Top 5 tools for generating long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are keywords with low monthly search volumes. It doesn’t matter if they consist of two, three or 10 words.

Due to their low popularity, they are often less competitive and easier to rank for than short-tail keywords. This makes them a great target for new websites.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to find long-tail keywords using five main tools.

Keywords Explorer is a keyword research tool that works on a database of billions of keywords.

Here’s how to use it to find long-tail keywords:

1. Search for a word or phrase that defines the industry
2. Go to Matching terms report
3. Filter by keywords with up to 300 monthly search volume
4. Filter for keywords with traffic potential (TP) up to 300

If you’re wondering what the TP filter does, it filters out long-tail keywords where the current top-ranked page gets a lot of search traffic. Because these keywords are less common ways of searching for popular topics, they’re usually difficult to rank for.

For example, “hair loss patches” is a long-tail keyword. But it has a high Keyword Difficulty (KD) score, as it’s just a less common way to search for “alopecia.”

Let’s look at how to find long-tail keywords for various websites and content types.

Long tail keyword research for ecommerce

1. Enter a product or product type as a seed keyword
2. Go to Matching terms report
3. Filter by keywords with up to 300 monthly search volume
4. Filter for keywords with traffic potential (TP) up to 300

For example, if you run a clothing store, you could enter suits like “sweater” and “sweaters.”

Researching long-tail keywords for blog posts

1. Enter a generic topic as a seed keyword
2. Go to Matching terms report
3. Press the “Questions” switch.
4. Filter by keywords with up to 300 monthly search volume
5. Filter for keywords with traffic potential (TP) up to 300

For example, if you run a clothing store, you might enter a suit like “shoes.”

Affiliate long tail keyword research

1. Enter a generic topic or brand as your initial keyword
2. Go to Matching terms report
3. Filter by keywords with up to 300 monthly search volume
4. Filter for keywords with traffic potential (TP) up to 300
5. Add the keywords “best”, “review” and “vs” to the Include filter
6. Set the Include filter to “Any word”
7. Click “Apply”

For example, if you run a fashion affiliate site, you could enter a seed like “sneakers.”

Site Explorer is a competitive search tool. One of its main features is to show the keywords your competitors are ranking for.

Here’s how to use it to find your competitor’s long-tail keywords:

1. Enter a competitor’s domain
2. Go to Organic keywords report
3. Filter for keywords that rank in positions 1-10
4. Filter by keywords with up to 300 monthly search volume

Since there is currently no Traffic Potential (TP) filter in Site Explorer, you will need to manually check the traffic potential of these long queues to decide if they are worthwhile targets. To do this, install the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar, then check traffic to the first page of Google.

If the top-ranking page gets more than a few hundred monthly search visits, it’s probably not the best keyword to target, as ranking will usually be difficult.

Looking for a way to check bulk traffic potential?

Export site keywords from Site Explorer, then:

1. Paste the keyword list into Keyword Explorer
2. Filter for keywords with traffic potential (TP) up to 300

Google Keyword Planner is free. It’s made for advertisers, but you can still use it to find long-tail keywords. To do this, click on “discover new keywords”, then:

1. Enter a generic topic as a seed keyword.
2. Sort results by average monthly searches from bottom to top.

Keywords with a monthly search volume of 10 to 100 or less are long tails. But they might not be the best targets if they’re just offbeat ways to research popular topics.

To check, search for the keyword in Google and link the top-ranking page to Ahrefs’ free traffic checker. In general, you don’t want to see more than a few hundred monthly search visits to your page.

While long-tail keywords can have any number of words, our study found that longer keywords are more likely to be long-tail. This is what makes Google Autocomplete a good source of long-tail keyword ideas.

Here’s how to use Google Autocomplete to find long-tail keywords:

1. Search for a simple topic on Google
2. Scroll through the autocomplete results until you find a long keyword
3. Check traffic to the top-ranked page with Ahrefs’ free traffic checker

For example, if we start with “hairstyles”, we can easily get to “Korean hairstyle for long hair for girls” in seconds just by scrolling through the suggested searches.

But we then need to verify that this isn’t just an unpopular way of looking for a popular topic. To do this, we can enter the top-ranked page for this query into Ahrefs’ free traffic checker.

If it gets a few hundred hits or less, that’s what we’re looking for. If it gets thousands of visits, it will probably be difficult to rank for it.

In this case, it only receives an estimated 106 search visits per month, which is what we want.

Reddit is another good source of potential long-tail keywords. But again, you’ll want to check traffic to the top-ranked page for any ideas you find to make sure they’re what you’re looking for.

For example, here are a couple of hyper-specific topics I found on the SEO subreddit:

If we link the top-ranked page for “how to improve off-page seo” in Ahrefs’ free traffic checker, we see that it gets thousands of search visits monthly.

This means that the keyword is not the kind of long tail we are looking for. Either it has high search volume in its own right, or it’s an unusual way to search for a popular topic. Either way, it’s probably hard to classify.

On the other hand, the top-ranking page for “seo for news website” gets less than a few hundred monthly search visits.

This means that the keyword must be long-tailed and not an unpopular way to search for a popular topic. This is what we want.

Final thoughts

Just because a keyword is long-tail doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to rank for. There are many examples of high competition long tail keywords.

For example, “vpn for beginners” only gets an estimated 40 monthly searches in the US, but has a Keyword Difficulty (KD) score of 50/100. This is because VPN affiliate commissions are high, so the keyword still has stiff competition.

Learn more in our guide to estimating keyword difficulty.

Do you have questions? ping me on Twitter.