How to Use Long Tail Keywords to Grow Your Blog Audience

If you ever felt like you’ve hit a wall with your blog content or audience reach, focusing on long tail keywords might be one of your best options.

Something way too many people focus their efforts on is trying to rank for generic keywords, which usually results in a lot of wasted time and effort in an area that simply has way too much competition.

What are Long Tail Keywords?

Before we get too far into how to find and use long tail keywords and how they work, let’s first cover the differences between what they are.

Generic keyword: blogging
Long tail keyword: make money blogging

While both of these keywords are very attracting and have a wide audience, one of them will be much easier to rank for, while also focusing clearly on it’s niche audience.

If you do a search for “blogging,” you can really be looking for anything. If someone is going to search for “make money blogging,” they are obviously interested in learning how to make money with a blog of their own. To get one step further you could even do “make money blogging with affiliate marketing,” which would be even more specific and give you a tighter niche audience with even less advertiser and search competition.

How to Find Long Tail Keywords

Knowing what long tail keywords are is one thing, but actually knowing how to research and find the winners is another.

There are plenty of free software tools out there for you to use, such as Bing AdCenter tools and Google Keyword Tools. Both of these will allow you to plug in a keyword, find related search terms and also provide you with advertiser competition and how many people are searching for each phrase per month.

If you would like to save a lot of time and get a premium piece of software, I highly recommend Long Tail Pro (full review). Not only will the software do everything that Google Keyword Tool can, but it will also give you a “Keyword Competition” score that will give you an idea of how hard it would be for you to rank for a specific keyword.

Using Long Tail Keywords to Grow Your Blog

With all of this mentioned, there are two key ways that you can start growing out your blog with these methods.

The first is to use long tail keywords in your pay per click marketing campaigns, which will improve your overall costs and conversions.

The next and best way is to use long tail keywords as the focus of your blog content and title.

Instead of using “How to Install WordPress” as your content and title, go more direct with “How to Install WordPress with 1 Click Install.” Not only will this help you rank better in the results, but it will also give you an exact audience of people who are searching on that exact topic/task.

If you aren’t currently building out your blog with long tail keywords, now it a great time to start!

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