7 Simple Ways To Find Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are phrases that contain at least 4 words. Generally, the longer they are, the more specific intent is.

Using them in a right way can be your path to success. I’ll give you three good reasons for finding the long-tail keywords:

• High probability of conversion
• 70% of searches are long-tail keywords
• Easier to rank

When someone searches for blue Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt, he already knows what he wants, so high probability of conversion is obvious.

On the other hand, when someone searches for T-shirt his intent is not that clear. It’s equally possible that one wants to educate himself about latest trends, buy a new T-shirt or do something like that.

Furthermore, it’s always easier to rank for blue Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt than for T-shirt, because head terms are highly competitive. People often make a mistake when they want to rank for such terms. They don’t realize that it’s easier to find a gap in the market than to rank #1 for head terms.

The fact that more than 70% of searches come from long-tail keywords, should motivate you to learn how to find the best long-tail keywords? This is exactly what this blog post is about. Let’s explore!

#1 Moz Keyword Explorer

If you’re asking yourself how to find long-tail keywords for free this is the right tool for you. Moz allows you to use Keyword Explorer for free for 2 pieces of research.

This is pretty good especially if you are on the budget because it’s very easy to find these phrases. You just need to type the desired keyword and click on Try Free.

Overview gives you four information:

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty
• Opportunity
• Potential

Notice that Potential is almost zero since there is definitely no potential in this keyword. This metric is a mix of all other metrics.

Focusing on ranking for email marketing is usually useless because too many companies have invested huge amounts of money to rank for this keyword. Instead, you should put efforts in long-tail keywords where you can see search volumes.

Click on See all 1,000 suggestions. Now that I got the list of suggestions, I’ll simply keep scrolling down until I find something interesting.

Furthermore, I can click on Export CSV so I can filter it and do some math in Google Sheets.

At first, I haven’t found anything interesting, so I decided to explore email marketing campaign and I got the new list of suggestions.

For an example, the successful email marketing campaigns long-tail keyword seems as a nice opportunity.

Furthermore, there’s a cool feature called SERP Analysis which lets me see the results of Google’s first of page.

For every single result I can see:

• Page Authority
• Domain Authority
• Linking Root Domains To Page
• Linking Root Domains To Root Domain
• # of Shares

That’s it!

#2 Google Keyword Planner

Finding related keywords has never been easier like these days.

With Google Keyword Planner, you can get a list of them. Assume that I’m interested in finding keywords related to email marketing.

I just need to open Google Keyword Planner and in Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category, write email marketing and then click on Get ideas.

Now I’ve got the list of keywords related to email marketing.

Suggested bid is definitely the best thing about this tool. Identifying premium keywords is simple.

Selected keyword is very profitable because advertisers pay $17.41 per click.

Also, you can search for site related keyword tool.

But wait… how to find long-tail keywords using Google Keyword Tool? I’ll download all these, keywords to CSV and import it in Google Sheets.

then, Click on Download and choose:

1. Ads Editor CSV
2. Save to Google Drive

After waiting for a couple of seconds I’ll see this:

The next step is to sort keywords by number of words.

I’ve deleted useless columns, and now I only have five of them:

• Keyword
• Total Words
• Avg. Monthly Searches (exact match only)
• Competition
• Suggested bid

4 of 5 columns are there by default, while Total Words is the custom-made column which I’ll fill with a total number of words.

It’s very easy to calculate the number of total words. Here’s the formula:

=COUNTA(SPLIT(A2, " "))

Now I’ll just fill the rest of the data and sort the keywords:

I hope you like this way of finding new long-tail keywords. In the end, I want to say that I’m not 100% sure if there is a correlation between Competition and difficulty of ranking.

Theoretically, it should be because if some phrase is very profitable, good chances are that someone has already invested money in SEO for it.

Nevertheless, I know it’s always possible to find a gap in every niche.

#3 Ahrefs

Within Ahrefs, you can find out main keywords of your competitors and there are two approaches :

• Spying competition
• Using keyword explorer

Firstly I’ll show you how to spy on competitors keywords. Let’s imagine that your competitor is copyblogger.com. The first step is to enter their URL in Site Explorer.

This is exactly what you should see:

Click on Organic keywords (267K) and you’ll get the list of keywords:

Since you’re interested only in long-tail keywords, filter these keywords by a number of words. You want phrases with 4 or more keywords.

Also, you can filter these keywords by keyword difficulty. This is especially good for new blogs.

And here they are:

Awesome, isn’t it? Another way is using Keyword Explorer.

In the search input, type email marketing and filter it by words.

Now repeat the same process with filtering.

There are 412 unique keywords that Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty says it easy to rank.

Let’s say you’ve chosen three keywords:

• email marketing best practices
• free email marketing templates
• benefits of email marketing

The next step is to create a great piece of content. To be honest with you, I’ve already chosen to rank for benefits of email marketing.

#4 Quora

It’s not the first time that I’m writing about Quora - the most used Q&A websites in the world.

I keep saying that it’s one of the best ways to generate content marketing ideas, but I didn’t say that it’s also a great choice for finding long-tail keywords.

Assume that you work in the marketing industry and you want to find out some exciting long-tail keywords. Here’s how it works. First of all, open Quora and in the search box, type marketing.

As you can see, you have two choices:

• Open Marketing (Topic) or
• Search for marketing

Let’s open the topic. It has more than 62,000 questions asked, so it’s definitely a good place to start for searching long-tail keywords.

If you look carefully, there is an Answer link here:

 

If you click on the link, you’ll see the list of recently asked questions, but more important, it can be used to find long-tail keywords.

Here is the first long-tail keyword:

second:

third:

fourth:

and fifth:

Now you can use these long-tail keywords and check out the competition, although it’s obvious that it’s easier to rank for great marketing presentation for a job interview than for marketing presentation.

A second way is not to open the topic but explore Quora unrelated to the topic. Principe is the same.

#5 Keywordtool.io

The popularity of the tool lies in a fact that it’s great for long-tail keyword research and here is why. First of all, it gives you long-tail keywords for different platforms:

• Google
• YouTube
• Bing
• Amazon
• App Store

For an example, if I search for email marketing I can see that there is the list of 457 unique keywords.

Now what I can do is to scroll down until I pick keywords that are interesting to me, but I won’t do that.

It’s because I don’t have a subscription (although it’s not expensive), and I don’t know anything about search volume.

I’ll click select all keywords (left arrow on the photo), and after that, I’ll click on Copy all.

Now when I’ve copied all the keywords into the clipboard, I’ll open Google Ads Keyword Planner, and I’ll paste keywords into the right box (Get search volume and data trends).

Here is how it should look alike:

When I get the list of with all data, I can filter the keywords and identify long-tail keywords that have a solid search volume and a high suggested bid.

For an example, email marketing for small business has a search volume of 210 and a suggested bid of $27.60.

This means that this keyword is highly profitable because advertisers pay about $27.60 per click.

You might be thinking that the keyword has a low search volume, but let me introduce you that someone will use synonyms and search for email marketing for small company.

Also, someone will search for email marketing services for small business or email marketing software for small business.

In other words, if you create an article about email marketing for small business you will rank for synonyms and similar keywords too.

#6 UberSuggest

Another great and 100% free tool is UberSuggest. I remember that this was the tool with a low quality UX and UI, but now things are completely different.

It has a great UX and UI and lets you research keywords for free. I’ll search again for long-tail phrases related to email marketing.

This suggest tool has given me the list of total 312 keywords and it also gives me a total monthly volume and CPC (Suggested bid in Google Ads).

All keywords are alphabetically ordered. For an example, here is the list of keywords for email marketing + A:

Underscored keywords seems interesting to me because it looks very profitable (CPC is $16.47).

What’s more, I can expand the keyword:

As you can see, now I’ll get another keywords. Here are two keywords:

and another one.

What’s more, there’s an extension, for Google Chrome and Firefox Mozilla, which lets me to see search volume and suggested bid in different tools.

It gives the data for the following tools:

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• Ubersuggest
• Answer The Public
• Soolve
• Keyword Shitter
• Majestic Anchors
• Moz Open Site Explorer

Furthermore, it gives me the search volume and CPC data in Google SERP.

Incredible, isn’t it?

#7 Google Search Console

Google Search Console, ex. Google Webmaster Tools, is not only good for checking backlinks because it’s also good as a keyword research tool.

Let’s see how to find long-tail keywords in Google Search Console. Firstly, open Search Traffic - Search Analytics.

Now you just opened the page where you can see the list of queries you rank for, what’s the number of impressions, CTR, and its average position.

This is the place where you handle everything:

By default, Queries and clicks are chosen. if I check everything (Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Position), I’ll see how many clicks my website got, what are total impressions, avg. CTR and avg. position.

Here is the example.

It’s possible to see data for the last 90 days. I’ve installed UberSuggest extension for Google Chrome, so I can additionally see Monthly Volume and CPC which is great.

Scrolling down lets you download the list of all keywords.

 

 

Furthermore, you can select Google Docs so you can directly analyze queries in the Google Sheets.

Surely, this is not the only what Google Search Console offers. You can find out what specific pages gives you the most clicks, impressions, CTR, and position.

Also, you can group queries by countries, device and search type (web, image, video). There is a lot of space for improvements and optimization.

For an example, you can see what is your average CTR and you can find out what pages have CTR below the average. It means that maybe you should try to change title and description.

Conclusion

With these 7 ways of finding long-tail keywords, it’s possible to generate phrases in every niche. You don’t want to try ranking for head terms when you can easily rank for long-tail keywords.

Let me repeat myself again a bit and write again three good reasons for leveraging long-tail keywords:

• High probability of conversion
• 70% of searches are long-tail keywords
• Easier to rank

The main problem is that you need a lot of time to write all these blog posts.

That's something where I can't help you with. For an example, it's hard to rank for email marketing best campaign examples if you don't have a +1,000 words blog post about it.