A simple blogging strategy is to find low competition long tail keywords. This can be done with Google’s free keyword planner. Simply type in your main “seed” keyword and Google will give you a number of keyword variations. Here’s a quick video explainer.
Once you’ve found a good long tail keyword which is suitable for your blog, you can build content around it. With long tail keywords, there’s often less competition on the search engines. A short two word keyword will have a lot more. So by finding the long tail keywords you can more easily get your content found on the search engines. At least that’s in theory!
Find Low Competition Long Tail Keywords
Ideally find an unusual long tail keyword which is at least three words long. Then head over the Google and type it into the search bar. You should see a number at the very top of the screen on a desktop computer or laptop. This number won’t appear if you’re using a mobile phone. Competitive keywords have more pages which show up when you do this search. So you’ll see a large number. For example “earn money from laptop” brings up a very high number of 135,000,000.
Then use the same keyword for a search but put it in quotation marks like so.
Take a not of the number underneath. In this case it’s a very low number. These numbers can give you an idea of how competitive a keyword is. The larger the number the more competing websites you’ll be up against.
I like to find keywords which have less than 10,000,000 for open search and less than 10,000 for phrase search (in quotes). The lower the numbers the more chance you can have at ranking your content and getting free traffic.
If you find a good keyword which looks like it’s uncompetitive, have a look at the main search results on Google for your open keyword search. If the high domain websites with lots of authority are ranking for your keyword, it can be more difficult to get your content ranked. There’s a great tool called Keywords Everywhere which can help you assess the competition for your keywords.
Find Low Competition Long Tail Keywords
Once you have found a good low competition long tail keyword which gets traffic and gives you a good chance of ranking, it’s time to write your content around it. Ideally use an SEO plugin (search engine optimisation) to help you write your content with SEO in mind. I use Yoast SEO.
There’s a number of other plugins which can help you get more from your content through SEO too:
- Speed up your website
- Help visitors share to social media (social share)
- Automatically post to social media (helping your visibility and SEO)
See best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Look at the competition again for your chosen keyword and have a read of the content which already has the top ranking. This is your competition so you need to write better and longer content than the best result! Ideally write at least 1000 words for your article.
Make sure you use your keyword in your SEO plugin. Yoast SEO will help you write SEO friendly content and get a good balance of the keywords within your article. It will also remind you to use your keyword in your article’s title, description, meta tags and image alt attributes.
Summary
So, to find low competition long tail keywords can involve a bit of research. But it’s worth taking the time with this before starting with your article. Not every single piece of content is going to find its way to the top of Google! Some won’t even get to the first page, depending on your content, backlinks and of course competition.
There’s many ranking variables used by Google (and the other search engines) so don’t expect miracles with this strategy. But remember also that Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com and other search engines will also rank your content. So you’ll get a small trickle of traffic from those search engines too. Aim for the long term with this and make sure your content is good enough to last. It can take several weeks for your content to get listed too, so be patient and keep going.
