We all know the impact that effective keyword research can have on your website. This article assumes you’ve already got an idea for a profitable website and you’re beginning to execute your plan. Here we will discuss how to use our Long Tail Pro desktop application.

If you are already using Long Tail Platinum, you may be well aware of the strategies we’re going to share today. However, we want to show you how Long Tail Platinum can really become your keyword hub. A place to find, analyze, track, slice, dice, and sort your keywords. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Squarespace, Weebly, WordPress, Wix, or any other platform – good SEO practices will contribute hugely to the success of your site, and good keyword research is a huge part of that.

Here are 5 ways you can make the most out of Long Tail Pro Platinum:

1. How To Use Long Tail Pro – Use “Include” For Specific Content Ideas

When adding seed keywords, Long Tail Pro lets you specify words that must be included or words that should be excluded from the keyword generation process.

To keep a consistent example throughout this post, let’s assume that I’m working on a site about grooming advice and style for men.

One simple way to use the “include” feature is to look for keywords that will best fit with the type of content you want to create. For example, if I used “beard” as a seed keyword with no filtering or additional criteria – I generated 503 keyword ideas.

But if I was looking specifically for some ideas to do “how to” or tutorial style content, I could add in “how to” as something that has to be included when I generate keywords for “beard.”

When I do that, I get 17 keyword that match my criteria like “how to stimulate beard growth” and “how to braid a beard” – both of which have an average keyword competitiveness of 23, meaning I should have a strong chance to rank for these terms if I deliver excellent, optimized content on those topics.

If I was looking to do a list post, I might add in words like “ideas”, “best”, or “2015” to see what I can find. In this case, I quickly came back with a couple of promising keywords that I could turn into a shareable list on my site like “Beard Trimming Ideas” and “Best Beard Styles”:

and this one:

 

2. Quickly Evaluate Google Suggestions

Back when we did a tag team post with Dave from Ninja Outreach, we showed a few ways to get more ideas for seed keywords and finding ideas that your competition may be overlooking.

One helpful free tool is called Ubersuggest. 

When you are ‘googling’ something, you’ll notice that Google is suggesting what you might be looking for as you go:

Ubersuggest lets you type in a search term and then gives you all the suggestions in one big list. You end up with a lot of things you may not have found in the regular keyword generation process using seed keywords. I typed in “beard” and ran Ubersuggest to get ideas like this:

Next, click and drag to highlight the hundreds of suggestions on the page and right-click to copy them.

Then, go over to Long Tail Platinum and under “Find Keywords” expand the option of “Add My Own Keywords” and paste in all the results.

After clicking “Generate Keywords & Fetch Data” you’ll see “My Own Keywords” on the left, and in my case I ended up with 355 keywords to look through. I clicked on “My Own Keywords” so I would just see those 355 keyword ideas. I could then sort by search volume, or filter by certain keywords.

For my grooming site, I found a nice keyword within less than a minute – “beard wax recipe.” Maybe I’ll do a “how to” post and include affiliate links to some of the ingredients you need to make your own wax. 

Another place to find suggestions is from the Google results themselves. When I search “beards” I get the related results at the bottom of page 1:

I can follow the same exact steps and quickly add and analyze these keyword suggestions. To get more creative starter ideas to use with Ubersuggest, click here.

3. Adding Notes Like a Pro

If you are anything like me, part of finding and evaluating keywords is thinking through how you might use them on your site.

Is it a keyword that I’d write an in-depth original post about? 

It is a lower volume keyword that might fit better as a sub-topic in a different post? 

Could it be something I could turn into a list and share in my niche? 

Using notes in LTP helps consolidate these ideas and keep them all in one place so you can quickly reference them later. Sure, you can also use tools like Evernote or even just email yourself, but I find that it’s convenient to keep my thoughts in the same place where I’m doing my analysis.

Here’s how it might work:

For my “Beard Wax Recipe” keyword from earlier, I can click on the note icon next to the keyword and jot down my high level plan for the content:

Then, I’d simply move and look for other keyword ideas that look promising and calculate the keyword competitiveness. When I find more, I’ll make another note.

In the end, I can quickly go back and look at all my notes by clicking on the note icon in the first, keyword column header. The result is that now I only see the 4 keywords (out of 355) that I made notes on:

The same sorting functionality works for your favorites – simply click the “star” icon to add a keyword to your favorites list. Then, using the star icon in the column header, you can quickly see your favorites only.

Both approaches are helpful – I just like to collect notes so when I come back tomorrow, I don’t forget the brilliant idea I had for using that keyword on my site!

This is particularly meaningful when you’ve built several campaigns and found dozens of keywords – especially if you are finding ideas for multiple websites at one time. You won’t have to worry about losing/forgetting your ideas over time because some of them are in Evernote, some are in your inbox, others are on Post-it notes, etc.

Your keyword notes will be in your keyword tool.

4. Go Really Long Tail

While technically speaking a long tail keyword isn’t just about how many words are in the search phrase, you tend to find that the more words there are, the more specific the search is.

That said, you can use Long Tail Pro to quickly view only phrases that have a minimum number of words in them. This is one of Spencer Haws’ favorite ways to quickly find those really long tail keywords and evaluate them.

In Long Tail Pro 3.0, you can actually do this filtering before or after you generate keywords. In my case, I’ve already run a keyword search for the seed word “grow a beard.” Rather than deleting it and re-running, I simply use the “Number of Words” column and type in that I only want keywords with a minimum of 5 words:

After calculating the competitiveness of a few different words, I came upon “fastest way to grow a beard” which has a KC of 25 – something I should definitely be able to rank for with the right content.

5. Track Your Progress

In addition to marking favorites and making notes as you go, another way to use Long Tail Platinum as your keyword hub is to track your rankings inside of the tool.

In 3.0 this is even quicker to access.

Simply click on the yellow Rank Checker button at the bottom of the screen to pull it up:

Add your domain (or specific URL) on the left, and then type in a keyword you are hoping to rank for in the field below. Click on “add” to add that term to rank tracker. Then repeat those steps to add in all the keywords you want to track.

As you can see above, if you add your domain only – longtailpro.com in our case, the Rank Checker will still look for any page on your domain that ranks for a term. As an example, you can see that we currently rank 11 in Google for “Weebly SEO.” The page that ranks for this keyword is actually www.longtailpro.com/weebly-seo not our home page, longtailpro.com (by the way, if you’re trying to decide what platform to use for your site, we have a couple of blog posts about using Weebly vs Wix, Weebly vs Squarespace, and Weebly vs WordPress).

When you close Long Tail Platinum and come back later, this list will remain. You can then click on “Check Ranks” to get the latest rankings at any time.

Wrap-up

Perhaps you’re to this point already, but if not, hopefully you’ve seen how to use Long Tail Pro and what it has to offer; an opportunity to find, analyze, and track your keywords all in one place.

As we bring this to a close, here is an example of workflow you might go through from beginning to end:

1. Use the keyword generator and/or Google suggestions to find a low competition keyword in your niche.

2. Make notes in Long Tail Platinum on the content you plan to create to rank for this keyword.

3. Create excellent content and publish.

4. Open Rank Tracker and paste in your page URL and add the keyword you are hoping to rank for.

By following this process consistently, you’ll build up quite a list of keywords to track and then as you open up the software to find more keywords, you can take a moment and see where you stand for all the keywords you’ve targeted in the past!

Check out our newer Long Tail Pro Cloud application today with a FREE 7 day trial.