Keyword Research Software To Find Long Tail Keywords

A long tail keyword is typically a keyword that has 3 or more words that make up the phrase being searched. For example, "keyword" is not a long tail keyword. However, "keyword research tools for beginners" is. It narrows down the search options that the person is looking for, which usually means that there are less sites focusing on that specific term. Now, it doesn't mean that you just choose any old long tail keyword to focus on, but you still need to do more research to find out what long tail keywords, people are actually searching for. There are quite a few ways to do this, but the two we'll discuss here are using Google's Keyword Research Tool and Long Tail Pro.

Google's Keyword Research Tool

Google provides a wonderful research tool to help you find keywords that might be worth targeting by your website. When you go to the tool, which you can find by searching in Google for "keyword research tool", you are presented with a lot of options. Don't worry too much about it. Just simply fill out a few fields to get a feel for how it works. The important option you want to choose though before searching, is on the left side of the screen under Match Types. Uncheck Broad, and check Exact instead. A broad search is going to bring back results that would include any of the keywords you are searching for. The Exact search is only going to show results that have "exactly" the term you searched for.
I can't post the exact results you will see here when you do the search, but suffice to say that the results for searching for "low competition keywords" is extremely low. Not a lot of people are searching for this exact keyword. In spite of the amount of competition for this phrase, the actual search volume is atrocious. So this would quickly eliminate this keyword from our list of potential keywords to target. Btw, you look at the Local Monthly Searches column to see how many people, on average, are searching for this term each month.

When we search for our other keyword, "long tail pro", we find that the numbers are a little better, but not much. Instead let's look at something that should have a lot of searches each month, something like the keyword "iphone". The amount of searches is extremely high when you search for that term. But of course, the competition would be extremely high as well. This should help you get the idea what we're talking about.

So back to our topic of discussion. Once you have identified some keywords with lower competition amounts and keyword that have large amounts of people searching for them, you'll need to add some more data points to your research. One of the best data points to add to the search is the advertiser competition. What this number tells you is that there are a lot of other people advertising for this keyword. If there is a lot of people advertising for a keyword, then likely the people searching for that keyword are buying what is advertised. Important if you're selling something.

With the Google Keyword Tool, it's sort of hard to notice exactly what the advertiser competition number is. It's masked behind a little bar. However with Long Tail Pro, the information is pulled and displayed in an easy to read number. So very quickly one can tell just how hard each keyword is.

This is just a little introduction into how to perform successful keyword research. It's a fairly easy process once you get the hang of it, but there are so many variables and opinions that it's hard to weed out what really works. I've read just about every guide there is to learning how to do keyword research, but the one thing I did learn through that process is that nothing beats just doing it yourself. Digging in, searching for keywords and analyzing the results. You'll find fairly quickly that you can spot good keywords even before you fully analyze the results. Before you know it you will be a long tail keyword research genius!

If you liked what you saw with Long Tail Pro, you can learn more about it here and you can give it a try. It has a 60 day money back guarantee, but if you're like me, it's worth every penny and I wouldn't trade it for anything.