Examining user intent through keywords

To understand the value of long tail keywords, we need to think about how a chosen keyword reflects the intent, as well as the motivation of a web user. Let us examine a typical customer awareness cycle. First, a customer becomes aware of a product, or expresses interest in a product. Next, the customer seeks information about that product. In the final stages before a purchase decision, a consumer will evaluate choices and make a buying decision. That typical awareness cycle brings a customer closer to a purchase decision as they progress.

Ideally, you'll employ keywords that capture a customer when they are closest to a buying decision. Imagine two potential customers; one who searches for Top-rated West Dallas pizza and one who searches for Dallas Restaurant. The long tail searcher has expressed a greater degree of commercial intent and motivation than the short tail searcher. This user has most likely decided that he or she would like pizza. The user has also decided that he or she would like to eat in West Dallas, rather than some other part of the city. Finally, the user has tried to qualify his or her search even further by searching for Top-rated pizza. This customer is farther along in the customer awareness/purchase cycle, and is overwhelmingly more likely to buy quality pizza in West Dallas than a person searching simply for Dallas Restaurant.

The graph below illustrates long tail keywords at work; short tail keywords are searched more often, but long tail keywords enjoy a higher conversion rate:

And so, the power of the long tail search comes into focus. The Internet searcher in the previous example, is pure gold to a business owner. The long tail search expresses motivation, intent, and specificity. Sure, the search volumes will be lower, but it'll be much easier to convert a higher number of long tail search users into customers. Now, here comes the bonus: most of your competitors are not going to do the extra work to capture long tail searches. While the competition is focused on the high-volume terms, you have the opportunity to secure high rankings for high value, easy-to-convert long tail searchers. Generally, the deeper you go in pursuit of long tail searches, the less search competition you'll encounter, both in natural search and pay per click. You'll need to know where to stop though; if you pursue search phrases that are too rare, you'll have no search traffic at all.

Developing a powerful long tail search strategy

Here are some tips and rules to follow to develop and maximize the power of long tail searches:

Researching keyword search volume with online keyword tools

As we've worked through learning about how to build a keyword strategy, one central tenet always emerges: the overwhelming importance of keyword search volume. If keywords are the foundation of your entire web strategy, then keyword search volume data comprises the bricks that make up that foundation. Find the high-volume keywords and rank for those keywords and the customers will come.

Keyword research is done primarily with free and paid online tools that maintain databases of keyword search volume. In the following sections, we'll cover three popular and effective free tools: Google's search-based keyword tool, Google Trends, and Google Suggest.

Google's Adwords Keyword Planner

The Google Adwords Keyword Planner, formerly the SKtool, is designed to help you determine the best keywords to target in your Google AdWords campaigns. This is the grand-daddy of all keyword tools, and should be the place you start. If you only use one keyword tool, this is it.

You'll need to sign up for a Google Adwords account and create a basic campaign, before using the tool. Google Adwords is Google's paid advertising system, whereby business owners can bid to have their ads show up concurrently with search results. If you aren't ready to start spending big money in Adwords, that's ok, simply enter a daily budget of one dollar for your initial campaign, and one cent bids on any keywords you store in the campaign.

To get started, point your browser to https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner. You'll need to log in to your Google account to use the tool. If the site you are trying to find keywords for is not being advertised in AdWords, this tool may not return any results based on your actual website content.

You'll be greeted with two choices, Find new keywords and get search volume data and Plan your budget and get forecasts. Start with the former for a simple and easy-to-understand first look at keyword volumes.

With Find new keywords, select Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category. Now you are ready to run the tool. You can enter one phrase or several; the tool will expand your list to related phrases which you can then evaluate. This screenshot shows where you'll try your first query:

Note that you can set your geographic targeting by selecting the edit icon next to All locations below the query fields. You can ignore this for now; you want to gather large swaths of data and then drill down into what's specifically relevant to your business or goal.

The query results page will show a graph with tabular keyword data below, as shown in the following screenshot:

Let us break down these results. The graph at the top simply represents changes in the keyword volume for each of the last 12 months. Pay attention, because the tables below show average monthly query volume, but seasonal terms spike in particular times of the year.

Below the graph you'll want to make sure you've selected the Keyword Ideas tab to get to the display shown above. We entered a single search term, google analytics training, and we can see in the first table average monthly searches of 4,400 queries. The graph above shows some monthly variation, but a relatively steady volume. The second table shows us more—these are queries that Google has suggested as close variants of the query we entered. Our screenshot only shows the first few entries, but Google typically replies with dozens. This feature lets us discover new keyphrases.

Understand the purpose for which Google provides this tool to help customers build keyword lists and ad groups for its Adwords product. So, you will note that the tool's purpose is you entice you to add keywords to a paid Adwords campaign. You can simply ignore the Suggested bid and Add to plan features within the tool and use the Download button to export your keywords to a spreadsheet. Of course, if you are running an Adwords campaign in parallel to a search strategy, your keywords data serves both purposes.

Google's dominance in search, and the thoroughness and effectiveness of its Keyword Planner tool, makes it hard to suggest other tools for basic keyword research. However, we do want to cover a few specialty search tools that extend and supplement the Keyword Planner.