[su_note]Important Note: All screenshots are using Long Tail Platinum 3.0, which will be publicly available very soon. Current customers will upgrade for free. If you’ve not purchased Long Tail Pro but have done a free trial, watch your inbox for a special announcement from Spencer Haws. [/su_note]
We all know the impact that effective keyword research can make for your website.
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.
Note that a few of the features used below are available to Platinum subscribers only. If you own Pro and want to try them out, click here to get 30 days of Platinum for $1 and follow along.
Here are 5 ways you can make the most out of Long Tail Platinum:
1. 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.
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 Long Tail Platinum offers 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!
Remember, if you own Pro and want to try out Platinum, click here to get 30 days of Platinum for $1.
[su_note]Important Note: All screenshots are using Long Tail Platinum 3.0, which will be publicly available very soon. Current customers will upgrade for free. If you’ve not purchased Long Tail Pro but have done a free trial, watch your inbox for a special announcement from Spencer Haws. [/su_note]
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Any plans to release LTP as a web app. I purchased LTP when it first came out but I no longer use a windows based PC. I’d gladly pay for a web version.
Hi Ken – good question. Maybe at some point, but it isn’t in the immediate future. Do you use a Mac now? I’m a Mac user myself and you can download the software there was well.
No, believe ot or not I can pretty much do everything I need to on a Chromebook and web based apps.:)
Got it – yeah, for now LTP is Mac and PC only.
Jake, I recommend to check out “Frame”. It’s a web app for running any software in a browser. By using it, you will be able to publish Tail Pro as a web app.
I think that the public beta will start at the beginning of July.
https://fra.me/products
Hi Vladimir,
Thanks – we’ll check it out!
For linux users, Adobe air is no longer supported since version 2.6
Making the long tail pro at least compatible with version 2.6 will solve this problem for lots of users.
A web application will take time, as all the work of scraping data from google keyword planner is done with adobe air itself (not sure though),
so it’s a complete code rewrite we’re talking about here.
This is also my issue. I’d like to not boot up a windows VM when wanting to use LTP. I understand I am in the minority, but Linux support would be great!
+1
Yes there is the problem if you are using Linux.
one work-around is using emulator like Wine.
Hope they will release cloud version too.
Opensource
https://www.winehq.org/
Commercial
https://www.codeweavers.com/
*Wine and Crossover uses same code base.
Excellent! Looking forward to 3.0.
Funny, at first I switched back and forth between LTP and Market Samurai (which I still like a good bit) but here lately, for the past month or so, I haven’t even fired Market Samuarai up. LTP is doing everything I need it to do.
Nice work!
Perry
Hey Perry,
Good to hear! Thanks for commenting.
Excellent! Looking forward to 3.0.
Funny, at first I switched back and forth between LTP and Market Samurai (which I still like a good bit) but here lately, for the past month or so, I haven’t even fired Market Samuarai up. LTP is doing everything I need it to do.
Nice work!
Perry
Hey Perry,
Good to hear! Thanks for commenting.
From your screenshot for the competition for keyword “fastest way to grow a beard” you have 21 as the average Keyword Competition (KC).
Since there are two websites with 0 for competition (one is Youtube) shouldn’t you be dividing the total by 8 rather than 10.
This would yield a KC value of 27 which would be more representative, yes?
Perhaps an option setting would allow for this calculation for KC rather than the current calculation?
Thanks,
Walt
Thanks for pointing that out! We’ll look into that as the KC should be based on number of sites (not always 10). Since this is still in beta, we are still fixing a couple of issues, this is one of those that we’ll get taken care of. Thanks!
From your screenshot for the competition for keyword “fastest way to grow a beard” you have 21 as the average Keyword Competition (KC).
Since there are two websites with 0 for competition (one is Youtube) shouldn’t you be dividing the total by 8 rather than 10.
This would yield a KC value of 27 which would be more representative, yes?
Perhaps an option setting would allow for this calculation for KC rather than the current calculation?
Thanks,
Walt
Thanks for pointing that out! We’ll look into that as the KC should be based on number of sites (not always 10). Since this is still in beta, we are still fixing a couple of issues, this is one of those that we’ll get taken care of. Thanks!
Some very, very useful and actionable ideas. A blog post was long overdue here too, guys. This morning I was cancelling a subscription to another product that I wasn’t using and I came “this” close to cancelling my LPT Platinum subscription also. Not because I don’t love the product, but because making more organized and valuable searches seemed to take too much of my time.
This blog post changes everything. Come on version 3.0!
Hi Dave,
Wow – thanks for taking a moment to share that! It really means a lot and I’m glad this helped.
Some very, very useful and actionable ideas. A blog post was long overdue here too, guys. This morning I was cancelling a subscription to another product that I wasn’t using and I came “this” close to cancelling my LPT Platinum subscription also. Not because I don’t love the product, but because making more organized and valuable searches seemed to take too much of my time.
This blog post changes everything. Come on version 3.0!
Hi Dave,
Wow – thanks for taking a moment to share that! It really means a lot and I’m glad this helped.
Greatly admirable ideas generated by Long Tail Pro. I really like it, as the search volume and cpc shown by LTP is quite exact. I didn’t ever find such tool for keyword research.
Thanks for providing such a great tool.
-Nitin
Thank you for the kind words, Nitin.
Greatly admirable ideas generated by Long Tail Pro. I really like it, as the search volume and cpc shown by LTP is quite exact. I didn’t ever find such tool for keyword research.
Thanks for providing such a great tool.
-Nitin
Thank you for the kind words, Nitin.
Got it – yeah, for now LTP is Mac and PC only.
This is also my issue. I’d like to not boot up a windows VM when wanting to use LTP. I understand I am in the minority, but Linux support would be great!
Hi,
Great post and good look for the new LTP,
so can you make a fast tutorial for the basic of the new LTP(using)?
Now i got confuse to set up this version of LTP
Tutorial videos are here: https://longtailpro.com/demo-videos/
Hi,
Great post and good look for the new LTP,
so can you make a fast tutorial for the basic of the new LTP(using)?
Now i got confuse to set up this version of LTP
Tutorial videos are here: https://longtailpro.com/demo-videos/
Where do I find a manual help guide for new version big UPDATE ?
Frankly, i see it’s the most difficult version to use . Compared to the old version
I think the developer should consider the Microsoft Access theme 2010. It’s beautiful, easy to use. And it’s also a database sever so some visual is same.
Hi There,
Here is a demo video to show what’s different in 3.0 for those who’d been using the previous version: http://longtailpro.com/Videos/v3beta/v3beta.html – More detailed demo videos are still to come. In the meantime, if you have a question about something in particular not shown in the video, feel free to email it to support @longtailpro.com and we’ll be happy to help.
Tutorial videos are here: https://longtailpro.com/demo-videos/
Where do I find a manual help guide for new version big UPDATE ?
Frankly, i see it’s the most difficult version to use . Compared to the old version
I think the developer should consider the Microsoft Access theme 2010. It’s beautiful, easy to use. And it’s also a database sever so some visual is same.
Hi There,
Here is a demo video to show what’s different in 3.0 for those who’d been using the previous version: http://longtailpro.com/Videos/v3beta/v3beta.html – More detailed demo videos are still to come. In the meantime, if you have a question about something in particular not shown in the video, feel free to email it to support @longtailpro.com and we’ll be happy to help.
Tutorial videos are here: https://longtailpro.com/demo-videos/
I need to do some keyword research for a new project and I am so glad came across your article. this looks perfect for what I need.
I need to do some keyword research for a new project and I am so glad came across your article. this looks perfect for what I need.
Jake, I recommend to check out “Frame”. It’s a web app for running any software in a browser. By using it, you will be able to publish Tail Pro as a web app.
I think that the public beta will start at the beginning of July.
https://fra.me/products
Hi Vladimir,
Thanks – we’ll check it out!
Great Strategies For using Long tail PRO Jake 🙂 I’m starting to follow your method now
Hi Max – thanks for reading and I’m glad it was helpful.
Great Strategies For using Long tail PRO Jake 🙂 I’m starting to follow your method now
Hi Max – thanks for reading and I’m glad it was helpful.
Thanks for this – my SEO guy uses this and he and I have been putting our heads together to get the best results. Obviously, without this tool, the amount of work that would go into getting good results would take much longer.
Thanks for this – my SEO guy uses this and he and I have been putting our heads together to get the best results. Obviously, without this tool, the amount of work that would go into getting good results would take much longer.
Using LTP For Many Days…Love this and thanks for the update, I have written a review about it, link is http://bytecode.com.bd/blog/long-tail-pro-keyword-tool-review/ Please give me suggestion to improve it or you are welcome to write more details about it.
Thanks….
Using LTP For Many Days…Love this and thanks for the update, I have written a review about it, link is http://bytecode.com.bd/blog/long-tail-pro-keyword-tool-review/ Please give me suggestion to improve it or you are welcome to write more details about it.
Thanks….
+1
Hello i want to try this tool for my weight loss blog. That blog is only 3 months old and i have drove 3k visitors without using this tool and its too tough to do this work alone. So i thought to give this a try but i could see that the 10 day trial offer is long gone. And i don’t have any money to invest as of right now. Can anyone help me with this!
Please i want to get good amount of visitors to my site. Help me Long Tail Pro Team.
Hi Arijit – the 10 day free trial is alive and well 🙂 – here you go: https://longtailpro.com/special-free-trial-offer/
Hello i want to try this tool for my weight loss blog. That blog is only 3 months old and i have drove 3k visitors without using this tool and its too tough to do this work alone. So i thought to give this a try but i could see that the 10 day trial offer is long gone. And i don’t have any money to invest as of right now. Can anyone help me with this!
Please i want to get good amount of visitors to my site. Help me Long Tail Pro Team.
Hi Arijit – the 10 day free trial is alive and well 🙂 – here you go: https://longtailpro.com/special-free-trial-offer/
Great post. I’m curious, is it possible to add several “include” words at a time within LTP? For example, ‘how to,’ ‘best,’ ‘vs,’ ‘review,’ etc. all at the same time?
Hi Grant,
Good question and the answer is “no” at this point. Your best bet might be to add several varieties as seed keywords like “piano”, “best piano”, “piano reviews” etc. and then use the quick filter after the results have run to see only the ones you want.
Great post. I’m curious, is it possible to add several “include” words at a time within LTP? For example, ‘how to,’ ‘best,’ ‘vs,’ ‘review,’ etc. all at the same time?
Hi Grant,
Good question and the answer is “no” at this point. Your best bet might be to add several varieties as seed keywords like “piano”, “best piano”, “piano reviews” etc. and then use the quick filter after the results have run to see only the ones you want.
Finding the keyword by LTP is more effective than Market Samurai because of simple functions. However, there are many updates for this tool.
Thanks Ngan, we are constantly improving the Long Tail Pro.
Finding the keyword by LTP is more effective than Market Samurai because of simple functions. However, there are many updates for this tool.
Thanks Ngan, we are constantly improving the Long Tail Pro.
Excellent – trying to get my site ranked and this information will definitely help me along the way.
Thanks for the great information!
Thank you, Cori!
Excellent – trying to get my site ranked and this information will definitely help me along the way.
Thanks for the great information!
Thank you, Cori!
This is really an awesome guide for platinum, I am not yet platinum but before buying it I am learning how to use it properly. Thank you for sharing
This is really an awesome guide for platinum, I am not yet platinum but before buying it I am learning how to use it properly. Thank you for sharing
woww. Learnt alot from this blog. I was looking for this. Thanks team
You are welcome.
woww. Learnt alot from this blog. I was looking for this. Thanks team
You are welcome.
Spencer-
I like to use the keyword filter with “-keywords” so I can find all the keywords I’d like to get rid of on my list. Once I have this filtered down to those words I want to delete will clicking on the trash icon at the top level of the KW filter delete JUST the words being displayed?
I believe the trash icon at the top level is a filter – meaning it will show you trashed keywords, it won’t delete keywords.
Spencer-
I like to use the keyword filter with “-keywords” so I can find all the keywords I’d like to get rid of on my list. Once I have this filtered down to those words I want to delete will clicking on the trash icon at the top level of the KW filter delete JUST the words being displayed?
I believe the trash icon at the top level is a filter – meaning it will show you trashed keywords, it won’t delete keywords.
Just about to purchase long tail pro through Chome store to use on my Chromebook, if it does not work properly as now windows or mac based how do I ask for a refund ? Thanks
Just about to purchase long tail pro through Chome store to use on my Chromebook, if it does not work properly as now windows or mac based how do I ask for a refund ? Thanks
Hi,
Great post! I have one question in mind, should I be using long tail keyword exactly in my post URL without eliminating stop words from it or should I remove stop words from my URL? For instance, if I want to target “How to Buy a Smartphone”, should I use “how-to-Buy-a-Smartphone” or “Buy-Smartphone” as URL?
Thanks
vary good info..