Like you, I have been trying to find ways of finding long tailed keywords relevant to my niche easily and without having to pay a company like Wordtracker (which I hear provides a fine service). When I found this method my second thought I had was to tell you how to do it as well. The wealth of knowledge and information that I have gained in the Digital Point community I could not have learned in any school, and this is my way to pay it back. First, lets go with what I know. I live and Victoria Canada and have a busy travel site dedicated to my beautiful city. Victoria is a world renowned destination and provides me, a webmaster, a niche to be exploited. But all the good key words are taken up and would require a gargantuan effort to try to compete with a phrase like "victoria bc hotels". So the first thing I do is type that phrase into Google search and look what I find here: See the suggestion of "victoria bc hotels inner harbour" in the drop down area? This is where I find the potential long tailed keyword I'm looking for. So next I need to see what the competition for that phrase is and all I do is surround the phrase in quotes and hit the search button again. Wow, only 10 results, I can definitely compete with that. Now some people like to search using intitle:"victoria bc hotels inner harbour". This is personal preference for the most part, I like to use the quotes only because I find I get a much more rounder image of what my competition will be. Some sites may have that key phrase in the content of their web page and could already have a good pagerank making me have to compete harder to rank well, and besides, you can see right away in the search results if the phrase is in their titles or not. Now that I have a potential long tailed key phrase, all I have to do now is go over to the Adsense Keyword Tool and see what the monthly searches are: Hmm... 720, well its not a million, but I know I could use another 700 or so visitors to my site a month, could you? All I need to do is sculpt a section of my web site or a blog post all about Victoria BC Hotels Inner Harbour(of course using that phrase in my page title and a couple other times throughout my article). With a little bit of promotion I will rank on the 1st page in the SERP and near the top. Total time involved from search to blog post a leisurely 2 hours. So whats in it for me to give you this advice? Well firstly, I'm paying it forward for all the great information I got here on DP and people that have helped me, secondly if you have found this info helpful please pay it forward to someone else to whom you can help and lastly adding to my rep. is always appreciated.
Ouch. You've made a hugely wrong assumption. Firstly - if - if it had a search volume of 720 a month - reckon on getting 40% of that traffic for the no 1 position - so that's not another 700 a month, it's only 288. But the worse mistake you've made - is you've got results for broad match (the giveaway - no square brackets around the keyword) This is an adwords tool - it matches keywords as it would for an adwords account. You need to know what the exact match volume is - which is less than 10 globally, and none locally to Canada.
Hi magda and thank you for your critique. I do admit the search volume is low and many people wont bother with anything under 2000 searches, I don't bother with anything under 500 personally unless I'm bored or I like the subject. I tried to use the square brackets like you said "[ ]" and achieved the exact same results, perhaps if you could give an example of its usage in case I miss understood you. I'm curious magda, how do you calculate the exact match volume? Do you use a tool or service that is fee or paid for? I personally am a big fan of finding effective results for free, I know there are some specialized paid for services out there that are far more accurate than my method. As a side note about searching in Google with quotes to see the competition I'm tending to use the intitle: modifier a little more, its giving me more narrow results especially if I'm pulling results from different data centres.
Great idea but before using the keyword suggestions I usually start at google insights then move over to google wonderwheel. Have you considered Market Samurai it is not free but there is a trial and it returns a lot of great data and makes this process so much easier. It also gives you search volume and number one search volume related keywords and much more. I would also suggest checking out longtail for vacation rentals on Vancouver Island and mainland BC.
I only use 2K and 3K searches for month to rank higher no for the site but for post titles. For a 2K monthly searches keyword if you get No.1 you might get 600 visits. Google Keywords Tool works great. If you are looking for more try Wordtracker
You are using the Google tool wrong. Look at the left hand panel and choose exact match. It's an ADWORDS tool. In adwords, broad match is the default setting. This means when you put this keyword in your adwords campaign it will be matched to synonyms and related terms. That's what the 720 refers too - 720 searches a month for related terms. It's meaningless for organic search. You're wasting your time on things that get no search volume at all, ever.
Magda, thank you! You have saved me a lot of wasted time, confusion and disappointment. Its people like you that is the reason why I love DP so much. In fact I wish more people would put there ideas in detail up in the forums like I did, then we all learn from our collective knowledge. reapr, thanks for the hints. So, moving forward. I now have a more accurate tool for determining searches by using the "Exact" modifier in the Google keyword tool, and of those numbers I should only expect %40 click through rate (CTR) if my article places well in the SERP's. Well, its not as easy finding long tailed keywords than I had thought yesterday, but I think my method still has some value... considering its free. There are all those long tailed keywords out there with no competition but have 10-100 or more searches a month, there must be some value in creating an article with 10 or more related key phrases that could generate significant traffic. Hmmm... maybe that's the next level of SEO, but it also speaks to a fundamental SEO rule, content is king.
@ dmvictoria Perhaps you might consider adjusting your first post a bit? To avoid that others make the same mistake? Additionally, if you check out your competition, make sure you are locked out of all Google services or to use Scroogle, if you are still logged into Google, your search results will be screwed up by your "personal search history" that Google applies to it. As for the one that suggested using Market Samurai, the keyword research module stays actually available after the free trial has expired, SY
Hi hospitaleracha, I too have thought about editing my post, but I don't seem to be able to now. Does anyone know how to do it? DP seems to lack any basic help section.
There, I changed one of the pictures. Number 2 rule of taking advice from forums... make sure you read the entire thread before attempting.