What are Long Tail Keywords?

Long tail keywords come from the power law graph, which shows that the long tail has many occurrences that are far from the “head” of the graph (See image). This concept was popularized by Chris Anderson in October 2004 when he talked about big brands using long tail keywords in their business plans.

As a website owner, internet marketer, or if you’re a person who wants to get more traffic from the search engines, then long tail keyword research should be part of your overall internet marketing strategy.

 

A quick example of what long tail keywords are:

 

How to Find Long Tail Keywords

Notice that these phrases contain at least three keywords. These long-tail terms might have lower search volumes, but they are more likely to lead to conversions since they are more focused. Conversions matter for you and your business. You can maintain the same traffic but double your sales by just improving your conversions. I will be making many video tutorials and case studies about conversions on my main blog, Traffic Salad. However, if you’re curious whether a site redesign can boost conversions and user engagement, please check out this video.

When to Use Long Tail Keywords?

Use it a lot, about 80-90% of the time. Especially if you have a new website (less than 1 year old) If you are targeting keywords with more competition and higher search volumes, you’ll have a hard time ranking to the top of the search engines. That’s why it’s important to go after the lower hanging fruits, the long tail keywords.

They will have less search volumes, but they will also have lesser competition in the search engines. Usually, you’ll find out that in just 1 or 2 months you’re already ranking in the first page of the search results for these long-tailed keywords.

How to use Long Tail Keywords

There are many uses for long tail keywords. But the most obvious reasons includes:

1. Targeting the Long Tail Keyword for SEO. Which means that you need to create content that is optimized for that long tail keyword. Just like in this article. The long tail keyword is “how to find long tail keywords”, so I’ve created an entire post and video, just to target these keywords.

2. Use them on your PPC campaigns. If you use Long tailed keywords in your Pay per click campaigns they will usually have lower costs per clicks and higher conversion rates. The only problem is that they will also have less search volumes, so traffic to your websites will be limited.

3. Combine multiple Long Tail keywords into a single blog posts or use multiple long tail keywords in your PPC campaigns.

 

How to Find Long Tail Keywords Using Market Samurai

The big challenge now is how do you find these keywords. You can use tools like Google keyword tool, but my favorite is Market Samurai

Here are the steps in Finding these long-tailed phrases:

Step 1. Open Market Samurai

Step 2. Choose a Seed Keyword (Usually only 1 to 2 words)

Step 3. Enter your Adwords Details if you haven’t done it yet (This will help you get more results *800 keywords rather than 100)

Step 4. Change the Minimum Words Slider to 3

Step 5. Click on the Generate button. Wait for results (usually after a few minutes)

Step 6. Analyze keywords based on metrics that you are looking for.

Step 7. Rinse and Repeat

If you prefer to watch it in FULL HDS video, you can watch this video.

This original article on “How to Find Long Tail Keywords” have been originally posted at MarketSamuraiProdigy.com