Finding keywords isn’t an exact science.  As a matter of fact, the method to finding keywords is a process of trial and retrial.  With the exponential growth of the internet and web 2.0, core keywords or broad keywords, are ever increasing in competition.  But that does not mean that you can’t get ranked in the search engines for a specific topic or niche.

Search engines are also growing and adding more useful algorithms to allow users to make searches more like asking a question.  “How to find gold,” “best places to shop,” “where to buy bubblegum,” these are all examples of long tail keywords that get the searchers closer to what they are searching for.

Long tail keywords make it easier to narrow down a search to a specific niche.  Think of it like searching for Chicago on Mapquest.  Once you find the city, you can start zooming in until you find a specific address on a city block.  A similar think happens when you use long tail keywords to search for a topic.

As a marketer of online products or articles, it’s important to know how to find and use long tail keywords.  But just like when researching for core keywords, you have to find the right combination of long tail terms that people are actually searching for.  If people aren’t searching for your long tail keywords then your hard work will be wasted because nobody will find it.  If you’re not up to speed on what keywords actually are and how they are important then you might want to read this article on keywords before proceeding.

I write informational articles and I tend to stick to a process that works for me.  I first find a niche I want to write about then research the long tail keywords that will help me get ranked with little competition.  I wrote about how to find a niche in this series on starting a blog, and now I’m going to write about how to research and find long tail keywords using Google’s free keyword tool and Google’s Traffic Estimator tool.

First thing you want to do is decide on a topic.  It can be any topic that comes to your head.  For this tutorial, I’m going to select the topic of “smoking.”  This is a very broad topic and as you can imagine it’s also a heavily competitive subject.  Doing a search on Google you will find that “smoking” (without quotations) brings back over 300 million results.

Now, take that term “smoking” and put it into Google’s keyword tool.  This tool will give us several keyword suggestions that are relevant to the core keyword.  Once you search the keyword and the results come back, do a double click on “advertiser competition,”  the row with the green bars.  The less green bar, the less the competition.

Personally, I select keywords that have a local search volume greater than 1000 and less than 50,000.  The higher the search volume and lower the green bar the better.  Write down a few of those keywords that stand out as possibilities.

Take those keywords and plug them into Google’s Traffic Estimator tool.

This will return some statistics on estimated costs per click (CPC) and estimated clicks per day.  Now, if you found a keyword phrase that had a CPC over $1.00 and clicks per day more than 2, then you might have found a long tail keyword that is worth writing a few hundred word article on.  Personally, I search for a CPC of greater than $1.00 and clicks per day of more than 10.

In the example above there is the word “smoking” and the keyword phrase “tobacco smoking.”  We know from earlier that “smoking” has too much competition.  “Tobacco smoking” has about 13 million competing pages, but the stats above show potential so we take that term and plug it into Google’s keyword tool to see how much closer we can zoom in.

As you can see above, “tobacco smoking” brought back at least 5 long tail keywords that are worth looking into.  So, the next step would be to plug the first term into Google and see what kind of competition it brings back.

A broad search brought back less than 2 million competing pages.  We can see the number 1 spot Is held by Wikipedia and 3 of the other 4, in the top 5, are held by a news reporting site, a government website, and a nonprofit organization.  The number 2 spot is held by a private individual and this is good news, but lets see what we return when we place our term in quotation marks.

In quotation marks, our long tail keyword returned 3,740 competing pages.  This is a very doable keyword term.  But we’re not finished with it just yet.

Go back to the search without the quotation marks and copy the URL of that private .com that holds the second position on Google and go back to Google’s keyword tool.  This time use the search for “website content,” shown below.

This search will give us the keywords that the number two position on Google is using.  We can use these keywords too.