Build Your Long Tail Keyword List – 3 Tools to Help

What are Long Tail Keywords

Long Tail SEO & ROI

If you’re looking to squeeze a little more ROI from your Google AdWords lead generation, going after the by tail is a good place to focus your efforts. make or break a campaign even before it is started. The first step in doing keyword research is to start with the most obvious, your primary keywords, primary keywords are those which you would identify with your product in your own or your customers vernacular.

The challenge with the primary set of keywords is that they are often the most competitive and can have large upfront costs, which you may not want to incur during the early stages of your advertising campaign. Furthermore because these keywords are generic representations of the niche that your brand or product is identified by, they are also not as targeted towards customers who are “buying”. As a result many seasoned internet marketers will start with ‘Long Tail Keywords’ in order to avoid large amounts of competition and increase early ROI’s (return on investment) in their campaigns. So what is a “Long Tail Keyword“, quite simply it is a keyword phrase which has at least 3 words and possibly as many as 4 or 5 words.

Where to Start
The first step in conducting long tail keyword research is to find your primary keywords, lets use the example of a coffee company called ‘Big Beans’ who sells wholesale bags of beans in the localized market of San Jose. Since this particular coffee bean company has been in business for a respectable amount of time their primary keywords are fairly obvious to them, some examples could be :

- Coffee Beans

- Big Beans

- San Jose Coffee

- Wholesale Coffee

Now these terms will produce a lot of traffic for Big Beans coffee company, however they are very broad and could encompass many different types of visitors who are exclusively looking to buy wholesale coffee beans, therefore decreasing the ROI of their marketing budget. However, when doing long tail keyword research this is a nessecary step as we will use our primary keywords as building blocks for finding keywords which are more targeted and will drive better ROI.

Discovering Your Long Tail Keywords

There are two ways which you can start discovering your companies long tail keywords, you brainstorm them (the tough way), or we can use a set of free tools. In most cases I prefer to take our primary keywords and use tools to dig down and discover long tail keywords, because there is really no point in re-inventing the wheel at this stage of the game, furthermore by using long tail discovery tools we can get an idea of what type of traffic we should expect from our long-tails.

Tell Me More About The Tools

The first tool and probably my favorite tool is the free Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. I like this tool because it does the best job of digging down on our current primary keywords and uncovering long tail variations of the same primary concept. Keep in mind when using either the Wordtracker subscription service, or their free keyword tool that all of their search data is based on meta searches and is only a representation of possible traffic values (although it can be fairly accurate.) If this concerns you, fear not as we will cover the wordtracker Gtrends tool as well which uses Google Trends data combined with wordtracker data to get more specific estimates on google search data. Lastly we will cover googles keyword tool itself, this keyword tool is very useful however I find that it is much more accurate in its estimations in regards to paid search rather than organic search terms.

Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool
The wordtracker free keyword tool works really quite simply compared to our other long tail discovery tools, we simply just place our keyword in this case “coffee beans” into the keyword box, check whether or not we want to filter adult results, and then hit the “Hit Me” button.

You can find this tool here : http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

and it looks a little something like this :

Wordtracker Gtrends Tool

The Gtrends tool, combines google information with wordtracker information to provide the user with a more accurate estimation tailored towards google. The Gtrends tool does exactly the same thing as the free keyword research tool however it provides the google trends graph along with the word so that you can predict how your keywords will do if they achieve number one position in google. To use the added functionality in this tool, simply follow the same steps as outlined in the Free Keyword Tool, after your lists of results are up then you will see a small graph icon on the left hand side of the keywords, when you click this a google trends graph will then pop up to give you more information about your long tail keyword.

You can find this tool here : http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends

Google Keyword Tool

Lastly, Google itself provides a keyword tool which can be used to develop and find longtail keywords. The tool offers two ways of doing so, you may either put in your primary keyword and google will find similar keywords, or you can input a website and google will read the website and make inferences about possible keywords. This tool can be very useful in digging down past our primary keywords, however keep in mind that this tool was made to estimate for the google adwords ppc campaigns and not for organic search.

You can find this tool here : https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Conclusion

Now that we have covered what a long tail keyword is and how to find them, you should be well on your way to discovering a whole multitude of undiscovered business that you were once missing out on. However, when delving into new longtail keywords remember to use your judgement and link them back to what your brands core values are to make sure that the keywords which you select are relevant to your value proposition and will actually lead to a return on investment for your company.