Product:

Ranking: 89/100

Introduction

Long Tail Pro is a keyword research software package that was launched back in 2011. It was created by Spencer Hawes, a successful niche marketer and owner of the popular blog Niche Pursuits. I grabbed this tool awhile back for the 10 day free trial (which is an ongoing offer, btw) but initially wasn’t very impressed. It was a lot different and not as user friendly as my go to research tool, Jaaxy, so I never cared enough to upgrade and just let it sit. Honestly, I didn’t really give it much of a chance and just assumed it was another sucky product.

However, I had been hearing a lot of talk within my online circles about this tool so I broke down and actually shelled out the $97 to try it out for real (plus an additional $17 for the Platinum). After using it for a few weeks, I feel as though I can provide you with a thorough Long Tail Pro Review as I’ve gotten more familiar with how to use it (it does take some getting used to0. I’m actually quite impressed. While it isn’t perfect, it’s still a rather handy tool for someone who may need to do any significant amount of keyword research.

How does it work?

LTP relies heavily on data from Google, as it uses the keyword planner within Google Adwords to gather its search estimates, CPC and competition analysis. While the keyword planner tool is completely free to anyone with an Adwords account, the software goes far beyond just pulling straight data. Long Tail Pro also gives you inside access to data from Moz such as Moz rank, juice links, page links, domain and page authority as well as page rank and site age. It also gives you the ability to view the first page competition of Google for any keyword, with all the data nicely displayed for you to see.

Hawes tells how to analyze the given data so you can decide if the keyword is too competitive or not.

He also provides an upgrade version for an additional $17 for month which will actually automatically calculate this competition for you and put it into a number between 0 – 100 (100 being the most competive) if you don’t want to sit and try to analyze the first page of Google for every keyword. It’s really convienient because you can just click the “view competition” button next to any keyword and decide from there whether or not you should go after it.

There’s also an additional feature provided within the Platinum upgrade which is the ability to add your own keywords. I find this incredibly useful for figuring out data for a list of keywords I already have, such as lists I create from keywordtool.io, ubbersuggest or just from using the alphabet soup technique. A quick copy and paste will let you create a campaign using the entire list instead of searching for them individually.

I spent some time reviewing several hundred of my ranking keywords in Google from my personal websites within LTP and I do find this “KC” number to be a fairly reliable metric to use.

Features of Long Tail Pro (+Platinum)

Search for multiple keywords at once

With most tools, you can only search for one term at a time and it’ll just display a ton of related terms within the results. But with LTP, you can actually start your campaign search with multiple keywords, even if they are entirely unrelated. For example, if you want to research terms like artificial Christmas trees, fireworks and bookshelves you can do so within just one search.

There will probably be a TON of results to go through, but you can filter the results to refine any search.

Filter search results

By default Long Tail displays the local (your countries) search estimates, average cost per click and advertiser competition. But you can modify the results to display additional features like:

• Global search volume.. (which I don’t know why this isn’t included by default) Generally, you want your audience to be the entire world.
• Google and Bing title competition (Although, I think this is pretty useless)
• Domain availability – tells you when .com, org, net’s with that keyword are available

Refine search results

You can also filter the results by search volume (local and global), average CPC and the number of words.

For example, if you only were interested in terms that got greater than 1,000 monthly searches, were between 3 – 6 words long and had an average CPC of over $1, you could exclude all terms that don’t fit that criteria and narrow down the results.

It’s good to weed out terms that are less than 3 words in length. The shorter the term, the harder it is to rank, so most of the time it’d be pointless to include them. It’d be a lot easier to rank for a search term like white artificial Christmas trees than just Christmas trees.

Sorts keyword lists by search volume, average CPC, advertiser competition and even alphabetically

With just a click you can sort your results to find the terms you’re looking for. It’s incredibly useful when you have 100’s of results to filter through.

Export keyword lists to your computer

If you have created and refined a list you want to work from, you can easily export the list to be saved to your computer to refer to whenever you want.

Front page competition results display with Moz data

For any keyword, LTP will neatly display the front page results with all the data from Moz that it uses to analyze competition. People by $100’s per month for access to Moz, so the ability to get that data within the software is nice.

Keyword competition check

For any keyword you want to check out your rank for, you can enter it and it’ll display your rank within Google or Bing. It’s nice to have instant access without having to search through several pages within Google to see where (or if) you’re even ranking. Definitely a time saver.

Features of Longtail Platinum:

Instant Keyword Competition

You can unlock the keyword competition and have every phrase’s competition calculated for you with the click of a button. It’s very handy if you’re doing a lot of keyword research, because you don’t have to click through each individual phrase and spend the time looking at the front page, trying to figure out from the results if it’d be worth going for or not.

Add your own keywords

Another really cool feature the platinum version adds is the option to add your own keywords to any campaign. I really like this because sometimes instead of just a vague idea, I already have a huge list of specific keywords I need to research. With other tools, you can’t really research more than one term at a time. This gives me the ability to copy and paste that list into a box and instantly get results for all the keywords at once. It’s great.

Pros vs Cons

Pros

• Provides Moz data within the software
• It’s only a one time purchase as opposed to a monthly fee (Pro version) so if you use it for a long time, it is very affordable
• It’s great at pulling up additional keywords for any root key terms you enter, which lets you come up with lots of ideas for content within any campaign
• It’s really handy to sort and refine your search results
• You can export your keyword lists
• Instant keyword competition (with platinum) which I find to be quite reliable
• Ability to add your own keywords (with platinum)

Cons

• It’s software that must be downloaded, so you may not be able to use it on all devices (I can’t download it onto my Chromebook)
• Relies heavily on data from the Google Keyword Planner, which is often not the most accurate measure for search volume
• Not the most user friendly platform, requires some getting used to
• Sometimes the tool seems to “stop” working and you must click to show the keyword planner and refresh the data
• It can be annoying to try and analyze the competition with the basic pro version, must upgrade to platinum for instant competition

Pricing

10 day trial – $0 (no credit card required) get it here

Regular (pro) – $97 one time purchase or $77 if you grab the discount (which Hawes provides you with a few days into your free trial)

Platinum –  +$17 per month (in addition to the $97)

Try out Long Tail Pro for 100% free (no credit card)

BONUS: Long Tail Pro (+Platinum) Tutorial

Watch me create a campaign so you can get an idea how the process of researching keywords works!

Every campaign you create will start with a seed keyword. It can be vague, such as “christmas tree” or very specific, such as “10′ artificial christmas tree”. If you really don’t have a good idea of what you’re looking for, vague is good because it will create related terms and give you a start with tons of ideas for content.

I’m going to start this campaign with “artificial christmas tree” and go from there.

You can start with just one or as many initial keywords as you want. Here I just listed artificial christmas tree, but you can add additional key terms. The phrases don’t have to be related, either. You could search for Christmas trees, Easter decorations and fireworks all at once.  For each keyword you enter you also have the ability to include or exclude any phrases to go with it. For example, you could include “cheap, deals, buy” within the box if you wanted to research terms in that direction. You can just leave them blank (which is what I did here) to have it more open ended.

By default, Longtail Pro will list the average cost per click, local searches and advertiser competition for every campaign. You can change these settings underneath to include additional results like the global search volume, domain availability, as well as filter the results by number of searches, number of words (to find longer tailed terms) and average CPC.

Here’s the initial search result for artificial christmas tree:

Here it came up with over 800 keyword ideas, which is quite a lot to sift through. This is why it’s better to refine your campaigns to include the data you are really looking for.  What I really like about the LTP software is the ability to sort your keyword lists by search volume, competition and alphabetically. This makes finding the higher searched terms in a list of 800 very easy.

Still, it does do a great job of pulling up related search terms to give anyone a lot of ideas for keywords. Any terms you don’t like you can click the red “x” to the side to get rid of it, or the gray star to the left to save it to your favorites.

How to analyze the competition with Long Tail Pro:

If you click on any keyword within the results, It’ll display the front page of Google for that particular term. Here’s an example showing results for “small artificial christmas trees”:

Note: the average keyword competitive number shown above is only displayed in the Platinum version

Okay, so now what? There’s a lot of numbers thrown around and it can be difficult to tell how you’re supposed to even find the competition using this information. The “average keyword competitiveness” number of 25 tells you straight away whether it’s good or not, but this number isn’t available with the regular $97 version. Spencer Hawes comes up with a little guide that he uses to find good keywords, here’s a screenshot of it:

Finding the competition with Long Tail Platinum:

Here’s an additional column that is added in with Longtail Platinum version:

The average KC (keyword competition) is a calculation of all the metrics that are analyzed by Hawes within Google’s front page, and displayed to you with one click of a button. They range from 0 -100, 0 being absolutely no competition and 100 being the most competitive you can get.

Here’s a general range:

Honestly, I find this to be a pretty good assessment of keyword competition. While I haven’t used the KC metric to come up with any of my existing campaigns (honestly I used an entirely different method), I will say that after analyzing hundreds of my ranking keywords with this tool, it does seem to be a fairly reliable metric. The keywords with low competition I rank very well for, while the ones with slightly higher competition took longer to rank for.

It’s interesting that using 2 entirely different methods (the ones within LTP and Jaaxy) will yield very similar results. Obviously there’s discrepencies and outliers, but for the most part they agree on the general range of competition.

Final Opinion

All in all, while not perfect, it is still pretty neat software for researching keywords and is a great choice for any online niche marketer. I must admit that it has several features which I find quite useful. The ability to add your own keywords and the instant competition number provided within platinum are really helpful when researching keywords. The search estimates given are occassionally a bit flakey (either way too high or way too low) but it generally gives a good idea of search volume for any given keyword.

Even though this tool uses a completely different metric for determining keyword competition than what I’m used to, I do still find it to be a pretty good competition measure. It’s important to realize that no keyword research tool is 100% accurate and none can guarentee your rank for any particular term. All they can do is provide you estimates and a basic blueprint for what to use, but it’s up to you to do the hard work (and Google to decide what ranks). Using the data provided just gives you a much better shot at landing on the first page.

At the very least, I suggest giving it a try since you can download it for completely free for 10 days!

Grab Your 10 Day Free Trial of Long Tail Pro 

So, I’m going to share with you all a free keyword competition tool I’ve discovered that will let you easily highlight any text and right click to check what you’re up against.

This will let you know how good of a chance you have of getting on the first page of Google if you were to try and target that keyword. This tool extracts the QSR for any particular keyword of interest. QSR = Quoted Search Result, or the exact number of competing pages within Google.

It’s important to note that this is NOT the results you see within the first page of Google when you type it within quotes:

Rather, it’s the number you find when you click through to the last page of the search results

For “best mattress for a bad back” the exact competition is 104. Theoretically you can do this manually without any sort of tool by just clicking through to Google’s last page of search results for any quoted search term, like I just demonstrated here. But that is extremely time consuming and not practical for any in depth keyword research. For that, there are more efficient tools.

Wait.. let’s backup for a minute…

If you’ve spent any length of time researching keyword competition, you probably weren’t taught anything about QSR. Most likely, you were told the need to spend your time checking out the front page of Google and seeing the competition there. But it isn’t as important as some people make it out to be. Many tools analyze first page metrics like page rank, juice links, domain age, etc… but I can tell you that I’ve researched thousands of keywords and QSR is actually a pretty darn good indicator of keyword competition. (But more of that for another post).

Let me just say I am able to outrank sites like Forbes, Huffington Post, Amazon, Consumer Reports, etc on a regular basis, so this really does work. Google wants to display the most relevant results to its users to give them the best experience possible, so if you can be as relevant as you can to any particular search term with low competition, you have a very good shot at showing up on the first page.

PART 1 – Finding the Competition

It’s relatively simple but surpringly effective. There’s an amazing tool that does the same thing (only instantly, plus tons more), but first I want to tell you the free way to do this.

This tutorial is dealing with the CHROME browser extention called Context Menu Search. You can find it here.

If you’re using Firefox, it’s just called Context Search.

Once you have it installed within your browser, you’ going to need to tweak the settings a bit to make it perform the way we want it to.

You see, the purpose of this exention is to right click any piece of text and easily be able to search for it within Google, Bing, Yahoo, IMDB, Wikipedia, and many additional online informational platforms… which is pretty cool, I guess.. but we don’t really care about all that right now.

All we need this tool to do is find the Google QSR.  If it isn’t already there, add in “Google QSR” into the display label and paste this within the link column:

http://www.google.com/search?q=”TESTSEARCH”&start=900#

Now, highlight and right click any piece of text within your browser and you should noticed the Context Menu Search option. Once you roll the mouse over, the search features should pop up, and you’ll want to click on the Google QSR field we just created.

Now this tool will instantly search this term in Google for you, however we’ve edited it to automatically display the last page of search results instead of the first. This is really handy because now you can immediately view the competition for this particular search term. Above we can see “mattress for bad back”  has a QSR of 168 – this is the number that displays at the top where it says “Page 17 of 168 results”. It’s also at the bottom of the page as well.

This is the exact number of pages in Google (at least the ones Google finds relevant) and it’s a pretty good indicator of whether a keyword is worth going after or not.

What’s a “good” QSR?

Here’s the general range for QSR -

over 300 – high competition, I wouldn’t even try it

200-300 – moderate competition, but still rankable with time and effort

100-200 – lower competition, fairly easy to rank for

50-100 – very low competition, can easily rank these terms

0-50 – almost no competition, extremely easy to rank

I’d recommend for anyone just starting out to try and aim for terms with under 100 QSR. It is going to be a lot easier for you to start ranking and getting traffic that way.

With a competition of 168, “mattress for bad back”  is a fairly low competition keyword and would be good to target.

One last step, take a glance at the first page of Google!

It can be a good idea to at least glance over what is already ranking for that particular term, and ask yourself , Can I create something better (and more relevant) than what’s already displaying in the top 10 results? 

Sometimes it’s a lot easier done than others, so it’s important you have a good understanding of what is already ranking and what you can do better to outrank those pages.

I’m not going to provide some in depth analysis of what to look for here, because I really believe most of that stuff is pointless to think about if you already know the QSR. It’ll only end up getting you more confused.

Really, if you know your exact competition (QSR) is under 300, then it really just boils down to being relevant and the best source of information on that particular search. If the 1st page is flooded with high authority sites that are completely devoted to the topic, for example if we pretend the first page of search results for “best mattress for a bad back” was filled with well established authority websites that were completely all about mattresses for back pain, it may be a little harder (and take more time) to rank on the first page.

In this case, it’s not. If you take a look, you’ll see completely unrelated sites like Huffington Post, Hubpages, SFGate, that just happen to have an article on the topic. Even though the first search result, sleeplikethedead, seems to be pretty relevant and on topic, a quick visit to the site will tell you it’s 1. outdated and 2. really not all that great. It would not be hard to rank well for this term.

In other cases you may find the first page competition seems pretty fierce and completely relevant, and all the pages are excellent. If this is the case, it doesn’t mean you can’t outrank them (if the QSR is right) but it may take additional time and effort.

PART 2 – Finding the Search Volume

How do you know if there are actually people searching for the keyword?

Okay, so you’ve established if the term would be easy to target, but how do you know if anyone is even searching for it? The best free source of this information would be to use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner Tool. It requires having an account with Google Adwords (which is free) and from there you’ll have to access the Keyword Planner under the Tools option.

Next, you’ll need to click the box that says “search for new keyword and ad group ideas”.

Now, simply enter in your keyword(s). You don’t really need to put in additional information here since we’re not interested in creating an actual ad campaign, we just want to find the estimated search volume.

After you hit OK, it’ll take you to your ad group ideas… but you’ll want to tab over to “keyword ideas” here.

Now we see that the estimated monthly searches is 140, which is good. Anything over 100 is generally good.

However, it also will pop up with related keyword ideas and you can see that “best mattress for bad back” is actually quite a bit higher in search volume. It may be worth checking out the QSR for that term too to find out if it’s a better keyword.

A quick check with the context menu search tells me that best mattress for a bad back is actually a better keyword, as it has higher searches and a lower QSR! Bam, we found ourselves a decent keyword for free!

But as I’m sure you can see, that was quite a lot of work to find one keyword… what if you wanted to research tons of keyword ideas? It would take you a very long time!

A faster, more efficient alternative…

I’m a pretty big fan of a keyword tool called Jaaxy that does pretty much what I showed you, only instantly (and it does so much more). The thing I absolutely love about it is the search estimates are the most accurate I’ve come across. Google Adwords isn’t really the best indicator of search volume. It’s OK, it can give you an idea, but in some cases it’s either super inflated or incredibly deflated… I’ve had it try and tell me a term got “less than 10″ searches per month, when I know for a fact it brings in the majority of traffic to one of my niche websites (getting searched hundreds of times per day)! I’ve cross checked the actual traffic volume some of my keywords were bringing in with search estimates given with this tool, and while it’s not 100% (nothing is) it’s pretty darn close (a lot closer than Adwords).

Here I’ve brought up the best mattress for a bad back search, and ta da, instant search volume and competition with 1 click….

Note the 103 QSR matches what I found manually before with the context menu search. The search volume is quite higher in this case then it was with the Google Adwords tool, but keep in mind this brings in data from multiple search engines, not just Google.

If you want to know more about this tool, you can check it out here. You can sign up for free and get 30 searches, so give it a shot!

Do you have another free way to check competition? I’d love your feedback, so drop me a comment down below!