Need some advice on long tail keyword research and general SEO methods.

[NoahsDad]

I was wondring if someone could please help me figure out a good way to do some long tail keyword research. I think the way I am doing it is wrong.

For instance, my blog is written for new and expecting parents of children born with Down syndrome, and today for instance I wanted to share a few tips to help parents get more sleep.

Now the same tips apply to all parents, but I''m assuming it would be better to title it more specific to my readers.

I could title it,

"3 Tips To Help Parents Get More Sleep"

but to target it more for my readers, I would need to title it:

3 Tips To Help Parents Raising a Child With Down Syndrome Get More Sleep"

but I'm assuming keyword wide the only thing I have in there is "help parents get more sleep"  or "get more sleep." which I'm assuming many people aren't searching for.

I'm also assuming more people are searching for the phrase "how to get more sleep" (but that is way to generic).

So I could title it something like,

"How to get more sleep: 3 simple tips every parent should start doing now."

Again, I'm not using the word "Down syndrome" in there (which I'm not sure I even need to since these tips apply to everyone, not just parents, and not just parents raising a child with Down syndrome. (I saw a sleep doctor yesterday who gave me some great tips, so I want to write about them..) However, I don't want to confuse google by writing about sleep tips, when my entire site is about parenting, and more specifically parenting a child with Down syndrome. So I'm not sure on how best to title posts like this, if that makes sense.

I'm also not sure on the best way to use keyword research to find the best long tail phrases to use. For example, how would I find out which of these is a better long tail phrase "how a parent can get more sleep", "how parents can get more sleep" "How parents of babies can get more sleep" "how new parents can get more sleep" "sleep tips for new parents" etc....? I'm assuming I just put each of those phrases into the google keyword tool, but what if there is a keyword combo I'm missing that has a higher search volume? Do I have to try to guess every combo?

I'm just using this post as an example, but I have this same issue on a lot of my posts. Any feedback / direction you can give me on how to best do, what I'm trying to do would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[TheGrid]

Hey I am Noah's dad too! Great name. As far as long tail is concerned, you can get some solid research on google keyword tool for free or step it up and subscribe to a service like wordtracker or keyword country. Both services proved extensive research and numbers based on inputted seed phrases. I have been using wordtracker for the better part of a 10 year professional SEO career. I highly recommend it.

[NoahsDad]

Thanks, I understand that I can use google keyword, and wordtracker, but I'm looking for more detailed info on the questions that I asked. And how to do that research.

[SL_SEM]

One of the best ways to find out the long tail terms for a topic is to run a short lived PPC campaign for the root of the phrase you are looking for.

So for example run a broad keyword campaign for: +Sleep +tips +new +parents

Let that run until you get a decent number of impressions and then you can go into adwords or analytics and look at the actual search phrases people used that prompted your ad to show.

I would also suggest using a tool like ubbersuggest that aggregates google's suggestions based on root phrases (http://ubersuggest.org/)

That will usually come back with some phrases you may not have thought of.

You could also do a search on places like twitter or facebook to see how people are talking about sleep deprivation and kids

Remember, the beautiful thing about the web is that it's malleable. If you post the article, and then find people are coming to your page through searches on variations of your title you can always go back and play with the title text (just don't change the URL).

I hope that helps.

[NoahsDad]

Charles,

Thanks for the post, but doesn't seem like I could do that for every post, every day. I'm more or less looking for some tactics to use on just the day to day type of posts.

[TheGrid]

" how would I find out which of these is a better long tail phrase "how a parent can get more sleep", "how parents can get more sleep" "How parents of babies can get more sleep" "how new parents can get more sleep"

What is your definition of better? More traffic or better conversions? That is what those tools I mentioned are there for. Anything beyond that can be determined by analyzing your analytic reports and see if there are other phrases people are reaching you for and moving from there.

[SL_SEM]

Yeah if you can't go the automated PPC gathering route then it really comes down to doing extra legwork and gaining experience over time that helps to round out your understanding of your audience's vocabulary.

One thing to note is that google will do a good job of trying to help correlate related topics. So if you are putting an article up about "Sleep deprivation tips for new parents" on a site that is known for downs syndrome info, especially if "Downs syndrome" shows up in the URL then you may not need to worry about putting it in the title specifically, and just be sure to put a blurb at the bottom about other down's articles or something like that.

Once you start getting traffic you should be able to look in analytics to see the queries people are using to find the page, and at that point you can see what vocabulary is most common.

Also don't forget that the market has probably done some of the work for you. So do searches on the topic, and find which ones come back with the most results. Grab the top sites from those queries, and throw them into open site explorer and look at the link text people are using to link to those pages. That should clue you in on the vocabulary people are using.

There is no quick and easy way to do this though especially if you are trying to maximize the queries a single page will pull in.

Finally another option would be to take the information and break it down into long tail related topics so you can write a 3 article series on the topic of sleep deprivation, with each one coming at it from a different angle in order to help each page target a longer tail term.

[NoahsDad]

Thanks for the tips. I'm not really writing a big article on sleep or anything. I just do a daily video and each day I write about different things related to our life. This just happens to be one of them for this latest post. I write a post every day, and if you look at some of my past titles, you can kind of see what I mean. Maybe I'm over thinking it, and shouldn't worry about it on every post, rather just capstone type posts.

[SL_SEM]

The "over thinking it" part is easy to do ;).

If you know the general terms, and the vocabulary is spot on then go with that. If you notice other traffic coming in with variations on the term then I would consider adding a paragraph to the article talking about that term, or perhaps even writing a follow up that could get that traffic to come back for the more specific term.

[NoahsDad]

Sounds like a good plan. On a blog like mine where you are adding more content each day, I'm assuming it's ok to have lots of days where you are just telling the story and not really trying to attract a lot of organic traffic for the post.

I try to attract organic with every post, but sometimes it seems like the post is more to my existing readers, if that makes senese.