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March 24, 2010

How to Find Long Tail Keywords for Niche Marketing

Long tail keyword tools are essential for small web entrepreneurs. You cannot compete for the most searched keywords — by now they have insurmountable competition. You must put together collections of micro niches which you can dominate. Each niche needs keywords by which people can find it. You need to do long tail keyword research to find those niches of low-competition keywords.



When you type in a keyword into the Google keyword selector tool, it suggests related keywords and gives you a downloadable spreadsheet of their search frequencies, and AdWords competition.




You can cut the keywords with too many exact matches from your list. Your pages will be lost in the clutter if you try to compete for them. What’s too many? Everybody has their own limit, but I have heard recommendations of somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000.


You tell Google to return the pages with these optimizations by searching for intitle:”keyword”, inurl:”keyword”, and inanchor:”keyword”. Delete the keywords with too many competing, optimized pages, more than 50 or 100, say. (You can find information on advanced Google query operators at )

Pages simultaneously optimized for the keyword in title, URL, and anchor text indicate that someone is intentionally trying to compete for the keyword.

If you want to sell to the people searching with these keywords, it would help to know if those people intend to buy. You can check their “online commercial intention” (OCI), at least estimates of their OCI, from an algorithm that some people at Microsoft have trained — there are questions about the methodology and assumptions used in this tool. Give the tool a keyword and it gives you a fraction between zero and one. Zero means the search seems to have no commercial intent whatsoever, and one means the people searching seem intent on buying NOW. The fraction indicates a kind of confidence level in the answer. It does not indicate a fraction of the people intent on buying. In experiments, the average value returned for non-commercial keywords was about 0.2, and the average for commercial keywords was about 0.83. Fractions near 0.5 had a high rate of incorrect classifications. Many people who intend to sell delete those keywords with an OCI less than 0.6 or 0.7. The calculator is on page

By using the Google keyword selector tool, the Google search page, and optionally the MSN online commercial intention page, you can do your own long tail keyword research for free.

Dr. Christopher, a Colorado Front Range public speaker, has set up a web site devoted to ezine article SEO at where he has gathered videos and other information about finding long tail keywords.