shot below for our example target keyword “blogging for money“, the domain names are much older and therefore more established.
Sometimes marketers can find a great high traffic, low competition keyword where the top 10 search results are made up of weak crappy content.
For instance, there might be a few PDF’s, forum entries, social media posts thrown in there that don’t really provide any real value to anyone. If this is the case for you, you may be onto a winner.
Obviously, if the top 10 results for your target keyword is made up of untouchable competition, root domains with competitively high scores, you simply avoid them and move on.
Oh and don’t forget to make it fun, that’s what its all about right?
So that’s how I use Long Tail Pro to do keyword research and to find topic ideas to write about for my blog posts.
Here’s a screen shot of organic traffic increase to my parenting niche site, since using LTP to research half a dozen keywords for blog articles on that site.
If you yourself have a particular way or method you want to share with me or the readers of this blog, or perhaps further add some tips and suggestions, please leave them in the comment section below.
Once again I’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions, leave me a comment below.
Happy blogging, for now, Fabrizio.
