How to find long tail keywords using Google keyword planner

By | March 8, 2016

The Google Keyword Planner is the first choice tool to start keyword research with. It shows up upto 800 keyword ideas around a given seed keyword.

Most importantly it shows monthly search volumes and cpc bid data for keywords. This makes it the most valuable keyword research tool and still it is free. Knowing the search volumes allows bloggers and internet marketers decide which keywords to choose for seo.

Furthermore, it allows to view search volumes for individual geographic locations around the world at the city level. This makes it really very powerful.

The only barrier is the 800 keyword limit and the choice of keywords shown. The keyword ideas shown sometimes may not be relevant to the seed keyword and be a little off the track.

Right now the focus is on long tail keywords and finding those with keyword planner can be a little difficult and time consuming. That is why we use other tools like keyword suggestions and related keyword searches to find long tail keywords.

However in this post we shall be putting more focus on how to overcome those barriers and Keyword Planner show more keywords and the long tail keywords. This is no magic, just neat little techniques that will make Keyword Planner retrieve more data than it usually does.

1. Start with the seed keyword

Start with your most basic seed keyword and generate keyword ideas. Choose geography and language as necessary.

Sort and save CSV

First of all sort the keywords in descending order of monthly search volumes. Then download the csv file. The keywords with the highest search volume should be on top.

Open the csv file in your favorite spreadsheet application and review it.

Note keywords with high volume

Meanwhile add all keywords to the plan. The list will continue to grow as we find more keywords. At the end all keywords can be downloaded at one go.

2. Dig high volume keywords again with “close match”

In the next step start digging down the high volume keywords from the previous step. Make sure to check the option “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” under Keyword options box.

This step is going to bring you lots of long tail keywords. Keywords with a monthly search volume of as low as 2000 can expand into multiple long tail keywords when used like this.

The process needs to be done for every individual keyword idea that seems to be big enough. Just keep adding all results to the ad plan to save them all in one place.

3. Dig using competitor Urls

This step is going to further reveal more keywords. But it is different than the previous ones. Find out the top competitor urls for your keywords.

Find your competitors

If you don’t already know, who your competitors are, just search using some keyword phrase and note the top 10 or 20 results. These are your competitors who you need to outrank through SEO. These could be forum sites, blogs, or ecommerce sites.

Get keywords of each competitor

Now take each of these competitor urls one by one and feed them into keyword planner. It would then once again come up with new and newer keyword ideas around these urls. The good thing being, that most of these keywords would be long tail and with some good search volume numbers.

4. Get more long tail keywords with keyword suggestions

The above steps would generate lots of long tail keywords. If you wish to have more, generate keyword suggestions from Google.

Generate keyword suggestions

Use the SeoStack Chrome extension to do this.
It is a free extension that generates keyword suggestions from Google and Youtube around a seed keyword.

Get keywords suggestions

Get keywords suggestions

Get search volume data for keyword suggestions

Prepare a complete list and then feed these keywords back into Keyword Planner to get the search volume data. Now you should have plenty more keywords compared to what was found with the keyword planner alone.

Final Thoughts

Long tail keywords are the most important technique and tactic to build organic traffic today. They are the cornerstone of modern SEO. Finding them takes time, experience and a proper understanding of the market you are trying to target.

If you are looking for more keyword research tools, check out some of these previous posts –

11 Best free keyword research tools for SEO in 2016
7 best free tools to get keyword suggestions from Google in 2016

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How to find long tail keywords using Google keyword planner

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