Every webmaster wants to rank on the search engine result page (SERP). That’s where you’ll get traffic organically. People just never go to the second page of the SERP, because they don’t need to. In order to rank their page, webmasters usually go for keywords with high search volume because it indicates there is huge traffic. In other words, there are people searching for it.

Now, ever have a great blog post title and idea but when you’ve done your keyword research, the keyword shows a low search volume? Ended up forgoing that blog post?

Well, today, I will be sharing with you the situations when you can actually ignore a keyword’s search volume. For your reference, below is a list of areas that will be discussed.

1. What is Keyword Research and Why We Do Keyword Research
2. What is Keyword Search Volume and How to Get Them
3. When You Should Ignore A Keyword’s Search Volume

What is Keyword Research and Why We Do It?

Keyword Research is one of the very first steps of an SEO campaign. It is the process of looking for alternative keywords that people enter into the search engines. We do keyword research also to find out how popular they are.

Keyword research gives us an idea of what to expect; traffic, sales, ranking. They’re usually done using tools where they provide data such as search volume, cost per click, etc.

What Is Search Volume and How to Get Them?

The search volume data tells us how popular the search term is. It is important to pick the “right” keyword. The higher the search volume, the higher the number of potential traffic to your website.

But a high keyword search volume isn’t always good, we will go further into details about this later on.

As mentioned above, many keyword research tool provides users with data. The data are usually obtained from the Google Keyword Planner. My team and I have actually written a few blog posts on free and freemium keyword research tool. You may read about them by clicking on the titles below:

• What Are LSI Keywords (Do they help your SEO in 2019?)
• 13 Best Free Keyword Research Tools
• Long Tail Keywords- Why You Should Use Them In Your Content

A majority of the keyword research tools mentioned in those blog posts provide data such as search volume, trends of the keyword, cost per click as well as competition. These data are obtained in several ways.

Twinword has a blog post which talks about where keyword research tools get Google Search Data and Statistics.

But let’s focus on a keyword’s search volume today and when you should actually ignore them.

When Should You Ignore A Keyword’s Search Volume?

1. When You Are Using a Long-Tail Keyword

You should ignore a keyword’s search volume when you are using a long-tail keyword. A long-tail keyword is a search term that consists of 3 or more words. Content writers use them as they’re much easier to rank for and they convert better.

Also, they’re used to pinpoint search intent as well as avoid tough competition on the SERP. The opportunity cost would be the high search volume.

Some characteristics of long-tail keywords are low search volume, low competition, high focus, and high conversion rate.

If you want to convert better, you will need to target long-tail keywords as they have lesser competition and are able to pinpoint the users’ search intent.

Long-tail keywords are specific, which means their search volume will generally be lower.

ii. Competition

Similarly, you need to ignore volume if you think competition is high. Everybody wants to rank for high-volume keywords. Who wouldn’t want a huge amount of traffic, conversions, and sales from organic search?

But not every business can rank for high-volume keywords. Those super popular keywords are way more competitive, which means many more sites are competing for the limited number of spots on the first page of the SERP.

So what can you do if you’re a smaller business with a less authoritative site? Higher volume, more work to achieve rankings.

You can obtain long-tail keywords in many ways. In fact, I have written a blog post on it:

Here’s one way: Using Google Autocomplete.

2. When You Are In A Niche Market

When you are in a niche market, a keyword’s search volume will definitely be lower because logically, there are fewer people searching for that term.

What you can do when targeting keywords with no or low search volume is using tools like WordGraph. See what keywords other people are targeting.

WordGraph.io tells you what keywords your competitors are targeting and you can use them in your content to achieve the same effect.

3. When It is A Seasonal Keyword

Sometimes, when you come across a keyword that has a low search volume, you need to check Google Trends. Perhaps, there may be low volume now but high volume for a specific period of time.

Some keywords’ search volume surge only for a particular period of time. For instance, when it’s close to Christmas, the search volume for “Gingerbread” increases.

As you can see from the image above, the search volume surges during the last quarter period of the year.

Why? Because Gingerbread cookies are made during that period. Chances are people are looking for recipes to make it. Or, they’re looking to buy them.

Hence, if you’re writing about something that is seasonal, you should totally ignore the search volume. Or… the current search volume. When the season comes, traffic and search volume will surely come!

4. When They Are Irrelevant

Keyword relevancy is more important than search volume. A high search volume for a keyword does not indicate that the keyword must be used. The tools only generate keywords that are related to the primary keyword.

Your task is to choose only those that are relevant to your content. After all, it is read by the users and not the tool. Irrelevant keywords will make your readers confused and it isn’t any good for user experience.

5. Page Rarely Rank For A Single Keyword Alone

There are many ways to ask the same question. For instance, you want to learn how to increase website traffic. Possible searches would be something like:

• How to increase website traffic?
• Ways to increase website traffic
• Steps to increase website traffic

Hence, webmasters typically include LSI keywords in their content to improve their chances of ranking. There are a few benefits to using LSI keywords.

Firstly, it prevents you from being penalized by the search engine itself. Using the same keywords over and over again in your content will make the search engine think that you’re stuffing keyword, which tells Google you’re just trying to rank instead of providing value to the users.

Next, it does not bore the users as well. It makes your content nice for the readers to read. It will increase their time on page and satisfaction, which means they will visit your page more often in the future.

Besides using LSI keywords, for some webmasters, they do keyword research and result page analysis to see which keyword would reap the most benefit. Now, take a look at the SERP below.

Now, if you noticed, WordStream ranks first for “How to Increase Website Traffic” and ranks in Position 0 for “Ways to Increase Website Traffic”. That’s two of the searches people would likely key in when they are looking to increase their website traffic.

Another search possibility would be “steps to increase website traffic”. As you can see, ThriveHive ranks in Position 0 for this query.

6. When you are focusing on voice search.

Last but not least, it is when you’re optimizing for voice search. Many do not realize this yet but, voice search will be dominating SEO in the coming years. It is only getting more popular as days pass.

We are making searches using voice command, be it, television, our cars, and mobile phones itself.

Voice Search is very different as compared to a regular search on the search engine, in terms of how we interact with them.

Regular search: jump higher exercises
Voice search: What exercises can help me jump higher?

See the difference?

If you’re optimizing for voice search, you should ignore your keyword search volume. There may be low to no search volume because they’re specific, at least for the time being. But guess who will rank when voice search becomes the norm? You!

Conclusion

Remember, the broader the keyword (or the higher the search volume), the tougher the competition. Hence, it may be more profitable to target long-tail keywords with less search volume as they have lower competition and they are more targeted as well. If you go for broad keywords, you may not even rank

Even if it does have thousands of searches each month, your site may not get even half of them. The top 3 pages on the SERP capture the most traffic share and they are usually pages that are authoritative.

Hence, it’s better to focus on niche, long-tail keywords. Every single keyword can potentially bring in revenue regardless of search volume. It all depends on how you convey your message, how well you write for your readers, and how well you promote your content.

Say you have written a great content and hit the publish button. What’s next?

You log into your analytics to see the traffic. Chances are you’ll see something like the image below that shows you how many visitors are currently reading your content. 

Well, most of the time reality tends to hit you hard in the face… but it actually does not have to be that bad. Let’s look at the statistics below.

It is reported that in March 2019 alone, over 4.4 million blog posts were published every day! That’s equivalent to 51 blog posts being published every second.

If you want your hard work to stand out from the rest, your efforts should not just revolve around writing “just another” blog post. 

It may sound cliche to say this but you must be willing to put extra work to see a positive return on your work. Yes, extra effort is needed here!

So, the question is – how do you get people to read your content?

Trust me, there are endless tactics and strategies out there to get people to read your content. Well, if you don’t believe me, try searching for “how to get people to read my content”. You’ll see a whopping 7.56 billion search results returned on Google! 

You can simply pick any of the suggestions and implement them right away. But we all know it’s not as easy as it sounds when it comes to doing search engine optimization. Why? Because Google now uses more than 200 factors in their algorithm. The good thing is you don’t have to tick off all the 200 algorithm lists because it’s nearly impossible anyway!

Today, we will be looking at one of the core elements that get your content optimized for Google and humans; keyword gap analysis. 

It is the one strategy that you should be using for your next great content. 

Of course, I have implemented the strategy myself and has proven to work! It is now my turn to share them with all of you. 

Let’s start!

What is keyword gap analysis for SEO?

Keyword gap analysis is the process of analyzing your existing content and discovering the “gaps” between your keyword strategy and your competitors as well as uncovering areas of opportunity. 

The main reason why we are looking at keyword gap today is that it really does help our content to perform better. This is done by comparing what is lacking in your content when compared to competitors. Stay with me, I will be explaining more on this in a bit… 

Let’s assume you have written a topic on “the benefits of exercising” for your fitness website. 

How do you make sure your targeted visitors are able to find you in the sea of content produced every single second? Is your content relevant to your customers? What are the keywords they are using to find you? What are the keywords your competitors are using? I’m sure all these questions have lingered in your mind before as I did.

To be able to rank on the first page of the search engine result page is not depending on luck or magic. A major part of it comes from identifying the right keyword searchers used when doing a search. 

Here comes the question – Have you ever wondered what keywords your competitors are using to tackle those searches but are not found in your content?

This is where keyword gap comes in. You want to fill in the “gap” by using the right keywords to close the gap between your content and the searchers’ queries.

Why does keyword gap analysis matter to you?

Because keyword gap analysis allows you to see where you are being outperformed, what you need to do next and most importantly how you can outrank others. 

Have you ever played a puzzle? Doing keyword gap is exactly the same as completing a puzzle. You find the missing pieces or “gap” from the whole picture. Once you discover it, the picture will start to look a lot clearer. This is where optimization is done and getting better rankings will follow suit. 

Here are the strategies you can use to get the most out of your keyword gap analysis. 

How can you do keyword gap analysis?

Filling in the “gap” should not be that hard right? I would say yes if you know what exactly is the gap that you are looking at. Without further ado, let’s find that missing gap and fill them up!

 Allow me to show you the five steps on how to conduct keyword gap analysis. 

1. Expand your target keyword

Before writing your content, you must already have listed down a few keywords that you want to rank for. 

Now, write them out on a piece of paper and expand them with another list of keywords you believe should be found in the search engines.

2. Identify your competitors

Knowing who your competitors are is a crucial part of doing your keyword gap analysis. In fact, it is the deciding factor for your keyword choices. 

If you already know who you are competing with, you may skip this step and move on to the next step. But if you have not, do read on.

Then, type your target keyword into Google and write down the sites that show up on the first page. 

You may notice that some sites may appear more than once on the first page. This indicates a high authority for that particular topic.  For example, Webmd.com appears twice for the same search term in the example above. 

When finding who your competitors are, it’s important that you find sites that are “truly” competitive with yours. Comparing “Medlineplus.gov”, “Mayoclinic.org or “Webmd.com” with your fitness site would not be a fair comparison. I would suggest you not include large brand or site operated by the Public Interest Registry. 

Basically, we are looking at a competitor that is performing slightly better than us, and that we are still able to catch them up. We don’t want to be aiming for keywords that we have no chance to rank at all.

3. Identify the missing keywords

Next, it is time to identify the keywords that your competitors rank for and don’t rank for. 

To ease up this process, let’s look at the tool you can use to identify the keywords that you should be looking at. 

Let’s dive in!

WordGraph

This is my personal favourite. I have been using WordGraph since the very first day they launched the tool. WordGraph is designed to tackle the search matching for the closest words around the search term. 

In other words, it helps you to extract the keywords your competitors are using, and what are some of the keywords they are targeting that you might be missing out. That’s the opportunity you should be seizing to be included in your content. 

WordGraph comes into play in helping you find your missing keywords.

First, enter your target keyword and domain in the search box. Then, type in the locations that you desire. 

Give it some time for the tool to grab some accurate data for you. After thoroughly analysing your site, WordGraph will show your overall matching rate and keyword suggestions on the left column.

Green colored keywords mean you have them already in your content. If you see grayed out keywords appearing, it means that the keyword is lacking in your content. 

Other than that, you can also use WordGraph to find the keywords that the top 10 sites are using to rank their content. You’ll easily see them by clicking the expand icon as seen below. 

To improve your content matching rate, it is preferable that you use the keywords suggested surrounding your main keywords. WordGraph also mentioned in their Word Vector Guide: “Since Word Vector is not as straightforward as keyword matching, the optimization will need a little bit more of pushing”.

Head over to WordGraph and let me know about your experience using it. I would love to hear them in the comments below. 

4. Re-optimize your content

If you need a reason why re-optimizing your content is worth your time, the team from Hubspot has already done the research for you. They managed to find out that up to 76% of the traffic to a blog actually comes from old posts.

That means out of 100 visitors, 76 of them actually come from your old blog posts! Just imagine the difference it can give you if you were to re-optimize your old posts today. Needless to say, you will gain traction and start moving up the ranks too.

Now, that is exactly what we are going to do. After compiling your list of keywords from step 3, it’s time to re-optimize your content!

There’s a probability that your content was not fully optimized the first time it went live, and it is currently the time to fix them. I’m pretty sure you’d have a list of keywords that others used to rank by now so you can apply them in your content more strategically. 

These are some of the prominent places in your content that you can optimize:

• Title tag
• Meta description 
• First paragraph
• Last paragraph 
• Headings
• Body content
• Link anchor text
• Alt text, file names, and titles of images

When optimizing your content with the new set of keywords, don’t get too obsessed with it. You certainly don’t want to be overusing them because it will do you more harm than good. Remember the penalties you face when you do keyword stuffing. Read your content all over again and place the keywords only where it is relevant. Keep them natural to you and your readers. 

Be sure to optimize them not just for the search engine but for real humans too. The rule of thumb is – always write content that matches the user intent. Because at the end of the day, humans are the ones who are going to read your content and take action from it. Learn more about why user intent is critical to your successful SEO.

5. Monitor and track your content performances

It must be tempting to measure just about everything, but that does not mean you should be doing so. Instead of juggling between a handful of metrics on your hand, how about this – start with a few content performance metrics that are highly relevant to you. 

What is the one ultimate goal that you want your visitor to do when they read your content? Click that “purchase” button? Share your content with their friends? Subscribe to your website? Write them out and after you are done with it, check which of the metrics matches your content performance goal.

Site Traffic 

Site traffic is one of the common indicators marketers use to check their content performance. Well, it is no surprise because traffic is the lifeblood of your content. No matter how great your content is, if nobody is reading them – it does not mean anything, really 

That brings us to a pretty simple conclusion – traffic is one metric that you must measure. 

After you are done with your content re-optimization, head over to your Google Analytics. These are the metrics that you may want to look at: 

• Pageviews – the total number of times a page on your site has been viewed. Pageviews allow you to track how web traffic interacts with your site since it includes the total number of views. 

• Unique pageviews – it combines the pageviews that are from the same person, and just count them as one. Unique pageviews show you a more accurate look at the amount of traffic coming to your website. 

By using Google Analytics, you can further breakdown the data to see where your traffic is coming from, either geographically or how they found your site online. Just filter your traffic by ‘source/ medium’ if you want to see how your visitors managed to find you. 

Knowing how you are discovered can be useful to plan your future content strategy. For example, if a large proportion of your traffic is coming from your social media channels, you may want to tailor your content to cater to that audience. 

Engagement

It is insufficient just by using ‘traffic’ as your content performance indicator. Traffic can be easily manipulated with clickbait headlines. Here’s a clickbait headline from Buzzfeed you may not want to model yourself on: 

Clickbait is one of the ways to boost clicks by creating an enticing mood yet often misleading readers. This tactic might bring a large number of visitors to your site, but they are highly likely to leave quickly too. 

So, does that brief interaction do justice to your content performance? The short answer to that is ‘no’.

In fact, a high bounce rate would indicate that a site does not have the high-quality, relevant content that the search engine wants out of its top-ranked sites. If the content is not relevant to your visitors, then you can’t be expecting any conversion, sales or leads too. 

It is good to see high traffic visiting your site but isn’t it even more rewarding when these people actually interact with you?

I will have to say yes because traffic without engagement doesn’t contribute to my content’s goal.

After optimizing your content, check the bounce rate in your Google Analytics. Monitor if there are any significant changes over the next few days.

Conversion or…Sales, sales and sales!

Now you have a number of visitors reading your content, but what do you want them to do next? 

If we look into the definition for “conversion” in the MarketingSherpa glossary, it means:

“The point at which a recipient of a marketing message performs a desired action.”

In short, the conversion is simply getting someone to respond to your call-to-action. 

If the goal of your content is to raise awareness of your brand and increase authority in your niche, you might want to take a look at the number of social shares and engagement. 

On the other hand, if your content is aiming at selling a tool, you might want to track how many sales are generated after you’ve published them. 

Traffic, engagement, and conversion are some of the indicators that can tell the performance of your content. There is no definite answer to what are the best metrics that you should use to check your content performance. You basically just want to use a metric to check if your content is performing better than yesterday. 

This quote from Lord Kelvin totally blew my mind:

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

Conclusion

To sum it up, here are the five steps to conduct keyword gap analysis:

Step 1: Expand your target keyword

Step 2: Identify your competitors

Step 3: Identify the missing keywords

Step 4: Re-optimize your content

Step 5: Monitor and track your content performances

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say you can rank for “the benefits of exercising” on the search engine within the next 24 hours, but you can certainly grow your traffic in a reasonable time if you have put keyword gap analysis to good use.

Can you see how this applies to create your next great content?

Try them out by first scanning the content that is not performing that well in your site. Choose that one lucky content to start with and monitor the results after you have done all the necessary steps. 

Let me know in the comments below if you have done so! 

Allow me to share another great quote from Arthur Ashe to end this article:

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

Recently, we’ve been hearing a huge speculation on whether LSI keyword really does work in your search ranking or not.

Looking at the buzz surrounding that topic, we’ve decided to collect all sides of perceptions from the experts and bring it into today’s discussion. 

Before we go more in-depth, let us first look into the fundamentals of LSI keywords.

What is LSI keyword?

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI keywords are keywords that are semantically related to each other. 

Although they may look alike, LSI Keyword is definitely not synonyms. They are words that often supplement each other in a context. The examples below will explain why it is not.

To give you a better understanding of how LSI keywords work, let’s look at the example below.

Let’s say you want to write a blog post about your recent vacation to Seoul, Korea. How do the search engines know what topics are you talking about in your blog post? 

Imagine if you use the three different sets of keywords below in your content, what will the search engines think?

Seoul, flight, accommodation, places to visit

• Your content may be talking about how to travel to Seoul, how to get there, where to stay and showing a list of places to visit. 

Seoul, best singer, best dancer

• Your content may be talking about the entertainment industry because the keywords you are using are related to singers and dancers. 

Seoul, university, acceptance rate

• Your content may be talking about educational information because the keywords you are using are related to a university and the acceptance rate. 

The thing is, how does the search engine know what topic you are writing about? 

You got it right! By using LSI keywords. 

According to Backlinko, Google scans your page for LSI keywords to determine what your page is all about. They reinforced the thoughts by sharing a Google research paper stating that they use “words frequently occurring together to understand an article’s main topic. 

But do LSI keywords really help your SEO in 2019?

While researching on LSI keywords and its usefulness, I found this tweet by John Mueller from Google. He posted on Twitter the line “There’s no such thing as LSI keywords – anyone who’s telling you otherwise is mistaken, sorry.”

This tweet started with @klaudiofejzaj asking him if adding some LSI keywords will help him to rank better. The reply from John has then gotten some attention from others who are asking for more explanation on his tweet. But to no avail. 

Amongst the responses to John’s reply, here are some that caught my attention:

“Hmm not sure about this. I find LSI tools great for visual representation of linked concepts. Helps define perception. Really useful for SWOT analysis of a digital profile. Not useful to use solely for keywords analysis.”

– @ClairMarr

I find this a rather a pretty fresh idea on how to use LSI keywords. Rather than using them to support the main keywords, it is used as a SWOT analysis of a digital profile! Have you ever done the same thing too? Be sure to let me know in the comments below. We will further discuss how to use LSI words in a bit.

Also, Clair Marr brings up an interesting point that using LSI tools help in giving a great visual representation of linked concepts.  Looking at the definition of LSI in Wikipedia, it says that LSI is able to correlate semantically related terms that are latent in a collection of text. In simple words, LSI determines whether two texts are semantically close to each other.

“LSI Keywords, TF-IDF, Co-Occurrence, Neural matching. tomayto, tomahto. It’s just semantics. Pun? Yes

Ok these are not one and the same. But the use case as an SEO could be: Deciphering user intent and creating comprehensive content.”

– @JeffreyBowdoin

Like how Jeffrey mentioned, what’s more important is you are creating a comprehensive content and it is able to answer your user’s intent. 

So the question is…

Can LSI keywords answer your user intent?

Here’s some compilation of what the experts have to say on using LSI keywords to answer your user intent:

LSIGraph

What Is LSI keyword & How To Use It Effectively

“When you search for ‘warriors’ in LSIGraph, it will return with a list of LSI keywords. All these keywords give an insight to what people have in their mind when searching for ‘warriors’ in the search engine.”

Jeff Bullas

How User Intent Affects Your SEO Performance: Intent-Based Keyword Research

“Google algorithms not only see target keywords, but they also consider the whole content of the page. And LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are those which will help you answer users’ queries and create useful content.” 

Andrea Lehr, published in Hubspot

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-latent-semantic-indexing-why-does-it-matter-for-your-seo-strategy

“Additional and more accurate categorization helps users, publishers, and marketers alike. Publishers, for instance, can increase engagement because LSI-driven content is more targeted and ensures that it’s landing in front of the right audience. Users entering queries also benefit because they can easily (and more quickly) find the content that answers their questions.”

As I dig deeper into the relation of LSI keyword and user intent, it brings me into a rather same path;  almost all agree that semantically related keyword does answer your user intent. 

A user intent, also called search intent or query intent, is about what the user actually has in mind when searching into an online web search engine. On the other hand, satisfying user intent is ultimately the search engine’s number one goal.

In fact, Think with Google published over 200 editorial posts on “search intent” topic alone. Let’s take a glimpse of it:

What Does This Mean For Your SEO Strategy?

If you want to succeed in SEO today, search intent has to be part of your strategy. 

Let’s look at the example below to understand how using LSI keywords can help to answer the searchers’ intent.

If you are writing a content about an apple fruit, how do you make sure that Google understands your content is about apple as a fruit and not the brand Apple?

Using the same keyword ‘apple’ over and over again will not help Google to understand what your content is all about. Searches wishing to find more about the Apple brand may come across your content that is not matching with their intent. 

To avoid this mismatch, use other keywords that are semantically related to the apple fruit. This will help Google to understand what your content is all about. In turn, searchers will only see your content when their intent is to search for an apple fruit.

“Fruit”, “sweet”, and “healthy” are not synonyms to apple fruit, but they are terms that are closely related to your intended keyword.

Using keywords that are semantically related to your main topic helps Google to understand your overall topic and later deliver them to the right audience.

How to use LSI to boost your SEO?

After spending more than a day reading and researching how other marketers use LSI keywords to boost their search optimization, here are some takeaways you can refer to:

• Meta descriptions: Using LSI keywords in your meta descriptions help search engines know what your content is about. You want to use your target keywords and at the same time make sure it is descriptive enough for them to understand. This is where semantic keywords play an important role. 

• Content quality: Rather than using the same keyword over and over in your content, use LSI keywords to increase the readability of your content. It gives more meaning and better understanding on what your content is about. 

• Image optimization: When you use an optimized alt attribute with a target keyword, it gives your page a boost because the alt text is a helpful relevance signal for search engine. But you don’t want to excessively use your target keyword as the alt text because it will be marked as spam if you do so. Try using LSI keywords instead to help search engine ‘see’ your image.

• Anchor text: Anchor text can provide both search engines and users relevant contextual information about the content of the link’s description, but using the same keyword in as you anchor text will deemed as over-optimization. To prevent this from happening, use semantically related keywords as part of your anchor text strategy. 

• Reoptimize old blog posts: When was the last time you look into your old blog posts performance? In our case, we do them frequently. If you need proof that reoptimization is worth your time, Hubspot did them well by achieving an average of 106% increase in their monthly organic search views! Remember to keep your original keyword phrase and supplement them by adding one or two LSI keywords. 

How many LSI Keywords should I use?

It’s not always the number that matters. It’s the quality. 

LSI keywords do not replace your main keywords. They are here to supplement your main keywords and help the search engine understand your content better. 

The first rule of thumb is to ensure that you don’t keyword stuffing. 

Keyword stuffing is a practice of putting keywords in multiple places in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results.

These are examples of keyword stuffing by Google:

• Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
• Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for
• Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural

Choose the most relevant LSI keywords to your main keyword and place them naturally throughout your content. Simply placing them without considering the relevancy will not help your search optimization efforts. 

In deciding how many LSI keywords to use, LSIGraph shared this guideline on their website:

“A good rule of thumb is to maintain a 2-to-1 ratio of LSI keywords to your main keywords. When using LSI keywords in your content, make sure that they are in the same paragraph of the keyword they are supporting as this will help provide more context of your main keyword to Google. What’s more, Google can better understand your content now.”

This means that if you are targeting one main keyword in your content, using one or two LSI keywords will be sufficient to strengthen the context and semantic relation of your content. 

How do you find LSI keywords?

Now that you know the fundamentals of LSI keywords, let’s jump into how to find LSI keywords. These tools are in no particular order. Feel free to check which tool matches your need to semantic keyword research well. Let’s begin!

1. Use Google

This may be one of those old-school methods but it is certainly a good place for any beginners to start with. There are two ways you can search for your semantic keywords using Google: Autocomplete and Related Searches. 

• Google Autocomplete

To give a better understanding on how to use Google Autocomplete to find your LSI keywords, let’s look at the example below.

Before I published my recent article on “How to rank for ‘Near Me’ Searches In Local SEO”, I have done some quick keyword research by just typing “near me” on the search box. 

These are the phrases that are suggested to me: 

These boxed words are your sources of finding LSI keywords. These are keywords and phrases that humans use to search for when they search for anything related to “near me”. 

Next, I also included relevant terms in my content:

• Google Related Searches

Google related searches is quite similar to the above method. The only difference is you can find these keywords or phrases at the bottom of the first page. These are the keywords that are related to your search term. 

Find the related searches at the ‘searches related to’ section.

2. Use LSIGraph

LSIGraph is simple yet commonly used LSI keyword tool. Once you land on  their site, you’ll see that their tool is mainly about generating LSI keywords. Just insert your keywords in the search box and click ‘generate’ to get a list of LSI keywords.

Using their premium subscription, you can get a lot more data than just LSI keywords. You will also get to see some important metrics such as search volume, trend, and latent semantic value. These valuable data will help you further in deciding which LSI keywords to use. 

3. Use Answer The Public

Answer The Public is a keyword generation tool that further breaks down keywords that contain prepositions, comparisons, an alphabetical list, and most importantly, related keywords. 

The keywords generated can be displayed visually, or in a list format. 

4. Use Ubersuggest

I have seen some marketers suggesting Ubersuggest to find LSI keywords. It is simple to use too. 

Just insert your keywords and it will list out ‘suggestions’ and ‘related’ keywords for you. 

5. Use Keyword Tool

Another tool you can use to find LSI keywords is by using Keyword Tool. Like Ubersuggest, it shows you  the keywords that people are typing into Google search box. 

The only difference with Keyword Tool and the rest is it lays out different search terms for other platforms than just Google, namely Youtube, Bing, and more.

6. Use Twinword Ideas

Twinword Ideas LSI Graph visualizes the semantic relationships between keywords. It allows you to visually see how each keyword is related to your topic.

Conclusion: It’s always the same goal

Up until today, there’s no single proof that Google uses LSI but again there’s nothing wrong with using LSI keywords in your article. 

As what @JeffreyBowdoin said, it is the user that matters the most.

If using keywords that are semantically related to your main keywords help searchers to find your content, which matches their intent, shouldn’t you continue doing so?

It is true that LSI keyword is not the only answer for your quest in matching the right message to the right audience. In doing search optimization, there are more than just adding LSI keywords in your content. For example, you may want to understand who is your target audience and their buyer’s journey beforehand. 

With that being said, it’s worth taking the time to identify and add semantically related keywords in your content. If you noticed, up until here, I have added a few LSI keywords for my main keyword “LSI keywords”. I’ve found that doing so gives me more content ideas and values to the readers. 

Now, back to you: Have you ever used semantically related keywords in your content before? Let me know in the comments below. 

Would you like to know how to convince your website visitors to become your paying customers? 

If your answer is a ‘yes’, then you’ll definitely need to learn how to do keyword mapping to your buyer’s journey.

I ask this because almost all of the marketers create websites to communicate with their potential customers. But here’s the real challenge in the digital world; how do you actually communicate with them and successfully deliver your message? 

This brings us to: Using the right keywords and mapping those keywords to the right content. In order for you to attract potential customers to your website, you need to create the right content that speaks directly to them at whatever stage of the buying cycle they might be in. 

Hopefully, by the end of this article, you’ll appreciate the buyer’s journey process and know how to map the right keywords in each buying stages to see a positive grow your business, in the name of increasing profit. 

Let’s get started!

What is the buyer journey?

The buyer’s journey is not something new in the year 2019. There are lots of variations on the definition of the buyer journey, but they all mean the same thing. 

According to Hubspot, 

“The buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.”

In general, the buyer’s journey stages are made up of three main stages: 

1. The Awareness Stage – This is the stage which a buyer understands that they have a need and are looking for ways to fulfill it. 
2. The Consideration Stage – At the consideration stage, the buyer is defining their need and are starting to research on options to fulfill it.
3. The Decision Stage – During this stage, the buyer has made their decision to buy and makes their purchase. 

The example below illustrates a sample of the buyer’s journey on a  simple purchasing decision of a runner who wishes to buy new running shoes. 

Awareness: Shane is aware that he needed a new running shoe because his existing shoe is torn. He then started to look for shoe options available online. 

Consideration: After doing some research, he is considering whether to buy the same shoe brand or check out other brands. 

Decision: Lastly, he decided to buy the same shoe brand because of the discounted price. 

At each buyer’s stage, a buyer will have different thought processes. They are looking out for different types of information according to their needs at that point in time. It is your goal to speak the right content at those different stages. 

4 Steps To Map Keywords To The Buyer’s Journey For SEO

Now, you have understood what are the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Let’s look at how you can map the right keywords in your potential buyer’s journey. 

Step 1. Mapping keywords to the buying stages

Mapping keywords to the buying stages means finding the right keywords you should be using in your content. 

Typical keyword research only focuses on keywords with the highest search volume and lowest competition. But that is not what we are looking for here. 

You should be looking for keywords or topics that your potential customers are searching for. In this case, it is the keyword with high intent that matters.

The stage your buyers are in will determine the searches they’ve made. The following stages are how we can match the user intent keywords to the buyer journey.

Awareness Stage

Since this stage is all about the potential buyers’ quest to answer a question or looking for ways to fulfill their needs, it is your task to ensure you create content that is optimized for that. 

The goal for this stage is to provide value before the visitor even needs your product or service. 

These are some questions to better understand the searchers’ intent at this stage:

• What problem does your products or services solve?
• What possible topics or keywords that the buyers will use to describe their problems?
• What is the buyer’s attitude towards the problems and potential solutions?

Consideration Stage

At the consideration stage, the user has a good idea of what they’re looking for and are actively looking for products or services to fulfill their needs. 

Your goal at this stage is to build trust in these potential buyers and to convince them that your products or services are the best solutions for them.

These are some questions to better understand the searchers’ intent at this stage:

• What is your brand known for?
• What are the frequently asked questions for your products or services?
• How do users feel about the pros and cons of your products or services?

Decision Stage

During the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, they will have already informed themselves using the content available and will be ready to make a purchase. 

Your goal at this stage should be to provide the content that offers their need to acquire the customer. 

These are some questions to better understand the searchers’ intent at this stage:

• What do prospects need at the exact moment that they’re about to make a purchase?
• What are the things that can encourage them to complete the transaction faster?
• What expectations do the prospect have for a transaction?

Step  2. Finding The Right Keywords To Use

Finding the right keywords to use doesn’t have to be difficult. As long as you can understand the searcher’s intent at each buying stages, you should be able to identify the best keywords to use. 

Now that you know the user intent in each of your buying stages, it’s time to find the right keywords to use. 

Let’s start with keyword research, shall we?

Awareness Stage

Searchers at this stage are just starting the searches and the questions may be broader in nature. 

The searches made at this stage may not immediately appear valuable because they have very little commercial intent.  But if you can successfully position your website as an authority in your niche, it’s going to help you gain trust with your audience. Then it can positively impact the next buying stages. 

Let’s make use of the previous example. Shane is looking for a new running shoe and he may be simply just looking around for various types of running shoes. Some queries might be:

• Running shoes for men
• Best running shoes
• Cheap running shoe
• Running shoe review 2019
• What’s the best running shoe in 2019

Put yourself in your customer’s place and list out all the possible queries they will make. 

To help you with this, I would suggest you to use LSIGraph to help you generate more ideas in a second. Just enter your keyword in the search box, and you’ll get even more ideas:

What’s best about LSIGraph is it provides you with relevant LSI keywords, also known as semantic keywords. These are the keywords you want because it emphasizes user intent. 

Consideration Stage

As the potential buyer move through the buyer’s journey, they will more likely make queries that correspond to products or services such as:

• Compare Adidas running shoes
• Latest Adidas running shoes review
• Best Adidas running shoes 2019
• Skechers vs Adidas shoes

They know what their problem or opportunity is and begins to look for potential solutions.  Also, potential buyers at this stage will be looking at not just your products, but also your competitors’. 

Decision Stage

Queries at the decision stage will indicate a higher commercial intent than the rest. 

This means your potential buyer knows exactly what they want and is ready to make a purchase. You may also consider adding some ‘motivator’ keywords to further convince them to choose your products or services such as:

• Discount
• Coupon
• Cheap
• Free shipping

To sum up the potential queries Shane will make in each of the buying stages, let’s look at the illustration below:

Use  keywords with intent to attract the right traffic

Using keywords with intent is useful as a way to pre-qualify the prospect that you want on your website. When done correctly, you can narrow down the focus of your web traffic to only those who are likely to perform the action that you want based on the content you’ve optimized for the intent.

Searchers that are using high intent keyword signifies a strong intent to conduct a transaction, whether to purchase something, to ask for more information or any other action that will later lead to a conversion. Think of terms like “buy”, “purchase”, “order” and so on. The formula you can use is:

High intent keyword + (product name) 

For example, “buy car insurance”, “cheap facial treatment” and “where to buy bean bag”.

Step 3. Mapping Keywords To Your Content

Now that you have collected your high intent keywords, it’s time for you to plan out your content strategy accordingly. 

Your content strategy should make sure that when a potential buyer makes a search in the search engine, they will be able to see your content. To do this, you will need to create content covering the needs of your potential buyers at each stage of the buying cycle.

Awareness stage

88 percent of consumers will pre-research their purchases online before taking action either online or in-store. Online research is becoming more common and people are more inclined to look for information before a transaction is made. You do too, right?

Searchers are looking for information and sometimes they may not even be aware that they actually need the solutions that you are providing. 

If you are selling ginger juice, you can easily reach your potential buyers with related content such as:

• “11 Proven Health Benefits of Ginger”
• “Ginger – The World’s Healthiest Food”
• “Benefits of drinking ginger water”
• “11 Benefits of Ginger That You Didn’t Know About”

At this stage, searchers are just looking for content to help them to a solution. There’s no guarantee that they’ll buy from you but if your content is helpful and interesting enough, they may as well proceed to the next buyer stage.

Real-Life Examples

MarketersMEDIA is a company that provides press release distributions. As such, the content they share in their blog is meant to drive leads that are not just looking for press release distributions but also those who just started writing their press releases.

Since Hootsuite is all about social media management, they have an entire blog dedicated to talking about content related to social media. 

When all your posts revolve around your main niche, and that’s essentially all you talk about, your audience will assume you as the authority in that niche. This will help in creating credibility and trust towards your brand in the long run.

Consideration stage

Here, your potential buyers have known about the benefits of the product you are offering. What they probably will do next is to compare your product to your competitors. 

Therefore, your content strategy now should be focusing on letting them know your business provides the right solutions for their needs such as:

• “Organic ginger juice in New York”
• “Top 10 places you can get ginger juice”
• “Best Ginger Juice Review”

Your content can be geared to educate your potential buyers more about your product as the best solution and why it is the best fit for their problems or needs. Build trust between your audience and your brand that could help in the buying stage later. 

Real-Life Examples

MarketersMEDIA puts out content on how their service works on their website. This piece of content targets people who are now looking for press release distribution, and it goes a step further by telling why you should choose their services. 

LSIGraph, the well-known LSI keywords generator, has written an in-depth educational content on what is LSI keywords and how to use them effectively below. This piece of content helps point their audience to a specific solution while building authority to the niche. 

Fun fact: 87% of shoppers today use Ecommerce reviews to decide whether to buy, and 77% of those shoppers tend to buy online. So you may want to consider encouraging your existing customers to give some reviews on your website.

For example, SEOPressor is a WordPress plugin that offers on-page optimization to their users They even dedicated a page that shows all their user’s testimonials as shown below.

Decision stage

Since this is the most important stage where your potential buyer will determine to become your customer or not, you may want to create content that can motivate them to make the final purchase.

If you managed to create trust and establish yourself as an authority in the earlier stages, without any doubt, your potential buyers will be more receptive to purchase from you. 

Nevertheless, your ultimate goal at this stage is to create content that is attractive enough to capture your potential buyers. You may consider topics such as:

• “Ginger juice delivery to you”
• “Ginger juice store voucher”
• “September promotion – Ginger juice”
• “Best Price Cold Pressed Ginger Juice”

The right offer and content at this buyer’s stage will have a dramatic impact on securing your conversions. Here are a few statistics to prove them:

• A study has shown that 89% of consumers name price as a top factor affecting their purchasing decisions (Hawk Incentives)
• 83% of consumers said that coupons change their shopping behavior (Inmar)
• 41% of consumers say they’re more likely to seek out something to buy if they have an offer (Kelton)

Attractive pricing will usually encourage the buyers to purchase from you but there are also other contributing factors such as brand loyalty, credibility, and trust. Let’s look at the real-life examples below.

Real-Life Examples

Other than just giving a massive discount at the pricing page, MarketersMEDIA also lays out all the reasons why you must choose them over other distribution platforms.

Zapier, on the other hand, provides a ‘free forever’ account for anyone. It is also a clever way to warm people up to use your product or service to the paid plan.

Step 4. Measuring Keyword Effectiveness in Keyword Mapping

After you’ve done mapping the keywords in your content to the buyer’s journey, you may wonder how you can measure the effectiveness of each keyword. 

When it comes to measuring your keyword effectiveness, data is your best friend.  The way to go about this is by using just one keyword per page that focuses on the subject matter of that page’s content. 

You can then use analytics tools to measure certain data, such as the number of page visits, bounce rate, click-throughs and conversions over time. These numbers will tell you which of your keywords are doing well and which aren’t. 

Do also take note that keyword targeting and understanding customer intent is a process of continuous improvement. Expect continuous effort to reap your return.

Conclusion

In deciding anything, always start with the end in mind. Know who your target audience is and what is their expectation towards your product or services.

When you are able to identify your buyer’s journey and align your content to each stage, you gain a better understanding of who you are writing for and how to deliver more value and help them reach a potential solution. 

Use the steps given in the article, but, by all means, take caution by considering what works best for your buyer’s journey.

What are your thoughts on doing keyword mapping to match your buyer’s journey? Let’s talk in the comments section below.

It’s 2019 and beyond – Long tail keywords are still as important as ever. However, many people may have forgotten about how valuable this pot of gold can be.

As you’ll see in this article, I’ll be explaining to you why long tail keyword is still as important in this era and what are some of the ways you can find them.

Before that, let’s get down to basics.

What are long tail keywords? 

To put it simply, long tail keywords are search phrases with more than three words. 

For example:

• “running shoe for men reviews”
• “running shoes brand list”
• “best running shoes in 2019”

This makes them more specific than searches with fewer words like “shoes” and  “running shoes”. 

Yes, long tail keywords tend to get lesser search traffic than the popular keywords, but the search intent becomes highly targeted. 

Why you should use long tail keywords in your content

Using long tail keywords for your content optimization is most definitely worth the time and effort. Whether you are trying to increase your sales or simply drive more traffic to your website, it gives benefits to not just you but also the search engine and your users. 

Now, let’s take a look at some of the reasons why you should use long tail keywords in your content.

1. Less Traffic But Lesser Competition

When you are looking for keywords to be used in your content, you want to look for keywords that are not highly competitive but still has a good number of monthly searches. Long tail keyword is your answer. 

Here’s an example.

Try Googling “plumbing service”, and you will get about 742,000,000 results in less than a second!

To get into the Top 10 with the same keywords, you may need to spend a lot of resources and still not appear on the Top 3 results. It will be really difficult because you will compete with lots of other high domain authority websites.

What if you add an extra keyword, “repair”, It has become a long tail keyword now hasn’t it? This time around, try “plumbing repair services” and you’ll see that the result has been reduced to 201,000,000. In other words, 70% of competitors are gone. 

Let’s filter the competition further. By using a more specific search term that is related to your niche such as “plumbing repair services in Boston”, you will see about 19,600,000 web pages. That comes up to about 37 times lesser in search results when compared to the broad keyword “plumbing service”.

Just 2% of people are really targeting this keyword. This could mean lesser traffic potential, but far lesser competition than the first choice.

So, how much traffic is exactly hidden in long tail? 

According to Hitwise’s study published by Bill Tancer and then re-published with some additional insights on the MOZ’s blog, long tail keywords comprise up to 70% of all search traffic! 

Just look at the graph below, the number of keywords per search is graphed on the x-axis and the number of searches is graphed on the y-axis.

For the Boston-based plumbing service from the example above, such long tail keyword variations may include:

These are all the real keywords I have found with their average monthly search numbers using a keyword tool known as LSIGraph. You will definitely find more long tail keywords there if you were to conduct more in-depth research. 

When it comes to writing content, the aim is to use highly relevant keywords rather than just focusing on the search volume. When combined with the right intention, you may reap the fruits of your labor in no time. 

2. Gives You A Highly Targeted Traffic

What’s better than getting the right traffic to your website? 

As you have already known, long tail keywords may not attract as much traffic as to how short tail keywords do, but what’s better is it attracts the audience that you are looking for. 

The thing about using long tail keywords in your content is that you can instantly filter out the right kind of audience you are targeting. 

Let’s see them in action using an example of queries made by a potential prospect, Joseph.

When Joseph does a search on “shoes” and “running shoe”, one may not be able to know exactly what he is really searching for because it is not descriptive enough. In fact, one can never tell the true intention of a person who is searching for a query like “shoes”.

However, this is a different story when he uses a more descriptive, long tail keyword such as “Adidas running shoes Ultraboost 19”. We are now able to make a few closer guesses from his intent that he is interested and is looking for more information about the Ultraboost running shoes. 

* Here’s a tip: When writing your content, always put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. Make sure you know what your audience wants from you and give them what they want. 

By targeting these limited searched keywords, you are more likely to attract an audience that is more relevant to your content.

3. Long Tail Keywords Have Higher conversion rates 

When creating content, what action do you want your audience to take?

According to a study, long tail keywords convert 2.5x higher than the main keywords! 

It is not surprising because long tail keywords usually come with higher levels of “searchers intent”. Giving what the user wants in the first place helps to accelerate the conversion rate. 

This is because long tail keywords are more specific in nature. Which means searchers are more likely to know what they are looking for when they use long tail keywords in doing their searches. 

Coming back to our running shoe example, you can’t possibly predict what Joseph is looking for when he merely types  “running shoe” in the search bar.  

By adding more variations to the long tail keywords, you can create and deliver the exact content users are  seeking at that moment:

• Buy running shoe Adidas Ultraboost 19
• Compare running shoe Adidas Ultraboost 19
• Running shoe Adidas Ultraboost 19 review
• Running shoe Adidas Ultraboost 19 features
• Running shoe Adidas Ultraboost 19 price

To put it briefly, visitors coming from a much more specific term will be far more likely to convert than those coming from generic keywords. 

4. Give more context to your main keywords

If you’re in this SEO journey for a long time, you’ll know that Google often updates its algorithm. With the 2017 Hummingbird update, it has been proven that Google wants everyone to focus on contextual searches. This update adjusted search algorithms to match exact phrasing more often to deepen their understanding of a context.

It’s pretty obvious that Google is getting smarter day by day. It starts to understand the content on sites better than ever. Google doesn’t just see how many times your main keyword appears in your content as it also takes into account the context of those keywords. 

If your website is selling running shoes, adding more long tail variations such as “buy running shoes”, “running shoe review” and “running shoes price” in your page will give more context to your main keyword; “running shoe”. 

From a user’s viewpoint, the more context you add to the search terms, the better results they’ll get. Click to learn more on how to match the right keywords to the buyer’s journey.

5. The future of voice assistants searches

By 2020, 50% of all searches will be conducted via voice. With the growing popularity of voice search, you should also optimize your content for voice search if you’ve yet to do so.

Different from how we normally search online, we are much more specific and detailed when we talk. This statement is also backed by research where they’ve found that voice search queries are generally longer, with seven or more words included.

Using long tail keywords certainly comes in handy when optimizing your content for voice search. 

For example, we’ll assume a search query is done in the vicinity of San Francisco to locate a nearby Japanese restaurant. The keyword breakdown would look like this:

Main keyword:

Japanese restaurants

Long tail keywords:

best Japanese restaurant, Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, Japanese restaurant near me

Possible voice queries would be:

“Hey Siri, where is the best Japanese restaurant in San Francisco?”

“Hey Alex, can you show me the best Japanese restaurant near me”

“The best Japanese restaurant in San Francisco open now”

Very much different, right?

From now on, you ought to spend more time thinking about how people would talk about your products or services in real life. Who knows your answer might even get ranked on top of the search results for voice search when done right.  

How to find long tail keywords?

Up to this part, we have seen how important is long tail keywords for your content SEO. Here comes the important question: how do you find these long tail keywords? 

It is not a tough task when you know exactly where to find the real gems. Here are some tips on where you can find your long tail keywords:

1. Create a list of short tail keywords

First, take out a piece of paper and pen. Now brainstorm all the words or phrases you’d associate with your content. For instance, if you want to write content about your pet shop, you might list them as such:

Those main keywords will give you a good reference which you can build out possible long tail keywords that may work for your business. 

Let’s see them in action. If your shop is located in New York and operating 24 hours, these are some of the long tail variations:

• Best pet shop at New York
• 24 hours pet shop at New York
• New York Pet Grooming 
• Best dog food at New York
• Buy dog food near me
• Buy cat food near me

If you are not sure what keyword to use, you may go to your analytics to see the general keyword phrases that lead visitors to your website. These keywords may be relevant to your whole website but may not be highly targeted by a single page on your site.

To start looking for the keyword phrases, simply go into your analytics and locate your organic keyword referrals: Acquisition > Campaigns > Organic Keywords 

Go through all the terms for relevant long tail keywords you can use in your content. If needed, you can also filter the searches with only the keyword that is relevant to you. 

2. Use the search engine

If you’ve run out of an idea in your brainstorming session, you can always turn to search engines for help. This is the simplest and most efficient way to generate long tail keywords. No matter what niche you are in, the following handy features from Google allow anyone to easily find long-tail keywords. Plus, it’s free!

All you need is to go to Google and start a search with your main keyword. 

Google Autocomplete

Google Autocomplete is one of the awesome sources of high-intent long-tail keyword that you can get. 

As what Google mentioned:

“We look at the real searches that happen on Google and show common, trending ones relevant to the characters that are entered and also related to your location and previous searches.”

Just start typing your keyword into the Google search box and see the Google Autocomplete variations:

In the example above, you can see that typing the letters “pet grooming” brings up predictions such as “pet grooming shop” or “pet grooming shop near me”, making it easy for you to find more long tail keyword variations.

People also ask

Next, check the section on “People also ask”. This section contains four questions together with their answers. 

If you expand one of the questions, you will see an answer and a lot more questions comes beneath it. To optimize for voice search, these questions are usually a good place for you to start.

To get a chance to appear in the question box, create quality content clearly answers questions about your topic or service.

Searches related to

Not to forget, the “Searches related to” area that you can find at the bottom of the search results.

As you can see in those results, Google is suggesting terms based on what people are searching for. These long tail keywords may not necessarily have high search volume, but these are the high intent keywords your potential audience is using in their day to day life. 

This is also a great way to find long tail keyword variations that are relevant to short tail keywords. In deciding which long tail to use, I recommend you to pick only the keyword which is relevant to your content. 

3. Use LSIGraph 

LSIGraph is not mainly positioned for finding long tail keywords but it is definitely one of my favorite places to do so. Just add your keyword and it will return keywords that are semantically related to your main keyword. 

For instance, the term “pet grooming” comes back with a list of LSI keywords:

What’s great about LSIGraph is it allows you to select the location and language of your choice. This is especially good when your content is targeting a specific location as you can see a list of keywords that are more related to the local intent. 

As mentioned by LSIGraph:

“Latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords are essentially keywords that are semantically related to your main keyword, used in a search query.”

By making use of LSI keywords, you can easily optimize your content without stuffing the same keywords. They are used to support the main keyword and helps to give context to the content so that search engines and humans can better understand them.

If you are not sure which long tail keyword you should use, you can simply sort the keywords based on its Latent Semantic Value, LSV. LSV is a measurement of how valuable the LSI keyword is in a context or topic. That goes to say: The higher the LSV, the more valuable is the keyword.

Nevertheless, always consider the relevancy of your topic when choosing which long tail keywords to use. High LSV value with a relevant long tail keyword would be the perfect fit for your content.

4. Use Quora

Quora is known as the giant database of questions and answers. Other than being a great place to get content ideas, it can also be used to find your long tail keywords. 

When you are on Quora, use the search bar to search for a generic topic. Just add in your keyword and you will notice that each question is searchable around that keyword.  

Let’s use the same example; pet grooming. You will immediately see a list of questions:

These questions are asked by real humans with real intentions. Therefore, you may want to seize the huge potential by creating new content or update your existing piece using that very keyword to optimize it. 

Remember Google’s Related Searches section at the bottom of the search results? 

Quora has something similar too! 

After clicking on any of the questions on Quora’s result, you can see that there is a list of related questions on the right-hand side of your screen.

Other Question and Answer sites you can explore more are Yahoo Answers, Answers.com and LinkedIn Answers.

The Next Step: Start Finding the Best Long Tail Keywords

In the end, what really matters is the effort to deliver high-quality content to your readers. 

By now, you should have some idea on the benefits of long tail keywords and how to find them, it’s time to start implementing them in your content. Use them to provide real value to your audience that will make them want to stay on your website. 

The rule of thumb is to always put your audience first. Take into account how your audience thinks, speak and react about your business, products or services. Knowing the intent will make your long tail keywords strategy more meaningful than ever. Check out this article on why excelling user intent is the new trend in SEO.

So, start using long tail keywords in your content and reap the rewards of all your hard work in the near future. Go forth and conquer!