Keyword research has been, and still is, the best way to start out a new niche website. You need to find long tail keywords with low competition so you can rank and get traffic. These tools have been around for awhile .. do they still work to find you keywords you can rank and bank?
Long Tail Pro does still work and is still a great investment. It does a great job of finding long tail keywords. It can still use some improvements which I’ll go into below, but overall it’s well worth it and it still works exceptionally.
Suffice to say, keyword research is still alive and well. Finding a keyword and then writing quality content around that keyword / topic (that is, don’t focus on the keyword itself literally so much) works and will continue working.
What is Long Tail Pro?
Long Tail Pro is a well-known keyword research tool originally written in 2011 and it is getting better with every revision. The latest version is a cloud-based version that is even more useful as it’s accessible on ALL devices.
Long Tail PRO (or LTP it’s called sometimes) is designed to do one thing, and it does it very well. It is exceptionally good at finding the user long tail keywords. These long tail keywords are the really profitable keywords because it’s the ones where people know what they are looking for so for sales it’s perfect.
Long tail keywords encompass a vast majority of searches, but is characteristic in having low competition keywords and reasonable monthly search volume. These keywords are more specific in nature and is generally someone looking for specific information to purchase a product or service.
When you are starting a newer site, you generally don’t have much authority and can get outranked easily. When you find these keywords that have good quality searches with low competition, you can cash in and get both traffic and sales easy. You’re in essence looking for the low-hanging fruit.
Once you get the hang of it, the keyword research process is actually enjoyable because of the results you’ll see from it.
Does Long Tail Pro Still Work?
It most definitely does still work today. In fact, I was just on Long Tail Pro and found some amazing keywords for another one of my blogs on sports.
I just updated my Long Tail Pro review on Long Tail Pro right here on the blog if you’d like to see a real live search with all of the little details. It’s watching it in use over my shoulder so you see the searches, results, and some amazing long tail keywords with your own eyes.
Here is what the Long Tail Pro new cloud version looks like. This is the one you’ll get if you sign up for the 7-day trial so that you have a few days to do some free keyword research and check out LTP for yourself risk-free.
LTP is simple to use. You just pick your main topic keyword such as “keto” and plug it into the Seed Keywords box in the top and hit the Retrive button.
Pretty quickly you get back a ton of keyword results that has the Average Keyword Competitiveness score based on the page 1 results in Google for that term. You also get back the PPC bids cost so you can see which are valuable keywords. Quite often higher PPC bids go hand-in-hand with higher keyword competition scores but sometimes you find that gem in there and it’s like finding gold.
The Keyword Competitiveness for a given page is based on the domain authority, page authority, and backlinks.
The Long Tail Pro cloud version can be yours for $25 per month and you get 800 lookups per 24 hours.
How Does Long Tail Pro Compare To Similar Keyword Research Tools?
There are many competitors such as Ahrefs, Market Samurai, and Keysearch that all do similar functionality. Each does some things better, some things worse. So far, they’ve all worked however.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a heck of a tool. It is well-known, and it has earned that quality reputation. The problem is that Ahrefs starts at $99/month and goes up to $399/month.
It’s just plain expensive. If you are doing very well online and can afford it than it’s a great choice. For most of us, Long Tail Pro is a better choice at $25/month and it has very comparable research tools. Ahrefs has other competition-related functionality, so if you are looking for a reasonable keyword research tool than LTP is your best bet right now.
Also, they have some really great keyword tutorials on YouTube and many are not totally Ahrefs-specific. They do a great job with the long tail keyword topics.
Keysearch
Keysearch.co is another keyword research tool that I use on a daily basis in addition to LTP. It has a little less info when you are looking at the Top 10 results for a given search when looking at the keyword difficulty. Keysearch has Moz’s rank information like DA and PA, but LTP also comes with TF and CF which are Majestic pieces of information.
Keysearch isn’t quite as polished when you trying to find new long tail keywords and you have no idea what direction it will go to find it. In this way, LTP is more effective.
Keysearch is still a great program and I do also have an active subscription with them as well. When you’re talking under $20/month it’s a good deal to add to the tools you have available.
Market Samurai
LTP has some advantages over Market Samurai:
- Long Tail Pro allows you to add multiple seed keywords at once and Market Samurai does not.
- LTP has more effective filtering capabilities.
- Market Samurai does not give the Moz data (DA/PA) like LTP and Keysearch does
- Market Samurai is device-based. It runs on your computer. In this day and age I much prefer cloud-based solutions. They can be used from anywhere.
Google Keyword Planner
The Long Tail Pro keyword research tool pulls from the same data as the Google keyword planner so you really get the best features from the planner right in LTP.
Competitor Summary
When you compare it to competitors when you are still trying to succeed and haven’t hit it big yet, Long Tail Pro and Keysearch are your two best bets.
I do have them both but if I had to choose one, I’d go with Long Tail Pro for usefulness. Just today I found 2 keywords with very low competition and nearly 10,000 searches a month. In fact, I put one of them in my Long Tail review if you’re interested in reading it here on the blog.
Will Long Tail Keyword Research Work in the Future?
It absolutely will still work. I actually just wrote about this topic over on my post Is Keyword Research Dead or is it a Hoax and the short of it is that keyword research will stay around.
The thing that may surprise people is it’s not 100% finding a keyword and then using that keyword a lot. In fact, Google is very much a semantic search engine now. What that means is that you want to use the keyword you found as your topic for your post.
Write around the topic (keyword) that you find but don’t put so much weight in the keyword itself literally.
It’s all about looking at the keyword and seeing the user intent and writing accordingly. It’s user-based really. I got into more detail in the post I linked above with more specific information for how to figure out what the intent is.
Once you see how it works and if you write content the right way it will work even better in the future. In fact, the more this semantic searching happens, the stronger my site gets as I write for the reader just like you right now.
Where Can I get Long Tail Pro?
Great question 🙂
You can either get Long Tail Pro via my special link, or you can head on over to my review and tutorial and read a little and follow a link from there.