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Long tail keywords come from an old illustration comparing a lizard or dinosaur tail to the peak and curve of traffic by word for SEO keywords. You know, something like this.

The concept is simple: hyper-generic keywords, things like “shoes” or “computers” tend to have very high traffic. They’re also very, very hard to rank a site for, and they have a lot of competition. You can’t rank a site for “books” when sites like Barnes and Noble and Amazon exist.

As you go down the curve, you end up with more specific keywords. Things like “running shoes” or “children’s books.” These are more specific, and thus have less competition and are easier to rank for. On the other hand, they’re also lower traffic, so it’s harder to pull in the high volumes of traffic you need to make a successful site.

Go even further down the curve and you have much more specific keyword terms. Things like “two year old black Nike running shoes” or “that one children’s book I saw at a garage sale that one time.” These are way more specific and thus have much less traffic and much, much less competition. It would be incredibly easy to rank for those keywords, but you have to deal with yielding virtually zero traffic.



Naturally, you want to target keywords in the middle. The generic keywords are too high competition for you to ever get a share of the pie. The super-specific keywords have such low volume that they might as well not exist. It’s the middle of the road where the money lies.

The hardest part of all is identifying which of these long tail keyword phrases are perfect for you. You need to find phrases that are:

• Related to your primary subject closely enough that your site is relevant as a search result, and thus it’s possible for you to rank highly for the term.


• Have enough of a search volume that you’re able to pull in a reasonable number of users, who will be exposed to your site and can become regular uses or paying customers.


• Have low enough competition that you’re night fighting for every scrap or being completely run out of the niche by more dominant forces.

So, how do you locate these keywords? There are a number of options available, so try them out.

Google’s Autosuggest

When you start typing something into Google, Google comes up with half a dozen ideas of what you might want to search for. Typically, these are related long-tail keywords. So if you were to type in “running shoes” Google might present you with “Running shoes reviews” or “Running shoes for women” as suggestions. These are ideas you can use for long tail keywords. However, Google doesn’t give you a traffic estimation along with these suggestions, because they’re meant to be user queries, not keyword research.

Similar to these suggestions, when you run a query, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page. You’ll see “searches related to…” with a bunch of longer keywords. These will be other related searches you can use as long tail ideas.

If you want something a little more automated and a little more widespread, try outSEOChat’s keyword suggest tool. This tool allows you to plug in a search term. It will then run a number of searches through Google, Bing, Amazon and YouTube, harvesting their suggestions. It will then run searches that plug in each letter of the alphabet and harvesting those suggestions as well, so you end up with a page of hundreds of search suggestions. At least a couple of them should be worthwhile.