It’s generally agreed that long-tail keywords produce higher quality traffic at a lower cost. While it’s a great theory, by its very nature long-tail keyword traffic is scattered across a vast landscape of countless possibilities. So the question is how do you generate the extensive list of long-tail keywords and phrases needed to build a significant amount of quality traffic?

Using the Lyris HQ demo Web site Top 5 Flicks as an example, a short list of possible long-tail keywords could be:

• ”action flick starring orlando bloom”
• ”horror movie without blood”
• ”buy romantic comedy movie”
• ”war movie about macarther in Japan”
• “directed by martin scorsese”
  
  

When you factor in all the possible movie genres, subjects, settings, actors, directors, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc. can you imagine how many possible permutations of long-tail keyword phrases there could be? Oh, and then there are misspellings (yes, I spelled “macarther” wrong on purpose above) meaning that keyword phrases could easily go into the millions. Some of those keywords will get a handful of searches each month; many of them will just get a single random search here and there.

But that’s the long-tail. Individually, the keywords probably aren’t worth the effort of researching and plugging them in to your system. But collectively it can account for a significant amount of high-quality traffic.

To go after the lucrative long-tail you must have an effective way to generate a comprehensive list of relevant keywords and phrases. Following are five keyword discovery methods that will allow you to do just that:

1) Web site Content Mining

You know all of those Web sites that marketers have been working hard to optimize for years? They can serve as a great source of valuable long-tail keywords. But how do you scoop up the keywords that are just floating out there amongst all those Web sites?

Some people have created screen scraper bots - applications that scour the Web extracting keywords from Web sites. But this method has been rendered obsolete by Google’s (relatively) new Search-based Keyword Tool. Using the SK Tool, you can specify a particular Web site address and it will instantly produce a list of keywords found on that site. Click on any of those words to go straight to a search results page where you can find other URLs to enter into the tool. In no time you’ll find a plethora of long-tail keywords.

The tool also provides a way for you to organize these keywords into categories. If you have a Google AdWords account, you’ll also have the ability to store keyword sets so you can build lists over time. Once you have a big enough list, you can easily export the list for import back into AdWords or any other search engine account. It’s a great tool. And it’s completely free.

2) Search Engine Query Analysis

While the above method focuses on pulling keywords from content, this method involves analyzing what people are actually searching for in the search engines. While there is undoubtedly a great deal of overlap between these two sources, analyzing what people are looking for may be a way of getting the jump on all those Web sites that have not yet picked up on the latest trends.

The Keyword Discovery tool in Lyris HQ mines query data from over 200 search engines world-wide, compiling nearly 38 billion searches. When used with the Lyris HQ Search Marketing tool, researched keywords can be automatically dropped into your pay-per-click campaigns with no export/import required. The Keyword Discovery tool is included in the Lyris HQ fee structure, giving Lyris HQ users the ability to easily tap into the most extensive database of keyword data on the planet.

3) PPC Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence tools take yet another approach to keyword research, focusing on the keywords on which PPC advertisers are bidding. The idea here is that if companies are actually spending money on these keywords, they must be the most important keywords. Two such “spying” tools are KeywordSpy and SpyFu, with service fees ranging from $59 to $139 per month.

These services allow you to input the domain of your competitors’ Web sites, and return a list of all the keywords on which they are bidding. In addition to the keywords, there is information such as how many searches are done on the keywords, how many companies are bidding on them, and what the cost is for the top bid position. This allows you to easily focus on the least competitive keywords.

4) Permutation

If you want to bid on the keywords that no one else has even thought of, the tool for that job is permutation. Permutation means assembling keywords together in various combinations to create different sets of keyword phrases.

The key here is to save the energy of researching what people are bidding on, searching on, or putting on their Web site and just pump out the keywords automatically. Using this method you’re bound to generate a lot of phrases that nobody ever searches on, but you’ll also catch a lot of those very low-volume searches that the previous methods miss - or even those that haven’t been searched on yet.

Manual permutation takes a lot of time and patience. Fortunately there are a number of free Web-based and installed permutation tools to help make the job quicker and easier.

In terms of paid software, the leader in the field is Boxer Software’s The Permutator, an installed software that costs about $50. (Read: How to Dominate the Long-Tail Part 1: Permutation)

5) Web Analytics

If permutation is like casting a very wide net in order to scoop up all the stragglers, using your Web analytics data is more like using a fishing pole with the perfect bait to catch exactly the right keywords. Any respectable Web analytics application has some form of keyword report that will show you what keywords visitors searched on in order to reach your site. That is your prime list.

Some keyword reports are more sophisticated than others. Using the Keyword Report in the Lyris HQ Web Analytics tool allows you to segment visitors and the keywords they searched on using a wide range of criteria, allowing you to focus on the highest value keywords.

You can even take it a step further and capture the data from the internal search form on your own Web site. This way you not only know what keywords people searched for to reach your site, but exactly what they looked for after they reached your site. Now that is targeted!

Summary

Implement all five of these keyword discovery techniques and you won’t miss any high-value long-tail keyword phrases. And you may actually find that you have no more use for the big-head keywords at all.

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About The Author

Dane Christensen is the SEM Manager for Lyris. He is responsible for optimizing the company's PPC bid management across seven different search engines.

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