Aaron’s site, seobook.com is a great resource.

In Summary:

1. Start by Looking at Analytics

Look at your site analytics and Google Analytics. It’s easier to rank for keywords that you are already getting some traction on than entirely new keywords.

2. Scout Your Major Competitors for Long Tail Terms

Scout out long-tail terms that matter. Look at how your competitor’s menus are structured. What are the key product or service sub-categories?

If this is a very competitive market, product menus can give a lot of ideas about long-tail keywords.

3. Get Serious About Long Tail Terms

It’s been proven that long tail terms are easier to rank for and rankings can be achieved much more quickly by younger sites.

4. Use Keyword Tools

There are lots of them, here are the three free keyword tools we like the most

Thanks Aaron!

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.

Most importantly for those of us in the B2B market,there is a new opportunity to dominate our niche markets and boost our marketing ROI significantly by really getting focused on who we serve best.

How Long-Tail ROI Works: Laziness

Your competitors are lazy! Okay, while we know that’s not the case, but the reality is that a lot of B2B markets have just started out with their Search Engine Marketing Strategies. What this means is that they are looking for the 5 most obvious keywords and paying Google a lot of money to ensure they get found for those.

Most recently we were asked to do some research for a company that sells CRM software and low and behold, it costs over $6 per click for that term. Not only that, but it is a very competitive market, with several options for the customer to compare. Because it turns up so many results, the likelyhood of a customer staying on your page versus hitting the back button is very low and the likelyhood of them actually completing your landing page (submitting an inquiry and creating a lead for your sales team) is even lower.

So let’s do a little math: very high cost per click ($6) times very low retention rate (say 4% ) and even lower lead capture rate (say 2% ) = a very very high cost per lead (in this case $300). Not only that, but that customer is so completely overwhelmed that your sales team will have a tougher time converting (competing) to turn that lead into revenue.

The real winners in this market, other than a few dominant $1billion ++ players, has been the long tail crowd. Hundreds of software companies have gobbled up nice, profitable parts of the market capturing inquiries for “Insurance Broker CRM” and “Real Estate Software.”

As the search terms get more and more focused, the cost per click decreases significantly, and B2B marketers can easily lift their Google ROI by as much as 100% by creating more targeted ad groups, serving very niche ad text and landing pages.

Over the years, internet marketers have watched internet users become more and more trusting of Google and it’s ability to deliver exactly what they are looking for in one search.

Anderson’s ‘megahits’ occupy the blue region of the chart, while the long tail is the red:

Long Tail Graph

Boost ROI With Your Long Tail Strategy:

This is especially relevant if you are doing some Google AdWords advertising, as illustrated above. Even the most narrowly focused businesses we work with generally have over 20 keyword groups and many variations of ad text and landing pages. If your doing less than this, you are probably only represented in the blue area above and are missing opportunties to more narrowly target your audience and their needs. In return for a more focused effort, you will see your campaign ROI increase by as much as 300%.

Start listing off all the sub-niches within your markets. Friday’s article will provide some more tools and guidance on developing your long tail strategy, so stay tuned!