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Long Tail Keywords- you’ve either heard of them a lot or you haven’t heard of them at all. There was a lot of hype in the past over these keywords, and it seemed that their discovery was the ultimate AdWords gold mine. The truth is that if you are lucky and you search for the correct ones, you may find yourself a little secret that others aren’t cashing in on. There are many paid tools out there that can help you find many long tail keywords; however, if you are on a very tight budget and can’t afford these tools, you’ll be happy to know that you can find other resources in order to find long tail keywords. First, a brief definition on what a Long Tail Keywords is: 3+ worded keywords, with less competition, highly specific and relevant for searchers. Here is an example of a long tail keyword versus a head keyword for a fundraiser: the head keyword could be cookie fundraising and the long tail keyword for this could be Otis spunkmeyer chocolate chip cookie fundraising.

Google Instant + Google Suggest

Google does a great job already on compiling most popular searches, and will show you what you are thinking before you can even finish. You should be familiar with this feature every time you search as well as with Google Suggest: In this example above, I can see different variations for other ways that beige flats are popularly searched for. I can now see that some popular searches have been beige flat shoes (though redundant), beige flats with bows, and beige flats for women may be of my interest for my campaign. These can fall within our long tail category as well as variations that I had not thought of but are relevant to my product offering. I would suggest to use this for many of your head terms to see what other variations have been very popular that can be included in your campaign. You can also  expand your search to find even longer keywords. By adding a simple “for” to my head term I can even see more variations to use in my campaign. I can see that another popular variation is beige ballet flats, which can even be extended to beige ballet flats for women. This exercise is also very useful when mining for negative keywords, since you can see undesired search terms you could match.

Keyword Planner Tool

The Keyword Planner (formerly known as Keyword Tool) has had several improvements by expanding beyond head terms. My best advice is to enter whatever your main keywords are in order to find other variations, and sort these out according to competition to find those that have low to medium competition as in the example below for Flower Delivery: These can give you a good insight into what keywords you can use with low to medium competition, so you can capitalize on keywords that are not being used by your competition.

Use UberSuggest.org

This extremely helpful tool can show you an overabundance of keywords. As the page itself says, it really suggests on Steroids. Taking my same example from the beginning for beige flats, uber suggest went crazy and actually found a total of 95 variations! This can give me a slew of insight into some long tail keywords such as: beige flats with a bow, beige flats with black tip, beige flats with black buckle and so on.

Long Tail Will Be Imminent

If you are still inclined on keeping long tail on standby for some time because your main keywords have been fairly successful, you should begin to think otherwise. With the rise of Mobile, which Google has been promoting extensively, the way people search is changing. This is due to the fact that people are making more use of Voice Search and semantic search. This means that our simple flower delivery search term will gradually adapt for a mobile searcher on the go to where can I find a luxury flower shop in New York City? As you can see, there are various sources to begin to search for Long Tail Keywords, which can potentially give a positive bump to your campaign. This is especially important for advertisers who have a low budget and can’t afford keywords with a high amount of competition to begin their research and long tail approach. As I mentioned in the beginning, there are many paid tools out there, but with a little elbow grease and making use of the free resources Google has provided, you can potentially find some winner keywords for your campaign. If you know of any other free resources or tips on long tail keyword research, or you just want to share your experience with this approach, let us know in the comments below!