Article Takeaways
- Keyword research is a necessity and one of the first steps for enhancing online visibility through SEO.
- Long tail keywords are typically more than 3 words in length and are more specific than ordinary keywords.
- While long tail keywords have a lower search volume, they’re very effective for building website authority.
- Long tail keywords provide an advantage when marketing niche products and services using digital marketing.
- Incorporating secondary and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords into your website’s content will improve content quality.
What is Long Tail Keyword Research?
Long tail keyword research involves finding keywords and phrases that are typically made up of 3 words or more. Long tail keywords are commonly in the form of questions and other information searches.
Long tail keywords are generally less competitive than broader keywords. This means it’s easier to rank for a long tail keyword, which is great for niche businesses, or for businesses that are just getting started with SEO.
Let’s demonstrate this quickly with an example.
Imagine you’re an online health store that sells gym and workout supplements. You want to run SEO and Google Ads for your brand, so you need to identify keywords that potential customers are using to find products that are similar to yours.
First, we identify a broad keyword that’s relevant to your business:
Supplements
Lots of people are searching for the term ‘supplements.’ That makes it very competitive, and it’ll be difficult to rank for. We can use long tail keywords to get around this issue.
So, we need to find a long tail keyword that will help customers find our website amongst all the competition. There are a few ways you can do this. Apps like the Keyword Magic Tool from Semrush can be used to find long tail keywords like:
What supplements should I take to lose belly fat fast
There are fewer people searching for this phrase, but there’s also less competition in the organic search results. That means we’ll be able to create a piece of content (such as a blog post) that will rank for the term. That piece of content also helps to:
- Increase the visibility of your website in Google’s organic search results
- Improve the overall authority of your website
- Attract new users who might not have found your website any other way
- Increase sales by including a mention of the products you sell
So, we’ve identified a long tail keyword, what’s next? Find out more by understanding the basics of keyword research.
Understanding the Basics of Keyword Research
Keyword research involves finding user search queries that are relevant to your website. Your website may already rank for these keywords, or you may want to create content that will help your website rank for these keywords.
Simple.
Keyword research is a nuanced, intentional action. While this process is simple for a professional SEO agency, it can be daunting for anyone who’s doing it for the first time, so let’s make it easy.
You know your business best. Think of your core offering (e.g. products, services and/or information) and what value you can provide to customers. For example, let’s say you’re an electrician located on the Sunshine Coast.
Here’s how we’d use that information to start our keyword research.
You’re an electrician located on the Sunshine Coast. One of the main keywords for your website could be:
Wow, 600 searches a month! But how do you get some of those people to visit your website?
Finding a keyword and its search volume is a big part of the process, but not the final step of keyword research. We also need to establish:
- Search intent – What is the user trying to achieve through this search query? Is it informational, are they performing research? Is it transactional, are they looking to buy or enquire now? Or is it commercial, a mixture of both informational and transactional, like comparisons and reviews?
- Keyword mapping – In an ideal world, each page of your website corresponds with one primary keyword. This is called keyword mapping. So, we need to consider which page we want a particular keyword to lead to. Will the core keyword (e.g. electrician Sunshine Coast) direct users to the homepage? Or do you service other areas, so this keyword should be mapped to a separate page?
- Keyword difficulty and competition – Keyword difficulty is an estimate of how difficult it is to rank for a particular keyword based on the competition. You don’t need to worry about this too much – just be mindful that a keyword difficulty of 60+ can be challenging.
The last big thing we need to consider is the topic of our web pages.
Google doesn’t rank pages based on keywords alone. It ranks them based on the central topic or theme of the page.
This means we need ‘topic research’ to make the most of our keywords.
Topic research involves choosing a central topic for each page, and then supporting that page with additional content (e.g. product and service pages, blog content, other resources). The central page is known as a pillar page, and the supporting content is known as spoke pages.
So, we need to consider whether our primary keywords are suitable as central topics, and whether there are any supporting keywords we can use to build out our website further.
The Difference Between Long Tail Keywords and Primary Keywords
Primary keywords are the cornerstone of keyword strategy.
Electrician Sunshine Coast is a good example. Primary keywords typically have higher search volume and bring more organic traffic, but they come with higher competition. They can also be less refined, so they may attract search queries with informational and commercial intent.
You need to identify your primary keywords before you can perform long tail keyword research. Content that contains long tail keywords supports your pillar pages while also attracting more targeted, transactional search queries.
Why Long Tail Keyword Research is Important for SEO
Users search the internet in thousands of different ways. While your primary keywords may be useful to some of those people, they don’t take into account the entire customer journey.
For example, if you’re a mechanic in Thornlands, you want to be found for ‘mechanic Thornlands.’ But what if you specialise in 4×4 vehicles, and a local customer wants to bring in their Toyota Hilux whose centre diff won’t lock?
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. They’re leaving for a camping trip next weekend. They don’t have time to call every mechanic in Thornlands to try and find a 4×4 specialist.
Instead, the customer cuts to the chase and searches for something specific to their needs:
4×4 mechanic who fixes diff locks
Since you offer a specialist service for 4×4 vehicles, you can target long tail keywords like this one. That allows you to connect with this type of customer, even though they never would have found your website through the primary keyword!
There’s a small trade off here. This keyword has very low search volume. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though.
Low search volume means less competition, making your website more visible in the search results. Plus, this search has transactional intent, so users who find your website through this search term are much more likely to call up and request a quote.
| Type of Keyword | Purpose | Pros | Cons |
| Primary keywords | Short keyword(s) that broadly apply to the whole business | – Attracts lots of traffic – Easier keyword research process – Ranking highly will generate consistent conversions – Can find longtail or related keywords from keyword research | – Can bring irrelevant traffic – Difficult to capture user intent – Harder and slower to rank for – Typically needs multiple pieces of supporting content |
| Long Tail keywords | Targeted keywords that hone in on niche products and services | – Brings in more relevant traffic – Better lead quality – Quicker and easier to rank for – Easier to identify and match search intent – Long tail keywords are good blog topics | – Limited information on search volume – While leads can be better in quality, they have lower search volume – Search intent and volume for long tail keywords can change considerably – Difficult keyword research process |
Why Long Tail Keyword Research is Important for PPC
Did you know that long tail keyword research can also help your Google Ads and PPC campaigns? The concept is very similar to SEO. Long tail keywords have less competition in the auction process, and they’re often cheaper than broad keywords.
Targeting long tail keywords for a PPC campaign can:
- Decrease Cost Per Click
- Decrease Cost Per Acquisition and Cost Per Conversion
- Increase conversion rate
- Optimise budgets (especially for smaller businesses)
- Sell niche products/services that you aren’t ranking for organically
- Compete against big players who dominate with big budgets
- Improve impression share
- Improve ad rank with a targeted landing page or website.
- Improve lead generation
Best practice is to set the Google Ads keyword match types of your long tail keywords to phrase match or exact match. Broad match long tail keywords typically generate irrelevant queries that will waste your budget.
How to Identify Long Tail Keywords for Your Website
The best way to identify long tail keywords is to use Google to search for questions that are related to your products and services.
There’s no wrong way to approach this. Simply search for related questions and make a list of potential long tail keywords. Don’t worry about search volume at this point – we will cull unwanted keywords a little later on.
Here’s an example below of a few long tail keywords we found when performing keyword research for a dentist.
The simplest way to get started is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What questions do customers often ask? What information do they search for when comparing products? Do they look for DIY instructions before hiring a professional?
These types of questions can help you identify useful long tail keywords.
Here’s a few other tips for long tail keyword research:
- Customers often ask the same questions about your business. What happens when you put those questions into Google? Can you develop a piece of content that ranks for this search query?
- What does your product, service or business do?
- What customer problems does your business address?
- What do your products and services cost?
- How do your products and services compare to others?
- What benefits do you offer to customers?
- How do your products improve a customer’s life?
- Why is your product important or unique?
- What does your industry’s jargon stand for?
These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself. You can also search for the answers to these questions, or search for modified questions that have a similar intent.
Tools for Conducting Long Tail Keyword Research
Free Tools for Long Tail Keyword Research
Keyword research tools can be incredibly helpful, especially if you aren’t an SEO professional. What’s more, popular tools like Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz all have free trials you can take advantage of.
Here’s a brief list of free tools you can use for your business’ long tail keyword research:
- Ahrefs Keyword Generator – Ahrefs has a bunch of free tools, including its own keyword generator. It provides keyword volume and difficulty, as well as related terms and questions that contain your keyword.
- Google Keyword Planner – Google Keyword Planner will tell you the average amount of searches for a particular keyword. Keyword Planner is an excellent tool for finding location-based results, because it allows you to refine results down to the suburb level.
- ChatGPT – The free version of ChatGPT is a good tool for finding keywords. Remember that AI can’t determine search intent or keyword volume. You’ll still need to use a tool like Keyword Planner to verify that AI-generated keywords are useful to your business.
- Google Search – Google’s search results provide a few excellent ways to identify long tail keywords. These include autocomplete suggestions, People Also Ask snippets, and the related searches found at the bottom of the results page.
Scouring forums – Find a forum relating to your industry or niche and view popular topics. Another way of doing this is using advanced search operators within Google search.
Paid Tools for Long Tail Keyword Research
For those with a marketing budget, long tail keyword research can be turned into a simple process using paid tools.
Paid tools that perform long tail keyword research also have other useful features, such as clustering, keyword mapping and cannibalisation warnings.
Here’s a list of great paid SEO tools you can use for long tail keyword research:
- Semrush – One of the best tools on the market, Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is a game changer for finding hidden gems.
- Ahrefs – Ahrefs Keywords Explorer is a fantastic tool for both broad and long tail keywords. Search by phrase or term match, and questions that contain your keywords.
- KWFinder by Mangools – Mangools’ KWFinder provides an overview of the keyword, keyword difficulty, actual search data and search trends.
Answer the Public – Whilst this tool isn’t specifically for SEO, Answer the Public provides insights through features like unlimited searches, search listening alerts and comparisons over time.
Leveraging Secondary Keywords and LSI Keywords in Your Content
You can improve your content with the use of long tail keywords. You can further boost your rankings using secondary keywords and latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords.
While Google has stated that it does not use latent semantic indexing to rank search results, it still uses forms of semantic analysis to understand the context of the information it crawls.
Secondary keywords (sometimes called ‘related keywords’) are additional terms and phrases that relate to your primary keyword, but typically have lower search volume.
LSI keywords are phrases that are semantically related to your primary keyword. For example, ‘supplements’ and ‘fitness’ are semantically related to ‘weight loss.’ LSI keywords help Google understand the context of your page.
An effective way to leverage secondary and LSI keywords is by incorporating them naturally throughout your content.
Instead of just using your main keywords in the content, research and identify relevant secondary keywords and LSI keywords. Make sure to use your primary keyword in the page title and H1, but incorporate secondary and LSI keywords in the body of the text.
You can also add secondary keywords and LSI keywords in subheadings and SEO meta data, such as title tags and meta descriptions. Using these keywords in headings and meta descriptions helps Google figure out the central topic of the page and improves your search rankings.
Some effective LSI tools include:
- LSIGraph
- Keysearch
Unleashing the Power of Long Tail Keyword Research
Performing long tail keyword research is essential for optimising your website’s SEO.
By understanding the basics of keyword research and differentiating between primary and long tail keywords, you can make informed decisions about your strategy.
There’s no special trick to identifying the best keywords for your website. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes, perform methodical research and then narrow down your list to include relevant short and long tail keywords.
That’s easy to say, but it can be a time consuming task if you’re tackling it alone. And that’s why you should have a chat with the team at Gordon Digital!
Gordon Digital specialises in all things digital marketing. We have a huge amount of experience with SEO, Google Ads and website optimisations, so we can develop a keyword strategy for any business.
Start a conversation with us today, or book a strategy session to see how we can help you kick your business goals!
