What is the best source of long-tail keywords? Gifted Tech

The best source for long-tailed keywords depends on your purposes, however, some common sources can be adapted to obtain long-tailed keywords and evaluate them numerically.

All of these tools provide statistics on long-tail words, analytics on searches, and help identify keywords that can help optimize your website and improve search performance.

Are you struggling to get traffic from Google?  This is probably because all of these interesting keywords are dominated by publications and huge authorities in your niche.

Well, I have two and a half words for you that will help you with this problem, long tail keywords.

And in this series, I'll show you how to research, select, and rank for long-form keywords to get a massive amount of search traffic.

What's up with SEO, here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you increase search traffic, find your competitors, and dominate your niche.

Today, we're going to dig deep into the growing segment of the search traffic for long-tail keywords, and the by-product is going to dominate your niche.  Now, I'm excited and I hope you are, so let's get started.

What are long tail keywords?

Long tail keywords are search queries that have low individual search volume but can get massive total search demand as a group.

The name comes from the "long tail" of what's called the "search query curve," which is a graph that plots all keywords by the search volume.

For example, if you look at the cute cat theme and some long-tailed variations on Ahrefs.

Keywords Explorer would be the first keyword in the header of the curve because of its popularity, and the best cat in the world would be a long tail keyword somewhere at the bottom.

The other two phrases will be at the end of the tail because they are both spammy ways to search for the topic, but several variations will likely add up to an enormous cumulative search volume.

Long tail keywords are determined by search volume and not because the actual keywords are long or have some number of words.

But of course, in most cases long-tail keywords will be longer since increasing the word count often conveys a more specific query, right?

But let me quickly bust a myth about keyword length vs. search volume because longer words don't always mean lower search volume.

If you look at these three keyword phrases in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, you'll see this.

4- and 5-word phrases have a lot more search volume than the 2-word phrase "weight loss", and I don't just choose a topic that I know fits the bill.

We studied 1.4 billion keywords and found that 9.3% of keywords have more than 1 million monthly searches with 3 or more words.

And if you look at the other side of the graph, you'll see that there's still a good number of unpopular one-word keywords that have less than 50 searches per month.

Now every single topic has a search demand curve and it falls into two different groups.

So the topics that fall into the first group are usually broad and have a very long tail with tons of related phrases.

Looking at the top 10 ranking pages in Keyword Explorer, you the query "hairstyles" you see, most of them rank by thousands or tens of thousands of different related keywords.

Long-tail keywords SEO

And bucket #2 is usually more focused on topics and will have a lot fewer long-tail keywords.

For example, if you look at the SERP for “page compression,” you will see that number of keyword rankings is significantly lower because the topic is so focused.

Now, these two types of long-tail keywords are very different and you must treat them differently as well.

So let's explore these groups and I'll show you how to choose long-tail keywords and find phrases for each one.

The #1 group is called the "long tail of general topics", and these tend to have a few high-volume search terms and many long-tail variations.

And by ranking for your boss's term, there is an element of predictability to knowing that your pages will rank for many other long-tails with relative ease.

Well, we covered the long tail of general topics but there is a whole different kind of long tail keyword, which has its bucket, and these are the long tail keywords.

These keywords represent their topics rather than being part of a larger headline.

So for example, if we search for "keyword cannibalization" in Keyword Explorer, you will see that query has a monthly search volume of 150 in the US.

Scrolling down to the top 10 SERPs, you will see that the top-ranking pages get significantly less traffic than the suggested search volume and none of the pages rank the tag of too many keywords.

The keyword cannibalization topic does not fit into a larger topic, it is a topic in and of itself and the long-tail keywords within it happen to be much smaller than broader topics like "weight loss".

Why should you bother with these long-tail keywords?

The obvious answer is that because search volumes are much lower than for "fat-headed" keywords, the competition is usually much weaker.

So you'll stand a better chance of ranking for them and likely seeing results faster than going after competitive terms like "how to lose weight."

The not-so-obvious reason is that you can still generate a lot of totally relevant traffic if you arrange 20-50 long threads.

For example, if you look at the SERP overview for the keyword, “How am I helping my husband lose weight,” which is a good example of what is called a “long-tail topical keyword.”

The top keyword has a search volume of 60, and the page gets 76 search visitors per month.

And to put the cherry on top, the top-ranking page has 0 referrer domains on it, so it's probably a low-competition keyword.

Now if you were to create 20 pages on different long-tail topics individually and generate 70 search visitors per month you're looking at 1400 search visitors per month, my friend is the cumulative value.

So how do you find a complete set of these topics easily?  I have three very simple strategies for you.

The first is to search for modified keywords within a larger topic.

So if we look at the phrase match report for the keyword, “black shoes,” then you can use the “include” feature and type in a modifying keyword like, “with.”

And you can see right away that there are almost 2,800 great keywords out there and by digging into keyword difficulty scores, they all seem like easy topics to rank for.

If we look at the SERP overview for the keyword, “black shoes with a navy suit,” which has 600 searches per month.

You will notice that all ranking pages get a decent amount of traffic, and almost all pages have little or no backlinks.

By clicking on this page, you'll see that the content is rather thin with few images, so you don't have to worry about creating monstrous guides to outdo it.

You can then click on the number of keywords, and search further for long-term variations and subtopics within the free keywords report.

They will be much easier to categorize than a fat head term like “shoe”, the next strategy is to append the sites with keywords for your product or service.

For example, if we look at the report matching the phrase "Rent a truck in," you'll see hundreds of results that are all very low competition.

Now, this may sound frustrating because the search volume is really low but it takes about 300 keywords multiplied by 10 and you have 3000 searches per month now, in this example I think it holds commercial value as well.

Keep in mind that while Ahrefs' database of keywords is pretty brutal, it doesn't contain all the possible search queries that people might be searching for.

So there is a lot of low-hanging traffic here to grab.

The last method is to use questions related to a topic, type any word and go to the keyword tool, then take a look at the available questions.

Since it is a very competitive niche as you can see from the keyword difficulty score, let's set the max KD to a low value like 5.

And I bet you never considered targeting these long-tail keyword topics yourself.

With these questions, you can create your FAQ section on your website and start getting a lot of long-tail traffic from these phrases.

These "long tail keywords" are great for websites that are new or those that aren't.

Created a reliable backlink yet you should be able to get noticed faster than targeting the long tail for general topics since you will be mainly going to low-competition keywords.

And with your site building a strong backlink profile, you can start branching out into broader topics.

So I want you to take that key point away from this tutorial, 96.54% of all search queries in the US have fewer than 50 searches per month.

So by neglecting long keyword phrases, you are losing the majority of searches.  This happens every day.

But now you have a complete understanding of the two types of long-tail keywords, those that belong to a broader topic and those that make up a topic of their own.

So keep sticking around, and use these techniques and strategies to get ahead of other SEOs, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.