If you just started your website or even been there for a while, you know how hard it is to achieve some results. And that’s no surprise seeing how stiff the competition is.

But this is not the only thing that holds you back from ranking #1. Because, a lot of times, people simply don’t understand what they are supposed to do, and, as a result, they do poor keyword targeting.

And there’s probably nothing more frustrating than putting much effort into something and get nothing.

But there is a cure to it that helped thousands of businesses to make it in their niche. I’m speaking, of course, about long-tail keywords.

In this article, you are going to learn how to pick them to climb up the Olympus of Google rankings.

Let’s go!

What are long-tail keywords?

So, what are those? Does it mean they are just longer than the regular ones?

Yes and no.

Long-tail keywords are longer in general, usually starting from 3 words. But this is not the defining factor here. Their nature lies in the fact that they are linked to the main and competitive term. But remotely.

If you think about it, long-tail keywords are the way we look for something on the Internet. Especially, with the intention to purchase a product.

A quick example.

Let’s say you want to buy a car. You don’t just type in ‘buy a car’, do you? Instead, you would write something more particular that would help you refine the results and get exactly what you need.

Like ‘budget car for family’.

What is the benefit here?

The more granular a query is, the less competitive it is. Yes, fewer people google it, but, at the same time, they are still interested in the main keyword, one way or the other.

Think of long-tail keywords as hidden paths to your site that you need to discover.

Free tools for long-tail keywords

The SEO industry is growing like crazy, so at this point, you can have some solid ways and tools to locate long-tail keywords.

Just to get an idea of how it works, I would recommend you start with some free solutions.

You probably know about Keyword Planner, so I’m not going to explain how it works.

Instead, I would like to talk about less famous and less used tools.

Like Answer the public.

This tool gives you a bunch of long-tail keywords for your seed keyword. They are divided into groups, which are Questions, Prepositions, Comparisons, Alphabetical, and Related.

Look how many different options I’ve got for “car” keyword. Whatever your business is about I’m quite sure you will find at least some of those suggestions useful.

 

 

You can also download reports in CSV free of charge.

The biggest drawback of this tool is that it doesn’t provide any numbers. No search volume, no CTR, nothing like that. But don’t forget that it’s free.

If you feel limited with Ask the public, you should try Keyword Shitter. Quite a name but it can generate thousands of keyword variants by mining Google Autocomplete.

Simply type in a seed keyword, fill in Positive and Negative filter fields to narrow down the scope and hit the button.

Again, it doesn’t offer any extended functionality and lives up to its name. But you can still sniff through the list and find some awesome keywords you didn’t think of before.

Plus, it’s a great opportunity to play around with the options and have some practice.

These 2 tools are only some examples that you can resort to without paying a penny. And when you are ready to step up your, SEO game you can find some more powerful tools.

Decisions backed by data

As you see finding (or generating) long-tail keywords is not that hard. Even free solutions can easily accomplish that task.

But, as in real life, it’s all about what options you pick and put to use.

For a novice, those options can be quite overwhelming and confusing. You need to have some kind of a guiding light that you can follow.

And this is why most of SEOs base their decisions on data. On numbers like search volume, CTR, return rate, etc.

Yes, you can trust your guts or read someone else’s posts backed on their sources. But it’s rather inconvenient and can jeopardize your business if that information isn’t reliable.

So, find a great keyword research tool that can help you on your SEO journey.

I’ll be using Ahrefs for this post, so all the screenshots will be taken from there.

Like I said search volume is one of the metrics people look at when comparing or choosing long-tail keywords. It’s great to see how popular a keyword is.

But this number alone doesn’t really reveal what is behind that keyword.

Is it too competitive? Will it generate clicks? Or, maybe most importantly, will it convert visitors into your leads?

As a quick test, let’s run our seed keyword ‘car’ in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and see what comes out.

Around 481k searches per month in the US and only 26% searches result in clicks. Also, notice that the keyword difficulty score is 90. It’s based on the number of backlinks the top 10 search results have.

As backlinks are still a huge factor in SEO, you shouldn’t ignore that number.

Now let’s see what long-tail keywords we can generate from this seed keyword and if we can find something valuable.

I set the filter to show keywords that have from 500 to 10000 monthly searches and comprise of 3 or more words.

 

And just like that, you have a list of 13,600 long-tail keywords. If you provide car rental services, feel free to add the word “rental” into Include field to see the results with it.

When selecting keywords from this huge list you need to prioritize those with the decent ratio of clicks, and least ads possible.

Two reasons for that.

First, you don’t want to target keywords that hardly generate any clicks.

Second, if a lot of people are bidding for those keywords, you are running a risk of losing your traffic to the ads. Plus, it’s a red flag that the keyword is a very competitive one.

It pays to find the balance between the challenging part of the keyword and your resources.

Let’s have a look at “budget rental car coupons” keyword. With 8,300 searches per month (which is pretty good), it has 85% clicks, and only 29% of those clicks go to the ads.

The rental business is competitive as it is, so these figures are pretty moderate.

You should go for ‘realistic’ keywords that would bring some traffic to your site but wouldn’t turn into a never-ending challenge of rankings.

And by giving well-researched on-point answers to users’ exact questions, you increase your chances to be noticed.

Search Intent

At this point, you should have built an extended list of keywords that seem great metrics-wise. But you probably want to find out which keywords you need to create your content around.

And this is not as straightforward as you might think. Because each search query has a different search intent that needs to be met.

Going back to the “rental car” topic. If someone is googling “rental car age requirements” (which is a long-tail keyword, too) chances are they are not going to purchase anything but want to get the information they need. 

So, targeting this keyword might not be the ideal decision. At the end of the day, income is what you are building up your business to. It stands to reason that commercial intent plays a crucial role here.

But “how to pick a rental car” looks much more promising. If you piece of content is holistic and engaging enough, it should convert at least some of your readers into your clients.

Remember, it’s all about satisfying the user, you can and should advertise your product. But doing it smoothly and seamlessly is what can set you apart from your competitors.

Be ready to give now to receive later.

Conclusion

Launching your business, you have tons of possibilities to promote your product online and see some great results.

But first, you need to master the art of finding and picking long-tail keywords. As they can be a real needle-mover that might put your site on the map.

Use free solutions to gain some experience and then, when ready, take it to the next level with a more effective tool.

Sift thousands of long-tail keywords through metrics like search volume, and CTR. Cherry-pick the ones that can bring real value to your site. And then turn them into awesome topic ideas on your blog.

Hope this post cleared things up for you! Good luck!