So far in these samples from my Fast Track SEO Course we have looked at how search engines work – we’re now about to turn to how you can make them work for you.

You can catch up on any posts you missed here – but, if you’re late to the party, you’ll have to excuse us.

We’re going to push on and look at keyword research and the long tail right now.

Understanding keyword research and the long tail

“Keyword research is just market research for the 21st century.”
Brian Dean (aka Backlinko)

Are you sitting comfortably?

We hope so, because this statistic will floor you if you are not.

Nine out of every ten online journeys start with a search engine.

If anyone asks you if you really need keyword research for your site just quote them this fact.

Because at the heart of every single search journey is a keyword.

When someone types a phrase into the search engine it is called a search query. When you decide to target this phrase for your site it is called a keyword.

And we’re going to show you exactly how to decide what to target.

The importance of keywords

Here’s a quote about keywords from Moz’s Rand Fishkin, SEO god and thoroughly nice bloke:

“In the history of marketing, there has never been such a low barrier to entry in understanding the motivations of consumers in virtually any niche.”

Let’s just think about what “understanding the motivations of consumers” actually means.

It refers to how the keywords used in a query can give us insights into our customer’s ‘search intent’.

Keywords tell us not just what our customers are after but why they are after them too.

Keywords can let us know:

How many customers search for X rather than Y.
Where they are in their customer journey.
What the particular aspects of X are that really gets people going.
The questions customers need answering before we even meet them.
What their buying objections are at the very moment they start to formulate them.
But, most of all, keywords can allow us to prepare a web page that will smooth their customer journey because we understand their ‘search intent’.

Let’s not beat about the bush here: ranking for the right keywords will make or break your website. And Rand’s hyperbolic praise of the keyword actually rather undersold it.

Keyword research will show you about your competition, your revenue potential and it can help your content marketing too.

It can reveal:

The traffic potential of certain phrases.
The competition out there for them.
The keywords that are likely to best fit your goals.
And it will also help you gain insight into the dominant trends in your niche and the interests of your customers.

So, it’s extremely powerful.

Keyword research can help you predict shifts in demand, respond to changes in the market and discover new products or services that your business could be capitalising on.

This is heady stuff – excuse us while we sit down.

There, that’s better.

Topics and the long tail (or, how to not go to the dogs with your keyword choice)

We’re going to introduce you to two critical ways to approach keyword research.

The first is the long tail. And the second is how you can use topics, rather than just keywords, to match search intent.

Imagine this: you have developed a vegetarian dog food recipe.

You not only want to tell the world about it you also want to sell the world your ‘how to make it at home’ guide.

What may be a good keyword for you?

‘Dog’ would have tons of volume but a shed load of competition. But, it would not necessarily deliver visitors looking for your product – maybe they just want to buy a lead?

‘Dog food’ might be better. After all you want to sell the health benefits to all owners of dogs and not just vegetarians. Yet, this keyword would also have a lot of competition and maybe searchers are looking to buy a can rather than slave over a hot stove.

‘Vegetarian dog food’ is pretty specific – and that’s good. But the search volume (number of people using it) will be significantly lower than just ‘dog food’. And, again, they may be looking to buy a product rather than a ‘how to’ guide.

Using ‘vegetarian dog food recipe’ is precise. You know you will attract people specifically looking for what you have – but is there enough awareness out there to get the volume of sales you need?

A good solution may be to target the more specific terms (‘vegetarian dog food’ and ‘vegetarian dog food recipe’).

These are part of the long tail.

But you are going to need more visitors than these will provide to achieve your revenue projections. So, you will combine the long tail phrases with topic-based keywords that try to capture higher search volume.

You are going to seek topics or areas to target that have a good level of search intent for you.

“What may these be?”, you ask.

Well you could look into developing pages for:

‘Vegetarian dog owners’
‘Homemade dog food’
‘Healthiest dog food’
‘Tips for a healthy dog’
‘Do dogs need meat’
And so on

We’ll show you how you can find these topics and keywords in a moment, but first we’re going to need to take a journey down the long tail.

The long tail

Now you know that the long tail is not one of the supposed benefits of a meat-free canine, we can take a look at the search curve.

On the vertical are the number of monthly searches. On the horizontal are the number of keywords.

So, the top 100 keywords (the first, yellow, band) is made up of just 100 keywords but represents millions of searches.

Yet, there is an infinite regress that you need to picture on the graph above: just imagine that long tail heading off into the distant horizon

Those high demand keywords – the Fat Head and the Chunky Middle – like ‘shoes’ or ‘dogs’ – sure do get a lot of traffic.
Just a few keywords account for 30% of all searches.
Yet, in terms of searches made online as a whole,
70% of the traffic comes from the long tail.

It’s true that there will be hundreds of millions of unique searches that make up the long tail but, when taken together, they constitute the vast majority of the world’s search volume.

But here’s the truly great thing about long tail keywords: they tend to convert better.

Why is this? Because the person using them is further down the buying journey and already knows exactly what they want.

In other words, the long tail can deliver buyers not browsers.

Quick tips for finding long tail keywords

1. Add your location to the head term (plumbing supplies New Jersey).

2. Find buying signals and add them in (Buy Panasonic Digital SLR, Panasonic Digital SLR reviews, Panasonic Digital SLR offers).

3. Look for ways to make a generic phrase specific to your offering (classical guitar lessons at home).

4. Get descriptive (shiny black high heel shoes).

5. Add actions (How to, Learn, Compare).

And you will find lots more tips at the end of this article.

Finding keywords

Now that you understand the sorts of things to look for in a keyword it is time to do some research.

Google’s free Keyword Planner (KP) is a good place to start. But be warned: the Big G, in its infinite wisdom, is starting to limit the quality of the data it provides through this tool to those who do not advertise with it (yah boo).

Don’t panic: there are suggestions for other tools at the end of this article and we’re going to look at ways that you can undertake your own research next.

In the full version of this SEO course you can also find a lot more detail about using the Keyword Planner and also even more useful information on ways you can choose your keywords, based not just on their fit for your business, but also on how easy they may be to rank for.

And, that’s what you call having your cake and eating it!

Extending your research beyond the Keyword Planner

Many SEO experts feel that the ideas returned by Google’s Keyword Planner are all too similar to the original phrase they were created from.

We’re afraid this is true.

In addition, many feel that Google’s algorithm now works more by matching search intent than religiously comparing keyword usage.

And this most certainly is the case – we touched on this previously in this course.

So, you are going to need to use the good old Keyword Planner as a base rather than as a final destination.

Here’s how you can extend your keyword research so that it will meet your search goals:

Generate a basic list of keywords to target (using your preferred tool).
Now search the web, news, images, YouTube and content ideation tools such as Buzzsumo (here) using your list.
Collect together the popular concepts, phrases, topics and interests that you find.
And finally feed these back into the KP to check search volume and competition.

Defining your keywords

What you are trying to do with keyword research is find keywords that you will target on your site.

The rule of thumb is that you target just one keyword per page.

However, as we have seen, there is no harm in trying to predict searcher intent (what the person searching is actually looking for or to do) rather than slavishly focussing on one keyword.

To do this you would group keywords that support your primary one and thus strengthen its chance of ranking as a result.

Indeed, with the rise of semantic search many SEO experts now target by searcher intent rather than keyword per se.

Let’s just explain this further.

There was a time (long gone now) when people would advise you to create a page targeting ‘bunch of flowers’ and a separate page targeting ‘bouquet of flowers’.

Google is much smarter than that – it understands that a search for a ‘bunch of flowers’ is the same as a search for a ‘bouquet of flowers’.

(There is no harm, though, in including the term ‘bouquet’ on your page optimised for ‘bunch’. Google actually likes to see associated terms on pages about a keyword.)

However, if you are optimising a page for ‘wedding bouquet of flowers’ it wouldn’t make sense to also target ‘cheap bouquet of flowers’.

A wedding bouquet is not usually something that people look to cut corners on. Different situations would trigger the search for cheap flowers so this, if you also offer it, should have its own page.

So, to summarise:

You are looking to decide what content or pages your website needs.

Each of these will have one primary keyword that may be supported by correlates (which means keywords that are expected to be found near it and help to anchor its precise meaning to a search engine).

You will choose your keywords based on search volume, competition and your sense of how likely searchers are to convert from them. (We’ll show you how you can fine-tune your understanding of a keyword’s competitive ranking next).

And now, of course, you will ask us how many keywords you need.

Sorry, but there is no answer – except ‘it depends’.

Try and start with around 50 to 100 but look to make semantic groups of these. A semantic group are keywords that are all very closely related and can, therefore, all be targeted on one page.

This should leave you with about 20 to 50 keyword groups headed up by a main keyword for each. You can now pick the keywords that give you the best chance of ranking. And once you have these you can build or redesign your website according to these, and any that do not merit a page of their own can be targeted by blogs or new content as you develop and promote the site.

To find out more about keyword research you can simply hop over to Amazon and spend less than a pint in London on the complete course.

I’ll add a link to the next SEO instalment here as soon as it’s up and ready. (And you can play catch up on those you’ve misssed if you need to).

And, because I’m nice like that, here are some free suggestions for tools, videos and articles to help you dig a little deeper into this critical area.

Happy digging!

These two short videos by Moz will help you understand how keyword research has changed in recent years as topics become more important. Find them here and here.
Explore more about the long tail here.
Watch a video from Neil Patel on keyword research here.
Let Brain Dean aka Backlinko show you how to research keywords like a boss here.
Discover more about semantic search here.
Try out these 12 free keyword research tools here, but the two we’d recommend are Moz (here) and WordStream (here).
Access Google Trends (here) to see how the popularity of search terms has increased or decreased with time.
Use Buzzsumo (here) to find the most popular content out there.