Google Gives You Long Tail Keywords for SEO

Creating an effective long tail keyword strategy is easy — you just need to find the words that people are actually typing into the search engines to find websites, or products, or services like yours.

What are Long Tail Keywords?

A long tail keyword is a very targeted keyword phrase that contains 3 or more words. These keywords are highly specific, and draw less traffic for the website, but tend to draw more quality traffic, which leads to more conversions than normal keywords. Once you have your keywords, you can use them in your blog posts to enhance the ranking of each post in the search engine results.

Google provides a list of long tail keywords for you

Here’s the fun part. . . Google now provides two ways to see those long tail keywords that people are actually searching for. And both ways are completely free and easy to use.

Method 1: Google’s Keyword Suggest tool

Google Keyword Suggest is a great research tool for marketers. . . and you’re probably already using it! Let’s say you’re looking for information on how to create a webinar. You could search for “webinar”, but you’re really looking for some solid “how-to” information; so you enter “create a webinar” (without quotes) in the search bar and a drop-down of related suggestions shows up.

For the savvy marketer, this list is some of the keywords that people are searching for in enough volume to make google think you might be looking for these things, too. These are long tail keywords that Google is suggesting you use.

Secrets on how to best use Google Suggest

You can now use wildcards in Search suggest to find even more long tail keywords.

Here’s are some suggestions generated by using an underscore at the beginning of the search:

Moving the underscore to the beginning of the word “webinar”, we come up with different results:

Changing the underscore to an asterisk yields different results again:

Google Suggest is a great tool to help you find keywords that people are actually searching for. But it gets even better!

Method 2: The bottom of the search results page

This is my favorite method for keyword search, and it’s mostly ignored. I think it’s a great example of “hiding in plain sight.”

Let’s use that last search above “create a *webinar” and click the search button. Now scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, and Google gives you 8 more long tail keywords to consider:

This bottom-of-the-page listing is an excellent source of long-tail keywords. Pick one that is close to your blog topic, like “how to create a webinar using powerpoint”, scroll to the very bottom of the search results, and you’ll see:

This method delivers a virtual treasure trove of related long tail keywords!

Take aways

The longer (and more specific) search terms are, the easier it will be to rank on the term.

Another benefit for focusing on long tail keywords is that, although these keywords are used less in search, the visitor that finds your website using them is more likely to buy your service or product. The longer and more specific the search terms are, the higher the chances of conversion are.

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