How to Find the Best Long Tail Keywords Using Free Tools

Are you struggling to get enough traffic to some mind blowing articles written by you? Do you feel jealous when people with shabbily written articles are ranked higher than you at Google Search? If the answer to the above questions is yes, then it is high time for you to learn Keyword Research.

Without using proper keywords, no matter how good your articles are, you may not be able to generate enough traffic to your Blog.

If you are a total beginner and have no idea about what Short Tail and Long Tail Keywords are, I suggest that you read my article about Various Types Of Keywords And Its Importance In SEO

Those who already know the basics of keywords must be knowing how important Long Tail Keywords are for bloggers, especially for the ones who are new to the blogging fraternity.

But the fact is, most bloggers don’t know how to find the perfect Long Tail Keyword that can draw a good amount of traffic to their blog. In this article am going to explain you the same.

Now before you scroll down and get turned off by the length of this article, let me tell you, if you read it through the end, you can find your Long Tail Keyword in less than half the time you spend reading this article. This article covers all the methods which you may use to find Long Tail Keywords. However, in actual practice, you may just be using one or two of them.

How To Find Long Tail Keywords

Let us find a long tail keyword which has decent search volume and is easy to get ranked for on the first page of Google. Am going to stick to finding Long Tail Keyword for “Search Engine Optimization.” You can take it as an exercise and see if you can find a good keyword yourself for the same topic.

This will also help you to know if you face any problem following this method. In case you do, you can immediately get your doubts cleared in the comments section.

The entire process of finding the Long Tail Keyword can be divided into three steps. Let us go through each one of them in detail:

Step 1: Identifying The Long Tail Keywords

In this step, you need to identify various Long Tail Keywords which you may use in your article. These keywords will be further filtered in the subsequent steps, so make sure to select at least 20-25 relevant keywords if your niche is not very competitive and around 100 keywords, for a competitive niche.

You can find the keywords using any of the following tools:

a. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is one of the most commonly used tools for identifying Long Tail Keywords. Though it may not fetch more number of reslts, but it sometimes comes up with some unique keywords which are easy to rank for at search engines.

To find the keyword, login to Google Keyword Planner using your Google account. If you do not have account, you can create the same for free.

Next, enter your primary keyword in the “Search For New Keywords Box”, you may also enter multiple keywords here. Since our target is to find Long Tail Keywords for “Search Engine Optimization” you can also use “SEO”. However, I am going to use only one keyword.

Next, you can set the filters to refine your results. If you are targeting audience from any particular country, you can consider adding location filters.

Once you have the necessary filters set, click on Get Ideas. On the next page, select “Keyword Ideas” tab. The box at the bottom, highlighted in red, will show you various keyword Ideas that you may consider using.

b. The Traditional Google Auto-Suggest Method

Google auto-suggest feature is another free way of finding Long Tail Keywords. Most of you must already be using this feature for your keyword research. For those who do not use it, let us learn how to use this free tool.

All you need to do is open Google Search and slowly start typing the Short Tail Keyword. As you can see, even before I could complete writing the entire phrase, Google suggested some Long Tail Keywords. Since Google uses this auto-suggest feature to display queries which are frequently searched by people, these keywords usually have good search volumes.

The main drawback of this method is that you can get only four keywords at a time, and so you may have to try various combinations to get more keywords which is very time-consuming.

c. Ubersuggest – Google Auto Suggest Simplified

Ubersuggest is a great online tool to find Long Tail Keywords which makes use of Google auto-suggest feature. All you need to do is add your short tail keyword in the search box and click on suggest. Ubersuggest will come up with almost every possible search query for that particular keyword.

This tool simply appends an alphabet, a number or a special character at the end of the Keyword and displays the Google Auto suggested keywords for each of these combinations. It came up with 100+ keywords for our query which is much more than what we targeted.

However, not all of these keywords will be useful. You will have to select the relevant keywords out of this and download or copy the same.

The main disadvantage of this method is that it will only append a letter at the end of the keyword. Therefore, it will give you keywords starting with your search phrase and will ignore keywords in which the search phrase appears at the middle or towards the end.

d. Keyword Tool

Keyword Tool works similar to Ubersuggest except that it also appends a character before your keyword so that you get almost double the number of keywords for your search phrase. However, it is a freemium tool which provides 750 keywords for free.

With Keyword Tool, in addition to Google, you can also do Keyword Research for YouTube, Bing, Amazon and App Store.

Step 2: Finding The Popularity of Keywords

Now that you have a handful of keywords, the next step would be to find how many monthly searches each of your selected keywords receive.

a. Use Google Keyword Planner To Find Popularity

It is the traditional and the most reliable method of determining the popularity of Keywords. The steps for determining the popularity of keywords using Google Keyword Planner is exactly similar to identifying keywords as discussed earlier in step 1.

You can copy-paste the master list of data found in Step 1 either to “Search For New Keyword” box or to “Get Search Volume Data” box. The former method may give you more keyword ideas, but cannot be used if you have more than 200 keywords. By following the exact method as in Step 1, you will now have monthly search values for each of the keywords.

b. Using “Keywords Everywhere” Browser Extension

If you are using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browsers, you can install “Keywords Everywhere” extension to find the search volume of any keyword. This extension works with Google Analytics, Google Webmaster, Google Search, Google Trends and Ubersuggest among others.

After Installing this addon, you can directly find the Search Volume of keywords in Ubersuggest.

Though “Keywords Everywhere” uses data from Keyword Planner, it is not 100% accurate. As a example, “Search Engine Optimization Tips” is searched 1900 times per month according to Keywords Planner. However, Keywords Everywhere does not show any data for the same. Barring few such instances, Keywords everywhere is usually accurate.



At the end of this step, we will be shortlisting all the keywords which have more than 50 Monthly searches. I usually used to use a total of six Long Tail Keywords.

STEP 3: Finding Competition For The Keyword

Generally, higher volume keyword comes with stiff competition even if it is a Long Tail Keyword. Therefore, we need to check our shortlisted keywords for competition to make sure we can rank for it on the first page of Google.

a. Manually Checking SERP for Competition

It is the most time consuming but the most fool-proof method of checking the competition. If for a given search query, you have high authority blogs like Tech Crunch, ProBlogger, Hubspot, Searchengineland, etc. ranked on the first page, it is going to be extremely difficult for you to replace them.

If you see YouTube results or any other low authority blogs or websites on the first page, you can easily make it to the first page of Google.



The presence of high authority websites is not the only factor which you must consider. You must also see if these high authority websites are using the keyword in the post title, permalink and meta description. If the keyword is in content, whether or not it is used as a single phrase.

If you find few high authority blogs on page one who are using keywords just in content, that too not as a single phrase, this means they are not actively targeting that particular keyword, and if you optimize your article for that keyword, you may rank higher than them.

This process may sound a bit complicated for newbies who do not have sufficient knowledge about SEO, Page Authority, Domain Authority, etc. If you are one of them, you can consider using the other methods listed below.

b. Find Keyword Competition Using Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty Checker

Keyword Inspector is a free tool which analyzes how difficult it is to rank for a particular keyword on the page one of Google Search Result. This tool searches for a particular keyword on Google and then analyzes each post in the search results for various factors like Domain Authority, Page Authority etc. It will then display the Competition score for the keyword on a scale of 0 to 100.

Check here: Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty Checker

However, this tool is extremely slow, and it usually takes 2-3 minutes to analyze a single keyword which makes it very time-consuming if you want to analyze 5-10 keywords.

c. Analyze Keyword Difficulty Using SEMrush (Paid Tool With Free Feature)

Though SEMrush is a paid tool, I have included it here as it does allow you to search keywords for difficulty with a certain daily limit.

To use this tool, just check SEMrush review, enter your domain name in the search box, and hit the search button.

Click on the “Keyword Difficulty” option under “Keyword Analytics” you will next see the page where you can enter your keywords.

For paid version, it allows up to 100 keywords at a time. However, if you are using the free version, it allows only 10 Keywords at one go. I entered the 6 Keywords I shortlisted after step 2. Now clicking on the “Show Difficulty” button will show you new results.

For example, we can say that the keyword “Professional Search Engine Optimization” has the least competition with difficulty percentage of 54.3.

However, since I always target 2-3 long tail keywords, I will also use the keywords “Search Engine Optimization tips” and “Search Engine Optimization Strategies”.



That completes our Keyword research. We now have one keyword which can easily make it to the first page of Google and 2 keywords which are slightly more competitive but can certainly get to top 3-4 pages and hence give you some organic traffic.

Bottom Line

Long Tail Keywords are the best way to drive traffic to your blog, and if you know how to find the Perfect Long Tail Keyword, you can get insane amount of traffic with it.

However, the key here is using the Long Tail Keywords with no less than epic content. If you have awesome content with right Long Tail Keywords and if your content is liked and shared by your readers, you will quickly move up the Search Engine rankings for all the Long Tail and Short Tail keywords you use in your blog post.

I hope you found this article to be useful, and you were able to find some good Long Tail Keywords yourself. If you have any queries or doubts, do share it through the comments below.

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