Long Tailed Keyword Research Optimization Guidance

[Zoro]

Im not sure if this qualify to be it´s own thread so if not please delete, im saving this text and will post it in the "Newbie Question(s) so dumb, you're afraid to even ask!" if thats the best place for this post.

Ok guys, i'm learning new things everyday and slowly evoling to level 100.
Im not a perfectionist but I love to know that what Im doing and I want to atleast do it based on the "most right way, science/people I look up to best way". Thats why I look up to people with more knowledge and I also seek to be a better version of myself everyday.

For example is that I love to go to the gym, but why just go to the gym when you can eat more protein, optimize your workout with a routine and put 1-2 hours extra into sleep to optimize gains right? Exactly!

I feel like im learning most things but the one thing atm is that I dont feel that I fully understand keyword research, or in more detail long tailed keyword research.

Im in the early stages of learning and I dont have huge amounts of money to put out on SEO tools.
I do own ubersuggest though, but I feel that google search bar should do the trick for me.

So what I do right is put in different keywords, I research competition vs the keywords I type in.
But I have a few questions and I humbly seek your guidance!

1. How do you find your long tailed keywords and how do you get the feeling if they are good or not? I can find loads of keywords on google search but how do I determine if they are a keywords worth pooking into?
2. Can you recommend any guide for long tailed keyword research? (i reading the Digital Strategy Crash Course everyday so something more than that. (I love the approach Anne from Yeys.com have, so a guide simular to that?)
3. When I search for "best keyword research tool" I get loads of sites with that in the webpage title right.
   But if I search (suggested by google) "best keyword research tool for search engines for beginners" on ubersuggest it says 0 traffic but it was still a suggestion in google so does that mean it gets traffic?
4. The keyword "best keyword research tool for search engines for beginners" looks unique on the firstpage and no one is targeting this in their title, does that mean that with the info above that this is a lazer focues keyword and could potentially put me on page one and win over higher DR sites?
5. I read somewere that the more typical keywords you can put into a title the better? is that right?
   Example keyword: Best horseshoe for flipping set
   Example optimize: Best horseshoe for flipping set expensive and cheap
   Is this something you think is benificial?

I'm here, im listening and willing to learn.
I've currently doing my best to read up on the forum on everything but if there is some threads you think I should deep dive into feel free to link.

 

[DanielS]

How do you find your long tailed keywords and how do you get the feeling if they are good or not? I can find loads of keywords on google search but how do I determine if they are a keywords worth pooking into?

AHREFs, haha. But at the end of the day, the process is still the same no matter the tool: Find a keyword with decent volume, do a SERP analysis, repeat.

What determines whether a keyword is "good" or not is the estimated volume, competition, and also the intent. Maybe a keyword only gets 40 estimated searches per. month, but it's a buyer intent term for an expensive product, so it might be worth going after.

Can you recommend any guide for long tailed keyword research? (i reading the Digital Strategy Crash Course everyday so something more than that. (I love the approach Anne from Yeys.com have, so a guide simular to that?)

You don't need a guide- it's as simple as it sounds. The thing that really confused me early on was the time delay. It doesn't matter what the keyword is, if your website is new or has low authority, it will take a decent amount of time (weeks or months depending) for your page to rank. Just because a page targets a low competition keyword and doesn't rank within a week, it doesn't mean your keyword research process was wrong.

When I search for "best keyword research tool" I get loads of sites with that in the webpage title right.
But if I search (suggested by google) "best keyword research tool for search engines for beginners" on ubersuggest it says 0 traffic but it was still a suggestion in google so does that mean it gets traffic?

Almost always, yes. You could even try putting keywords into Google Trends to see if there's data present to validate things further if you wanted to.

The keyword "best keyword research tool for search engines for beginners" looks unique on the firstpage and no one is targeting this in their title, does that mean that with the info above that this is a lazer focues keyword and could potentially put me on page one and win over higher DR sites?

Potentially, yes, if Google likes your post. But you'd be much better off starting off by targeting keywords that non-UGC, high DR sites are not ranking for at the start to get the ball rolling. Links still matter- don't set yourself up for failure by trying to compete with high DR sites when your site has no authority.

I read somewere that the more typical keywords you can put into a title the better? is that right?
Example keyword: Best horseshoe for flipping set
Example optimize: Best horseshoe for flipping set expensive and cheap
Is this something you think is benificial?

When relevant. Keep in mind, the title should be clickable for humans. Stuffing as many keywords as possible into titles tends to not look great and can lead to lower rankings. Keep things relevant.

 

[ToffeeLa]

If you want a primer for starter keyword research and site development, then read this thread:
https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/seo-avalanche-technique-ranking-with-no-resources.5114/

 

[Ryuzaki]

A lot of your questions only exist because you aren't using the data available to you. Ubersuggest is better than typing in "guess words" into the Google search tool to see what auto-fills.

Because in the present a lot of that auto-fill isn't suggesting keywords with meaningful volume, it's predicting what you'll type next based on zillions of queries being typed, with most being "one-time only and never again" searches.

Your questions about trying to outrank big, powerful sites for longer-tails than they use in their titles isn't going to work out for you. If you search "best dog to own" and get a certain top 10 and then search "best dog to own as a companion" and you get the same top 10... well that's your competition. Because while Google still does operate on keywords, their goal is to rank based on topicality. And that powerful top 10 is dealing with the same topic.

The good news is that you'll rank for tons of related keywords all in a topic "basket". But you need to identify if the parent keyword (the main shorter-tail all the long-tails are derived from) is something you can compete for.

You don't need a guide for that. You need to identify the top 10's DR score (or whatever backlink metric you want to use) and how many links the specific ranking pages have, and see if you can match both of those. If your site has better relevancy in general (a dog site, to follow the above example) you may get a little leniency on the backlink metrics. Of course there's anomalies but you don't sound like you're in a position to spray and pray, so you have to get tactical.

Going after 0 volume keywords is a waste of your time when there's parent keywords with 300 - 1,000 with no meaningful competition where you can take down the parent and all the children (longer-tail) keywords all at once.

 

[secretagentdad]

The only difficulty metrics worth a damn are volume of exact mentions and volume of exact title matches. Everything else bullshit. Google provides these via the in title and “keyword” operators.

Average back links / link acquisition rates on the front page type metrics are useful for the most competitive keywords.

 

[Zoro]

AHREFs, haha. But at the end of the day, the process is still the same no matter the tool: Find a keyword with decent volume, do a SERP analysis, repeat.

What determines whether a keyword is "good" or not is the estimated volume, competition, and also the intent. Maybe a keyword only gets 40 estimated searches per. month, but it's a buyer intent term for an expensive product, so it might be worth going after.


You don't need a guide- it's as simple as it sounds. The thing that really confused me early on was the time delay. It doesn't matter what the keyword is, if your website is new or has low authority, it will take a decent amount of time (weeks or months depending) for your page to rank. Just because a page targets a low competition keyword and doesn't rank within a week, it doesn't mean your keyword research process was wrong.

I get what you guys are saying with target low competition keywords.
And I understand the basics around it and that I should make it simple like you say.

But my brain trying to approach it logically you know, if I find a good keywords with low DR and low backlinks on the top 10 pages I should be able to rank with good content right. But my page is even lower DR and authority so I dont get why google should rank me for it.

But maybe I answered that question myself LoL, make the content better, more focused page title to match the search intent, becuse the other sites might just spill keywords over if I analyse it correctly.

Thanks for your insight Daniel, Ive read your Website Journey and impressed! Are you Swedish by any chance?

 

[DanielS]

But my brain trying to approach it logically you know, if I find a good keywords with low DR and low backlinks on the top 10 pages I should be able to rank with good content right. But my page is even lower DR and authority so I dont get why google should rank me for it.

But maybe I answered that question myself LoL, make the content better, more focused page title to match the search intent, becuse the other sites might just spill keywords over if I analyse it correctly.

Yeah, you answered your question(s) yourself- follow SEO basics, essentially. Create a better post, publish it, and move on. 3 months later, you'll notice the post is getting traffic (if everything was done correctly). That's basically how it works for low competition keywords.

Thanks for your insight Daniel, Ive read your Website Journey and impressed! Are you Swedish by any chance?

No problem. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I am Canadian!

 

[voLdie]

Also, part of the keyword research and content game process is taking pot shots.

Zoom in, take a deep breath and pull the trigger.

If you choose well you will get them over time. You will also randomly rank well for random terms you didn't see coming. I get shit tons of traffic on some articles I thought were just padding out a cluster or were not that important.

The thing is you can approach keyword research in a ton of ways.

I load up a list that is always growing and if an idea pops into my head throughout the day I add it. Doing research on a specific topic and see several long tails add them.

Here is one Keyword research methods I use. I am sure you can use other tools but these are what I use currently.

I'll do this for a real website concerning DIY firearms.

Method

- Let's think of a broad keyword i.e. "3d printed guns".

- Put the term into https://keywordsheeter.com/ or Uber Suggest | Results: https://pastebin.com/SgcSGKWS

- Ok, the top term obviously is going to have a ton of competition. I am not super familiar with the avalanche method but from my understanding, this term would be gone after once the site is ranking, gained links, and lots of topical authority.

I like to think about how can I scale out a content idea here is one:

3d printed guns legal | 390
3d printed gun laws by state | 140

We have two options here first there are a ton of keywords that may have low/no search volume but logically people are searching:

3d printed guns legal california
3d printed guns legal florida
3d printed guns legal texas
3d printed guns legal uk
3d printed guns legal hong kong

When looking at these in the Google SERP we see the only person truly writing for the exact term 3d printed guns laws by state is a short blog on a lawyer's website.

Boom. No real targeting so with our lack of authority we will make up with badass content.

Content Option #1

Massive post targeting the key term. I would expand it a bit by using a title like:

3D Printed Gun Laws by State & Country [Guide]

We could create a big post of 2k+ words and for subheadings, we can include the various locations i.e. states and countries.

Content Option #2

Pillar post discussing the legality of 3d printed gun laws in general. A section in that post talking about local 3d printed gun laws that then link to short 500 or so word articles about that specific location's laws.

I have a few other methods I use but scaling is important for SEO based plays. So if you can find a topic cluster create a ton of targeted content around super long tail KWs.

1. You can rank easier/quicker
2. Build topical authority
3. Create a systemized process. I could have 50 articles here to outsource to my writing team, send through the formatting team and hit publish
4. When you try to find new keywords/new topics every day it will slow you down

I might add some different keyword research methods i.e. throwing your main serp competitors into semrush -> filtering on KD -> looking at the highvolume terms remaining in the SERPS to verify difficulty -> adding topic to your content planner.

Think out of the box. Think scale.

 

[JOoa0ky]

I see that you don't have Ahrefs but if you did... a cool strategy that I've been trying is to let Google guide you on what to write about.

For this to work you need to already have a couple of ranking pages and they have to have collected a good amoutn of KW per article.
- Pick one of your articles and see what KWs they rank for.
- Ignore the position 1-20 ish ones.
- Pick some of the KWS in the 30-100 ranks and write about them. You may be surprised by what some of these KWs are.

Google has already assigned you a certain amount of topical authority on that subject so why not just piggyback on what they think you can potentially rank for.

On another note, @Ryuzaki I came across this concept of targeting zero volume keywords. Seems like it may potentially work or it may not... somewhat of a dice roll. Seems like it tried to take the seo avalanche technique a level more abstract.

 

[UFO]

I see that you don't have Ahrefs but if you did... a cool strategy that I've been trying is to let Google guide you on what to write about.

To piggyback on this, make sure you have set up Google Search Console (Free) if you haven't already. Once you have some content published and you are getting impressions/visitors check Google Search Console for search terms related to your content. Add unused terms to existing content or create new content. Rinse, repeat.

Google isn't going to give you every term your site shows for but you'll find a lot of good new terms to pursue and different angles to cover. I realize you're a few steps before this but once you have a decent base of content published this can be a gold mine for long tails and can have quite the snowball effect if executed properly.

 

[Zoro]

@ToffeeLa @Ryuzaki @UFO @JOoa0ky @voLdie @secretagentdad @DanielS

So much valuable information here TY! Ive read all your tips, ive read about the avalanche method and the theory about KGR and things are finally falling into place.

I will use those 2 methods and your tips about how to validate if a keyword is worth trying and in a few months see if it works!

I will also try to pyramid link my posts for better link juice and work my way to the top!

If you have more valuble information dont be afraid to share

 

[Ryuzaki]

If you have more valuble information dont be afraid to share

If you're trying to scale the amount of content you're publishing, you can piggy back off of the work other webmasters have already done. First identify weak competitors that as strong as you are (age, backlink profile) or weaker, and then simply view the list of keywords they currently rank for. Those are keywords you are also qualified to rank for. There will be built in competition, of course, but if your goal is to publish 10,000 articles, you need all the help you can get with keyword research. Something to consider!

 

[voLdie]

^
|

Also using SEMrush to see what other competitors rank for in the top 10 but are not necessarily targeting. This usually indicates very low comp. if you target way better than everyone else.

It is still often a sit and wait game when punching out of your weight class as stated in the "content avalanche" write up.

If you go hard as fuck minimum (for someone with minimal budget) 1 article per day, EVERY DAY, at 4 - 6 months you will be seeing some really nice progress.

Got to always remind yourself we are building assets not "gettn' rich quick". Enjoy the small wins. They compound.

 

[Zoro]

I read about blocking different SEO bots to keep your site "safer" from crawls and people stealing your great articles. Is this still a thing in 2022 or just roll with it

 

[PuppetMaster]

@Zoro one of my favorite places to find longtail keywords are in the SEMRush Keyword magic tool. Type in any parent keyword and then set things to "broad match" and "questions". Lots of juicy 4-8 word longtail phrases that will have anywhere from 100-1000 searches per month that you can easily target by just putting the entire question into an H1 or H2. That + the Avalanche Method has been working for me