SEMRush Demo: Long Tail Keyword Research Using Your Competitions Data

Atiba de Souza: Hey, what's up everybody. I am your host, Atiba. And welcome to Traffic Keys media. We're here and we talk all about how to drive organic traffic to your website or your digital assets, because more traffic means— if it's quality traffic more leads, more leads means more chances to make money and grow your revenue. 

So, today we're going to do a bit of a demo of Semrush. And what are the ways that you can use it to discover long tail keywords that you should target to rank on because your competition isn't ranking very well for those keywords. So we're trying to find opportunities with long tail keywords. But now let's talk about that.

What the heck is a long tail keyword who knew that keywords had tails. Yeah, okay. They're not actual literal tails, guys. What a long tail keyword is, is a string of multiple keywords. So, you know, pencil is a keyword. You can type pencil into Google. Well, if you type pencil into Google, Google's probably going to show you a bunch of different pencils and tell you the bunch of different types of pencils. 

It's probably what it's going to do, but that may not be what you were looking for. Right. You may be looking for, "What's the best pencil to buy for my SAT's". Now, that's a long tail keyword. See, it's a, it's literally a sentence. It's a question. So long tail keyword is when we take multiple words and smushed them, bring them together in some sort of sentence or phrase that helps the search engine and us as website owners, figure out the intent that the user had by doing that search.

That's a long tail keyword. Okay. So usually you're talking a minimum of— the minimum ooh, if I can speak, minimum of four words and it could get a lot longer. But how do we find these long tail keywords? Well, one of the ways to find them is if you're a small player in your market and you've got some big players in your market, chances are they rank for some of these long tail keywords.

Okay. And you can do some competition research to figure out which of these keywords that they rank for that, one, you're going to want to rank for. And two, which ones they're not ranking very well for that you may be able to sneak in and steal. Now, we're also going to add a caveat. Onto this, because clearly there are some keywords that don't have a lot of search volume and you can try to rank for those.

And there's nothing wrong with that. You can do very well with doing that, but we're also going to be looking for those that have high volume. That's the holy grail right there. Here's a keyword that my competition is ranking for, that has great intent for whatever it is my product or service is and the type of people that I want to have their eyeballs on my product or service. 

Right. So my competition is not ranking well for them, it's easy to rank for it, and it's got a ton of people looking for it. That's an ideal keyword to create some content around. So how do we find such keywords? Well, there's few different ways and I'm going to show you one today using Semrush as my preferred tool. 

Now, I love Semrush. So this is a Semrush demo. There is a link down below. If you're not a user of Semrush, there's a link down below for you and you can get a free trial of Semrush on me. But definitely check this out because it is worthwhile. Okay. So, the site that we're going to look at today is this one here. 

I just kind of chose the kind of randomly, cookingwithria.com. So let's say you are a food blogger— Ria is a food blogger, a pretty famous food blogger, and you're a food blogger. And you've blog about this, the types of food that she also blogs about. So technically ya'll are competition. Okay. And the eyeballs are going to her site.

You also want them to coming to yours. Alright. So we found our competitor. Great. Now we're going to come down here. On the keyword organic research report on Semrush. And we're looking at all the keywords that she currently ranks for. Right. And there's a ton of them. How many were there? Exactly?

6,200 of them. And she's generating 24,000 visits per month. Okay. 6,200 keywords. They've got to be some keywords in there that she's ignoring that we may be able to rank for that are going to be of value. So how do we do this? How do we do this? Well, we start to filter our keywords here and we have this little area where we can filter our keywords here in Semrush. 

And so the first thing we're going to do is look at the volume. We're going to come over to the volume and depending on the size of your site. So if you are a brand new site then you don't want to go after keywords that have volume of 10,000 to 100,000, heck, you don't even want to go after keywords that have a hundred— 1000 to 10,000, because you're not going to rank for them.

Google is not going to rank you up front for him. You have to crawl before you walk. So you would choose some of these smaller ranges down here, but let's say we have an established site. And by established, I mean, it's been around maybe a year, year and a half or so. We were starting to get a little bit of traffic, but nothing major.

We exist, Google knows we exist, even though they don't absolutely love us. I would say then, then you want to be in this one, 101 to 1000 sort of range. So we can choose this here or we can create a custom range down here. We're just going to choose this range here. And as soon as we do this, Semrush sometimes get a little bit sticky.

It will stick for a moment, but it's going to come back and filter this list for us in just a moment. There we go. So now, now we see here, if we look on the report of the actual keywords, I have it sorted by volume here. So we've got the ones with the most volume. So we see, we've got some keywords here at that thousand mark.

Okay. Alright. But we're not done. We're not done filtering. We, then, want to go to this next option here, which just says KD, which stands for Key Word Difficulty. Now, KD is a very subjective metric. Let me just be honest with you. Every tool determines its own keyword difficulty. Google does not create this. Okay, this is not a sanctioned thing.

Google will not corroborate or say that this is right, but what it says is what does this tool assume about this keyword? How difficult it is to rank on page one for this keyword. That's what keyword difficulty tells you based on what the tool assumes. Okay. Here's my rule of thumb, anything with a keyword difficulty of 60 or below, I consider easy.

I consider that even if you have a new site, you should be able to rank or begin to rank for a keyword that has a keyword difficulty of 60 or below inside of six months with a brand new site. If you have a site that's a little bit more established, it could happen even faster. So again here, They've got all sorts of ranges kind of listed here.

I do custom range and I leave "from" blank. That means zero. Essentially. You could put zero in there to 60. Okay. Cause I consider anything below 60, to be easy or possible. They rank it slightly differently and that's their choice. It's their tool. I'm just telling you what I've done and what has worked really well for my clients is 60 or below.

We've toyed with 70, 75, even 55. And we find that 60 is kind of that sweet spot, anything 60 and below. So now, we've filtered again. We're still at 1400 keywords. There's still plenty of opportunities here. Okay. Now at this point, because it's competitive research, we can now consider, "Do I want to find the keywords that they're not ranking well for?" The answer is yes, but before I do that, I just want to take a quick look at some of these keywords and where we're going.

And again, we're sorted by volume here. Okay. So the highest volume is at the top. And you want to start looking at the keywords and seeing are these keywords, keywords that you would want to be ranked for? Because if you're running through all the thousand volume keywords, and you're finding no keywords that you want to be ranked for here on this list, then this is probably the wrong competitor for you.

You probably think they're a competitor, but they're not. Okay, at least they're not providing you with really great value. Okay. So you can look through here some more and find what's some other keywords— I'm looking at this and some of these keywords are pretty good. I'm not seeing any that are super long tail vote.

That's the thing that I'm missing here. Not seeing anything that's super, super long tail. And maybe three words is long tail for this particular industry, who knows? But what you can then do is decide, Alright. These keywords were good, but I want to narrow it down even some more because here, for this keyword here, "Jamaican Curry Goat Recipe", she's ranked at number 64.

That's not a very good ranking. But then some down here like "Salt Fish Recipe", she's ranked at number 9. That's a really great ranking. She's on page 1. Right. And we're looking for those really awesome keywords where she doesn't rank well. So we can come back to our filters here and choose positions. Okay. We can choose positions and in the positions we can decide where we want the keywords to be ranked. 

Okay. Now I want a range. So I want anything from, let's see the lower bound of 20. And the upper bound, let's say 99. So anything between 20 and 99. So she's on page two to page 10, for those keywords. I'm curious what I'm going to find. I'm going to hit apply, and let's see what we get here. So we're going— we're at at 1400 keywords right now.

Once we narrow this down, let's see what we get here at comes. I feel like drum roll, please. Okay. So there's still a ton. We were at 1400 and they're still at a thousand keywords, so there's still a ton of opportunity here. Alright. So looking at this here. Okay. "Food grade, five gallon buckets." Okay. That's not a good keyword for me.

But now you started to look through some of these keywords and find Jamaican Goat, Jamaican Curry Goat Recipe. This is a long tail keyword, and it talks about intent. The person who is searching for this keyword once what they want a recipe, they're probably trying to make or learn how to make Jamaican Curry Goat. So if you have a recipe for that, then yes, this is great content for you to consider. So I would look here and say, yes, there is a great keyword for me, where I can compete with my competitor on a term that they're not ranking well for. Now, look at the keyword difficulty at 43 and it has great volume at a thousand.

Okay. If I'm a brand new or relatively new site. And by that, I mean, your volume really hasn't topped 5 to 7,000 yet. One keyword that has a thousand volume is a great thing for you to rank for. Okay, so we can continue looking through here. We saw this one "Food Grade Five." That's a bad keyword for me.

Father's day meal ideas. Hmm. Well, if I'm a food blogger, maybe this is a good keyword. Maybe this is something I want to consider. Alright. And so we're just looking through her list of keywords here and finding other great keywords. "How do you cook lentils?" Another long tail keyword. Okay. If you've got a recipe again, they're looking for techniques and probably a recipe.

If you've got a great answer for this publish it, she's ranked at number 93, your competition is ranked at number 93 and it's got a volume of over— well of a thousand. Yeah. So this is how guys we can find. Okay. Very easily. Long tail keywords that our competition is not ranking for that also have really great search volume.

Once you have these, you can make a list of these and then start making content that speaks to each one of those keywords, and then start tracking using Semrush. Semrush is great. Use Semrush to do this. You can track your keywords and track when your content starts to rank for those keywords and as you start to grow. Okay, so hope this was helpful.

As a tutorial, I do, as I said, have a link down below for Semrush. This is my go-to tool. People ask all the time. What is the one tool that you cannot live without? This is it. This is it, ladies and gentlemen. If I were to tell you to spend any money on SEO tools, this is the one. Okay. Alright, everybody. Hope that was helpful. As always leave me comments if you need.

And I will talk to you soon. Bye-bye.