How to Use Keyword Planner for Long Tail Keyword Research

If you are like most of the content marketers or SEOs, you probably use Google Keyword Planner to find the right keywords to write about and hope you will rank in the Google’s first page. But do you use it right? Have you made the best use of Keyword Planner? In this article, I’ll show you the advanced guide to use Keyword Planner for keyword research.

Why should you use long-tail keyword

If you are just starting up, you most likely cannot compete with the Big Boys, so you will avoid the too competitive keywords because it is too hard to outrank them. Instead, you should focus on long-tail keywords.

Indeed, long-tail keywords do not have high search volume, but you will still get a large amount of traffic with a few long keywords combined. What’s more, if your article is good enough, you will also rank well for the short tail keywords.

let me show you a real case study. In 2015, I needed to write an article about deleting the recovery partition. I knew the keyword “delete recovery partition” is competitive, so I found a long tail keyword that also contains this phrase, delete recovery partition diskpart.

In a very short time, I ranked #1 for the keyword delete recovery partition diskpart. In about 5 months or so, I ranked #1 for the phrase delete recovery partition. To my surprise, this article also ranked #7 for the keyword recovery partition during that time.

Sort thousands of keywords by long tail

This is an advanced Keyword Planner guide, so I will not talk about how to set up Keyword Planner. What you will have is a selected list of keywords that are incredibly easy to rank for, which will save you a ton of time.

We will create a super long keywords list sorted by the number of words in each keyword and search volume. With a few minutes, you can have this list, so you can easily pick the longest tail keywords that are very easy to rank for. What’s more amazing about this guide is that it will not cost you a penny.

Let’s get started

1. Login to Google Keyword Planner. type a keyword in your niche in the Keyword Planner box and click Get ideas.   
2. Under Keyword ideas tab, pick a few keywords and copied them to a Notepad. You can pick as many as you want as long as they are relevant to your targeted audience. To get the exact monthly search volume data in Keyword Planner, you can read my previous post.
3. Paste one of your picked keywords to Keyword Planner and get ideas. Then download this sheet as a CSV file. Repeat this to all your selected keywords in your Notepad. All these CSV files should be saved in a separate folder. 
4. In that folder where you saved all download keyword sheets, create a new Notepad file and type “copy *.csv importfile.csv” (without quotes) in it and then change the file extension to bat.
5. Double click this bat file to run. When it is done, you will get a new CSV file named importfile.
6. Open this new CSV file, which is a combination of all the sheets you downloaded. Delete all the repeated items.
7. Add a new row to Name it Number of words. Then fill this new added row with the following “=IF(LEN(TRIM(B2))=0,0,LEN(TRIM(B2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B2,” “,””))+1)”.
8. Add filters to manipulate it the way you want. Select the Searches column and click on the Sort&Filter button and select Z to A.
9. Then you can create a filter for the number of words. Click on the number of words filter and get rid of 1 2 3. You can also change or set up other filter based on your needs. If you are in a very competitive niche, you probably want to also get rid of 4-word-long keyword and only view on the keywords with at least 5 words.

With this powerful spreadsheet, you can easily find the long tail keywords that are incredibly easy to rank for and get a lot of traffic in a very short time.

In June 2016, Google Keyword Planner stopped showing exact search volume. To get this around, you can use a simple trick to show keyword monthly search volume in Keyword Planner for free.

For more relevant long-tail keywords

You might think that the keywords you get from Keyword Planner are not that relevant as I do. The relative searches or suggested searches showed in Google search results are much more relevant.

Luckily, you can use free tool Ubersugest or keywordtool to find all the related searches that people are typing in the search box. with these free tools and the method used before, you can easily find do long tail keyword research in a short time.

1.  Head to Ubersugest.io or keyowrdtool.io. type a keyword in the search box and press Enter.

2.1. At Ubersugest, click View as Text. Then press Ctrl+A and Ctrl + C to copy all the keywords.

2.2.If you prefer Keywordtool. Click Copy all.

1. Login to Keyword Planner. paste all the keywords to the second box (Get volume data and trends), and then click Get volume ideas.
2. Then download this spreadsheet. You can also repeat these steps and download more spreadsheet, combine them, and add filters as the method before.

Bonus

I also have a little Keyword Planner trick to show you. At the Start page of Keyword Planner where you enter a keyword, you type your competitor’s landing page instead of your own. This will get your competitor’s keywords for free.

Conclusion

No matter what kind of niche or what stage you are in, long tail keyword strategy is worth trying and then you will get paid. However, SEO and content marketing is never a short-term strategy. You should have patience before you can see big results.

Hope you find this Long tail keyword research with Keyword Planner helpful. What do you think about this method? What do you do for keyword research? Please leave a comment down below.