Long Tail Keyword Research Using Free Tools

As I have just finished doing a ton of keyword research for my 3 niches as part of my high paying niche experiment, I thought I would share with you the techniques and tools that I have been using to do it.

Wordtracker Free Tool & GTrends

I had a year’s subscription to the full Wordtracker product a few years ago when I did a lot of PPC work but so far this time around I have been using just the free tool. As part of the Thirty Day Challenge an extension has now been built which allows you to check phrases against the “GTrends numbers”. If you don’t know what that is go do the 30DC training as it would be redundant of me to repeat it here.

Basic Version: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

GTrends Version: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/

Either one of these brings you to the intro screen which presents the following simple form. The drop down allows you to filter out adult words and unless you’re targeting the porn industry, you may as well leave it on the default setting.

Initial Keyword Research

In here the first thing I do is type in a broad phrase for the market I am looking at. I’m going to use “speed reading” for my example as it is not one of my niches and those people who participated in the Thirty Day Challenge will be familiar with it. This is the top of the list that it brought back:

The numbers down the left are the estimated number of daily searches, the more the better. These numbers aren’t all that accurate and I often find that as the numbers get smaller I tend to just look at the phrases and use my judgment.

For example, look at the 8th one down “eye q speed reading”, what is that? It’s some weird term that has got into the Wordtracker database and is not something that people are going to type in on a regular basis. The one below is “speed reading software” is far more likely to be a good candidate.

Now what I am looking for as I look through this list is phrases that I want to target in the search engines. This would involve using that phrase in the title of any content that I wrote so with that in mind I want meaningful phrases. For this particular phrase just about every phrase returned was good but in some markets you get phrases that are just a string of random words put together in a way that would be very difficult to work into a meaningful English sentence.

Incorporating GTrends

Now if you are using the GTrends version then you will see an additional icon to the right of each result like this:

Clicking on this icon will bring up data from Google Trends which is a more accurate estimation of the traffic you could expect to see from a keyword phrase. Let’s look at the data this brings back:

As you can see this is the output from the phrase “speed reading programs”. I have cropped off the bottom which showed the pretty graph because it looks similar for all keywords unless you find a very high traffic one. There’s two key numbers in this output:

Google Competition: The number of optimised competing pages listed in Google (we’re looking for <30,000)

Actual Visitors From #1 in Google / Day: That’s quite a mouthful and it’s been changed recently. It used to say daily searches which is what the regular Wordtracker tool shows you. This tool shows you an estimate of how much traffic you can expect to receive if you had a page ranking at number #1 in Google for that term.

In a recent post about number crunching I looked at this in more detail and explained the effect that the Google ranking has on traffic.

Google Adwords Tool

Adwords is the system that allows advertisers to pay for PPC traffic. This tool allows advertisers to search for potential keywords to bid on but of course it can be used just to brainstorm. Now I am not sure where the data comes from for this tool but I don’t really care. Here’s the link:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Here’s the front page:

Notice the dropdown that says “Choose data to display”. I use the default setting for brainstorming but if you are thinking about using this for PPC, a handy option is Cost and Ad Position Estimates. Here’s a sample of the speed reading data:

One of the things I do here is look for words that have a higher search volume than advertiser competition. For example look at “tony buzan speed reading”. Now personally I find the volume information from this tool to be inaccurate but what I like is the sheer number of phrases that come back. But scroll down to the bottom of the first list and look at this:

You can dump all those keywords right into a text file, Excel spreadsheet etc for use later. But there’s more… If you kept the “use synonyms” box checked then underneath your main list you’ll have a second list of words that are related to your main phrase but don’t necessarily contain it:

This info is supremely useful because you’ll notice that Wordtracker is only bringing back phrases that contain the exact words you typed in. So for example it will give you a nice long list of phrases containing the words “speed reading” but not phrases containing “read faster”. This second list of words from the Google Adwords tool can be used to “seed” Wordtracker with a load more phrases.

My Keyword Research Method

I now use the GTrends version of Wordtracker exclusively, I don’t even bother with the main tool but I list it here as I’m not entirely sure if the GTrends version will be maintained.

Step 1: Look at Broad Phrases

I start out by just typing in obvious phrases that I can think of into Wordtracker. I use the Google Adwords tool to brainstorm variations. If there are lots of these I’ll write them down and then work through them one by one using Steps 2-4.

Step 2: Drill Down Into Each Broad Phrase

I usually try and start as broad and generic as possible and then drill down. For example if your market was really huge such as “reading”, bearing in mind that Wordtracker only brings back 100 results per search you need to get more specific if you want to find those long tail keywords. Then I click on a word in the list to drill further into it.

Step 3: Find Phrases That Meet the Criteria

This is the core of the process, the point where I have a list of potential phrases and I’m looking for ones that are high traffic and low competition. I use GTrends for this. I’ll check every one of the top 10 or so phrases. After that I use my intuition. If the phrase is “complete free speed reading course in Atlanta” then I probably won’t bother.

I might miss some this way but I can usually get a feel for a market within about 10 minutes. If I’ve clicked on a dozen phrases and I’m getting nothing then I move onto another phrase. On the other hand if I’m getting lots of good phrases then I’ll spend more time there and check more so that I don’t miss anything.

Step 4: Record the Good Phrases in a Spreadsheet

I mentioned in my post about dumping the playdough niche that I realised I needed to distinguish between phrases and topics. I create a new file (I use Excel) for every niche and I create a new tab (a worksheet) for every topic. For each topic I’ll jot down some content ideas and ideas for tying that content in with the product that I want to promote. This is important for me because if I cant think of a way to work my affiliate links into my content for a particular topic then I’m going to have a hard time with those phrases.

For each topic I’ll have one column for every phrase that matches the criteria of 100+ traffic and <30,000 competition. I rank them so that the one with the best potential goes first. I call this a “target phrase” because it is one that I will target in the search engines. Once I’ve found a phrase like this I take a closer look at it in Google and look at the sites that are currently at the top. I make notes. I’m looking to see of the sites are optimised for the phrase, if they provide good content, if they are spammy etc. By doing this I start to get a gut feeling for the phrases and I use that to juggle the rankings.

I also don’t want to miss out on long tail traffic. Any phrase that shows up with less than 50,000 competing pages and at least 15 in the traffic number I make a note of. These are my long tail phrases and I try to get as many as I can to go along with each of my target phrases. I don’t do the whole Google search as I wont be building pages specifically to target those phrases but I’ll try and work them in somewhere.

An Example of my Niche Research So Far

In Niche #1 ($15), I have 6 quite different topics that I could write about. The best three topics all have at least three key phrases that qualify as target phrases. In addition, each one has plenty of long tail phrases as well. This is by far the best niche in terms of the content and traffic potential. Unfortunately it’s the one least likely to make any real money.

Niche #2 ($25-35) has just a single topic, however within that topic there are a dozen target phrases including one that estimates traffic numbers of 1250 with only 17,000 competing pages! There are around 20 long tail phrases. Now this is tricky because there is potentially a lot of traffic here but all the phrases basically mean the same thing so I’m going to have to get really creative to come up with enough content to cover all those phrases. I doubt that I can which means much of that traffic is left on the table. Of course I’ll be hitting the 1250 phrase first!

Niche #3 ($75) has three distinct topics. Two of those topics have only a single target phrase and the third has two. There are far more long tail phrases in this niche. This is a fairly good balance because I should be able to come up with enough content to cover the phrases in each topic. So there’s less traffic potential than the other two, but I should at least be able to tap into that potential.

That process gives me a pretty organised list of phrases to build content for in a variety of topics within each niche. Tomorrow I’ll talk a bit about my process for finding content ideas.

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