Bloggers find low competition long tail keywords because they are much easier to rank for on Google. With two and three word key phrases, there’s so much more competition. So getting ranked can be extremely difficult, especially in a competitive niche. By finding longer tail keywords you’ve a much better chance at getting your content found on the first page of Google.
So how do you find low competition long tail keywords then? You can start with a keyword planner such as Google’s. Access here with an Adwords account. Type your main “seed” keyword into the planner and it will show you terms related to yours. Here’s what came up when I searched for ideas for this article:
The planner gives you ideas currently being searched for on Google. It also shows you the monthly search volume for these longer tail terms. The term I used for this article “find low competition long tail keywords” gets 30 monthly views, according to this tool (see pic above).
Find Low Competition Long Tail Keywords
Once you have identified a keyword you want to use which is 3 or more words long, you can check on Google to see the relative competition, according to Google. Type the keyword into Google as a normal search like so:
You should see a number appear at the top of the page which denotes the number of competing websites for this particular term. Scroll through the results and see which websites appear. This can give you an idea of the top ranking sites for your chosen term. Next type in the term again, this time in quotation marks like so:
Another number will appear at the top of the page denoting the number of specific web pages which compete for the term you’ve used. In this case it’s 10,700; a relatively low number. Less than 10 million for an open search and less than 20,000 for a phrase match search is pretty low. As you try more terms you should get a feel for the more competitive ones.
Let’s look at another example using a shorter phrase to see the difference.
Find Low Competition Long Tail Keywords – More Competitive Phrases
A similar shorter term phrase is “long tail keyword research” which gets considerably more monthly searches than the previous example:
“long tail keyword research” as a keyword gets around 1000 monthly searches! So you might think this would be a good keyword to go for as a blogger. However, on quick inspection on Google, you can see that it’s much more competitive because of the number of competing websites for that specific term:
Although a normal Google search brings up only 8,420,000 websites, the phrase match search shows 137,000 pages. Considerably more than the previous example which had only 10,700 pages competing for the term. So in this example, you can see that it’s going to be much easier to rank the keyword “find low competition long tail keywords” than it is to rank for “long tail keyword research” on Google.
But It’s Hardly Any Traffic!
I know you’re probably thinking that the keyword I chose for this article only gets 30 monthly searches! So even if I ranked top of Google (which might not happen), I’ll only get a share of those 30! This amounts to less than one hit a day, even if you’re at the top! So why bother?! Wouldn’t it be better to go for the 1000 monthly searches using the keywords “long tail keyword research”?
Although there’s more traffic for this term, your chances of getting even on the first page are considerably smaller when you use competitive terms. It’s much better getting a small amount of something, than no amount of a lot!
Bloggers create content and then float that content out into the world! The more content they create, the more those little trickles of traffic add up. As your site authority grows, you stand more chance of getting found for the more competitive terms.
But initially, it’s going to be better to find low competition long tail keywords. Unfortunately those terms tend to get less traffic. But that’s simply the way it is. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and if you chase after the most competitive terms, you’re going up against high authority websites which have hundreds of thousands of backlinks and a huge standing with Google.
Summary
Finding low competition long tail keywords is easy. Simply use Google’s keyword planner and type in your main search term. This brings up a number of search terms which are already being searched for on Google. Look for the ones which attract less traffic as they are usually going to be the longer tail keywords with much less competition.
Write a lot of content and make an improvement on the content which is already ranking. Use an SEO tool (I use Yoast SEO) to help you write SEO friendly content. This should help you rank your content. Don’t rely on a ranking and make an effort to promote your content as much as possible through social media, building backlinks and sharing your posts through your email list.
If you keep doing this and keep building content, something will eventually stick and you’ll start receiving free traffic from the search engines. If not from Google, don’t forget other search engines rank your content too – duckduckgo.com, Bing, Yahoo etc.
Make an effort to create high quality content which will stand the test of time. As a blogger, it’s the long game. If you want it faster, use PPC – see PPC vs organic.
