Long tails ROCK. IMHO, they have two really great purposes in life.
- A long tail that contains the “head” of you main theme is used to reinforce that theme.
- A true long tail, one with cost and traffic and not just a really long shingle, are terms that are generally easy to rank for
So including long tails in your website will net you some easy-to-get traffic that is likely to convert and can also help to reinforce your theme.
Personally I’m only interested in long tails that have cost and traffic – or at the very least natural search traffic. I’m not interested in actively promoting a term with little or no traffic on it, just because it’s a long tail of my main term – I like to kill as many birds with a single stone as I can.
Long tails that contain my main theme can also be useful because they often times show me the latest developments in that niche and spark thoughts in my head and those of my writers of additional ideas about my parent term – I can often find controversy in my theme if I filter looking for long tails.
I use long tails of my silo parent theme in article names, and I use long tails of the article names in my article text. I target those terms in a few, well placed inbound linking strategies – for example I’d write a blog post about them and use the term in the anchor text. And Boom, I’m ranked for the term because Google can see that my whole silo is relevant to that term! How easy can it get? Even easier, now – let me show you how to find some really choice long tails:
There’s a predefined function in the The Last Keyword Tool filter that will let you find long tails of the parent term for the project: keyword_is_long_tail
Just put that phrase in your filter box and hit the apply filter and it will show you all the long tails for your parent term:
What about the long tails in that theme for another term? Easy, there is a provision for that too. Here’s an example: keyword matches “%dog%” Just replace the “dog” with any phrase you want – it can include spaces like keyword matches “%dog food%”
So now you can use synonyms of your root term and find all the long tails for them as well – so in a project that you drilled where the parent term was “dog food” you can look for “puppy food” or “dog chow”, etc. and find several long tails that express your theme in different ways – and make for a more interesting article that will help your rankings and bring you traffic, all at the same time.
I’d say that’s a whole flock of birds with a single stone 
(expand the video to full screen to be able to clearly see what I’m showing you)
TLKT lets you explore themes & markets with filters. Quick drills, specialty filters and columns let you find main themes. Understand the value of terms as they apply to your business with custom defined columns like DWS’s “profit column”.
About SueSue Bell is the CEO, founder and mastermind behind Theme Zoom's 'Krakken' Search Engine Marketing Tool, The Last Keyword Tool and Domain Web Studio (DWS). Her expertise with system design and databases allowed her to back engineer popular search engines and discover methods for Search Market Analysis and Competitive Analysis that turn SEO and search engine rankings into a science. This resulted in the creation of tools which make the life of an SEO/SEM easier by automating both the difficult and mundane aspects of Market Research, Keyword Research, Website Site Structural Design and Implementation. Sue retired from her career supporting the Military in her thirties and recently came out of retirement to mastermind the programing behind our powerful and proprietary market analysis tools. She currently enjoys living in the arid Arizona desert, spends her spare time dominating online markets, and is available on a limited bases for online marketing consultation and training.
