This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Crash People’s Parties.

SEO keywords are an important part of your website tool kit. By basing your content around keywords that you know people are searching for, and then inserting those keywords in strategic places within your content, you increase your chance of getting discovered through search engines.

Long Tail Pro is a product that can be used to generate, filter and assess the competitiveness of SEO keywords. I successfully used it to select keywords for websites that went on to receive high volumes of search traffic.

If you need to generate ideas for content to add to your site, I encourage you to follow along with the process I used.

Step 1: Select Your Seed Keywords

This is the easy part. Select some seed keywords relevant to your industry. Don’t overthink it – just use whatever pops into your head.

As an example, if you’re a landscape gardener, you might select gardener melbourne and home landscaping melbourne.

Enter them into Long Tail Pro like so.

Screenshot for an example campaign in Long Tail Pro

If you were to click Generate Keywords right now, you’d get hundreds of keywords that you’d then need to process one by one in step 3. It’s better to apply some filters so that you don’t have so many to sort through. I recommend setting Average Local Searches to 200–10,000 for a deep page or 2,000–10,000 for a front page.

If you don’t get enough keywords, consider lowering or scrapping the lower limit. If you get too many, consider setting a minimum CPC and/or a minimum phrase length.

Step 2: Filter the Results

You should aim for a few hundred keywords to be generated, because not all of them will be relevant. It’s up to you to discard the ones you don’t think are relevant by clicking the red X. For example, as a landscape gardener, you probably won’t be interested in these keywords to do with job seeking.

Irrelevant keywords in Long Tail Pro

Step 3: Assess the Competition

For each of the keywords you’re happy with the relevance of, you need to assess the competition. Click on any keyword and you’ll get a table of the current top 10 results for it in Google.

Screenshot of a competition analysis in Long Tail Pro

Here are the criteria I recommend you use to identify a keyword that isn’t too competitive.

  1. No root domains
  2. No retailers or government sites (ideally lots of web 2.0)
  3. Five or fewer title matches
  4. Two or more Page Authorities below 30 (or Domain Authorities below 60 if P.A. unassigned)
  5. Two or more Juice Links below 30 and PR of 0 or unassigned

Step 4: Write Your Content

Out of the few hundred keywords Long Tail Pro would have generated in step 1, you should be left with a handful that passed the relevance and competitiveness tests. These are your good keywords.

Turn each good keyword into a piece of useful, relevant content that you want to be listed when someone searches for that keyword. Make sure that your content addresses the keyword and gives the searcher the information they want, and include the keyword prominently in your title tag.

Step 5: Recycle and Repeat

Here’s an easy way to find more keywords. Repeat steps 1–4, taking the good keywords you found the first time around and recycling them as seed keywords for round 2. You can even repeat this process again and again.

Need help?

If you have any questions or need help with this highly specialised work, contact me and I’ll be glad to help.

And if you haven’t already, go grab your copy of Long Tail Pro.

Read the next chapter in the full edition of How to Crash People’s Parties.