Finding long tail keywords with a relatively small amount of competition, and building articles around those keywords, is a great way to start off your article marketing campaign. The concept of target marketing articles is based around the idea of ranking your articles on or near the top of Google’s organic search results for the keywords in your article title. Short keyword chains of two or three words are much less likely to rank highly on Google because of the relatively high competition so it is much better to target long tail keyword chains with your articles.
Finding long tail keywords which are relative to your particular niche is done by entering smaller keyword phrases into the keyword planner which you can find with a quick Google search. Type in  your short keyword phrase which relates to your business and choose ‘keyword ideas’ from the two tabs. You should get a list of keyword ideas with some which are ‘longer tail’ – meaning there are more keywords in the phrase. Use these longer tail keyword phrases to find even longer ones by entering them back into the keyword tool.
Once you have found a suitably long tail keyword phrase which fits into your business and ideally identifies a potential problem which you can solve with either your article or your product/s, you can do a little more digging to see if it is a viable keyword chain which you could rank for. To do this enter your long tail keyword into Google in quotation marks like this: “finding long tail keywords”. On a laptop or home computer you should get a number at the top. The number I got for this search was 3,430. See below just under the search bar:
This number identifies the number of pages on Google which are competing for that exact phrase. Below 5000 is good and there is a chance to compete and maybe even get near the top of Google for that phrase. Once you have done this have a look at the sites which compete for the phrase with a normal search. This should give you a good idea of the main competition for ranking your article. Large authority sites like Wikipedia or other authority sites (often .org) will be hard to compete with but if you see a blog site in the first few results it means you may be in with a chance of ranking. As you can see the sites listed are competing with a similar keyword phrase (not the exact one I have chosen) and there is a blog in there at the bottom.
There are a number of factors which will determine how your articles rank and this search will give you a basic idea of whether you have a chance of ranking for certain keywords or not. Your site’s authority is a large part of this and the age of your website and the amount of content you create on a regular basis will also have an impact. Sites often rank highly because they have been there a long time and Google recognizes them as an authority.
Although this may seem like a laborious task to do for each article you write, you will have a much better chance of finding visitors through your article marketing than if you don’t target long tail keywords. If each article gathers only an extra one visitor each month every month, over the long term this will be far better than creating articles which don’t appear at all in the search results.
Trying to rank your articles for more popular but much more competitive keywords, will often have the effect of not being seen at all in the search results and although you can promote them, they won’t gain any free traffic. Â The goal is to increase your overall traffic to your site over the long term. Remember it may take a while for Google to index your articles and as your authority builds, and you continue to create new content, your website traffic will increase also.
Remember to also use WordPress SEO by Yoast to target your articles to your specific keyword phrase once you have found it.
Please comment below if you have anything further to add or sign up on the right for more tips on building your online presence.