What is the best way to research long tail search queries?

[StoryScout]

Hi,

I am wondering if there is any special way to seek out long tail search queries?

For example, when I search in Adwords or Ubersuggest for a particular group of keywords, I only ever seem to get 1 to 3 keywords.

I am looking for the longer search terms like actual questions i.e. "Where is the best yoga studio in Doncaster?"

Currently I rely on not hitting in Google in enter but I figure that there must be a better way?

Thanks guys!

[KevinBudzynski]

There are many ways. I typically start at Spy Fu and export an inventory of keywords. I Identify relevant ones and eliminate the rest. Now I have a base list, and begin building permutations/synonyms that are relevant. For example, the query "Where is the best yoga studio in Doncaster" I would identify:

• Best
• Yoga
• Studio
• Doncaster

as objects and run it through a permutation generator. For synonyms, I would run it again. For example, I would eliminate best for favorite and keep on adding the results into kw inventory.

How are you planning on using this info?

[Linda-Vassily]

Even though Google Analytics returns (not provided) for most search terms, don't rule it out totally. Even if 87% of the results are (not provided) that still leaves you with 13%, which can be quite a lot, depending on your site's traffic. And Google Webmaster Tools still lets you see the keywords people used to find your site, so you can look there.

If you are running an Adwords campaign, under keyword details you can see which keywords were used to bring up your ad; quite often there are a lot of long-tail terms there. Or if you have site search enabled on your site, you can look at what people look for once they are on your site (useful information for a number of reasons).

When you do a regular Google search, after the results there is a list of related searches which can be useful; you can also do a search with some of the related searches to build out the list that way as well.

[trung.ngo]

I recommend checking out http://keywordtool.io/, very slick tool. Soovle is another cool tool to get long tail keyword ideas from multiple search engines (e.g. Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.)

But the tools are only the first step to finding long tail queries. You'll have to dig in and look at related searches and use the data to inform what keywords are the right inputs for the tools based on the type of long tail queries you're looking for. In this case, questions that people are asking on search engines.

A great way to get some initial data is to enter the head term into Google Keyword Planner and export the Ad Groups that Google recommends. Then put it into a word cloud tool like Tag Crowd and exclude the head term from being included in the tag cloud.  This will produce a word cloud that will give you some quick insights into how people are searching around the head term.

Happy keyword researching!

-Trung

[danatanseo]

There are some great suggestions here. I would use all of them. One nifty tool not mentioned is http://www.found.co.uk/ppc-keyword-tool/  It concatenates lists of keywords. After getting all the possibilities there, go to Ubersuggest and plug them all in. If you want to do a whole bunch at one time without being bothered by turing numbers, try using ScrapeBox. Cheers!

[wilreynolds]

Trung beat me to it but +1 to keywordtool.io, an often overlooked thing is to ask your users how they would find a solution to their issue - with a tool like seed keywords - http://seedkeywords.com/.

We have recently had success with looking at the old pre-not provided data for long tail queries, the data is fresh enough that it might open your eyes a bit to new opps and a lot of people aren't doing that.  One of our peeps Amanda might be publishing something soon about this, it helped us build / refresh content better than if we had used other tools.