Reaping The Rewards Of Long Tail Keyword Research

By Aurora Brown
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-03-18

Keyword Research - another oldie but goodie. To reap rewards from a good SEO campaign, you need to select powerful keyword that have high volume and are attainable in terms of rankings. Simultaneously, you can also search for "long tail" keywords that are highly targeted, even if they have very low volume. The traffic from long tail keywords have to convert at an extremely high ration. We see this all too often: people running high budget campaigns to websites that have not implemented appropriate keyword research and selection. This minimizes the benefits gained from a link popularity and SEO campaign.

In this article we will go back to basics again and give you detailed information on how to select profitable keywords for your website.

Finding Keyword Gold

The key to keyword research is finding keywords that have a high volume of search traffic with a low amount of competing pages. These are the "keyword gold" phrases that will lead to high rankings and targeted traffic. Trying to rank for keywords that have a high amount of competing pages may be completely ineffective as it may not be realistic for your site to rank for those keywords. For example, if you have a small dealership selling used cars in Valencia, CA - you will NOT want to try to compete for the keyword "used cars" - it is too competitive and there are too many "giants" competing for these terms. You would want to focus on targeted phrases like "used cars Valencia" or "used vehicles Valencia" as these are more attainable. Optimizing for keywords that are not attainable will only result in disappointment - you will waste your budget and efforts going after these keywords, and find yourself not ranking or receiving targeted traffic. So we recommend choosing keywords where you can realistically rank in the top 10, even if they have lower search volume.

So how do you determine these two factors? We'll start by using Google's Keyword Sandbox tool:

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

Establish Search Volume

Start by typing a keyword into this tool based on how you think your customers will find you. Be as detailed as possible. Also, it's important to use "exact" in the "match type" column to get more accurate results. For example, start by typing in Used Cars into the keyword search box:

We typically recommend using the "global monthly search volume" column as it reflects more accurately general keyword search volume over time. This tool will tell you just how many people are searching for the phrases that are relevant to your website. Select keywords that are highly specific to your site/business - the more targeted, the better.

Click on "export to CSV for excel" so you can get these in a list.

You can then keep fine-tuning and adding other keywords that are increasingly relevant to your business / site. Search and export them all so you will create a comprehensive list of keywords. Once you have them all in excel, go through these keywords and select only the most relevant ones for your website/business, and delete all of the rest. These keywords will give you an idea of what people are searching for.

Establish Competition in Google

Then, go to Google and search for each of the keywords on your list, using the following qualifier: allintitle:keyword. At the top right, you will see the number of pages in Google's database that contain this keyword in the title:

Enter in the number of competing pages into a new column in your excel sheet.

Determining Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)

Then, in a third column, create a formula where you divide the number of searches from the Google Keyword tool by the number of pages in Google. This will give you the Keyword Effectiveness Index for each of the keywords, or the KEI.

Once you have a number for each of the keywords, then you can look for the keywords that have the highest KEI - this indicates that they have high search volume with a low number of competing pages.

For example, if we were looking at the following 3 keywords:

Out of these keywords, the ideal keyword to go after would be "used cars sales", as it has the highest KEI.

You can then sort your list from highest to lowest and that will help you get a better idea of which keywords are the most valuable keywords for you to target.

The disadvantages of using KEI as a measurement

Keep in mind, however, that this is a very broad method of searching for keywords and doesn't take some critical aspects into consideration, such as the quality of the competition or the authority of the sites competing for those same keywords. For example, you may find a keyword that has a very high KEI and looks like it's incredibly attainable. However, if you manually look at the sites and study their backlinks, you may find that they are very authoritative sites that will not be easy to compete with. Therefore, KEI should only be a "stepping stone" into your keyword selection process. The benefit is that you can have a better idea of what keywords may simply not be attainable and this step can be fundamental in "whittling" down your list.

Sometimes you can select the keywords simply by using common sense and intuition and the KEI measurement.

Combining KEI with Competitive Backlink Analysis

If you want to take keyword selection to another level, you will have to do some competitive analysis for each of the keywords. Our preferred method is the following:

Set up the SEO for Firefox application. Then search for your keywords in Google while the application is turned on. Once you get the results for all of the top 10 results, click on "export to CSV".

Once we have these in excel, we then apply a formula to find the Average, Standard Deviation, and Median for the Yahoo backlinks of each of the keywords searched for. This will give you an idea of how competitive each of the keywords are based on the backlinks and/or any of the other data you wish to add from this report. It also helps you to gain an idea of the statistics for some of the sites that you will be competing with.

This is what the formulas look like:

Average: =AVERAGE(L2:L11)

Standard Deviation: =STDEV(L2:L11)

Median: =MEDIAN(L2:L11)

Once you have all of this data, enter it into your excel sheet. Your excel sheet will look like this:

Now, looking at this data tells a completely different story. If we were simply looking at KEI, we would've chosen "used cars sales" as the ideal keyword. However, once we look at the competition, we find that this keyword requires too many links in order to rank. If your site is new and/or has a low authority status and a low number of inbound links, this level of competition will be unattainable in the beginning. As your site gains authority status and you increase the number of backlinks, you can reconsider competing for keywords that have a higher competition level.

Consequently, this data indicates that the best keyword to select would be "Used cars Dealer", as it has the lowest Yahoo links median. Although the traffic to that keyword is significantly less and there is a high number of competing pages in Google, those competing pages have low authority status and a low number of inbound links thus presenting a more attainable goal in terms of rankings.

Summary

Using this time consuming method, you can attain quantifiable data to help you select the best keywords to target for your market. After doing this for some time, you will develop an "eye" for this and may not need to do so much work.

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About the Author:
Aurora Brown is the Social Media Manager and Editor-in-Chief for Authority Domains online marketing company. She currently authors the Authority Domains Search Engine Marketing Blog and is working on her first novel.