Are you trying to rank your WordPress blog for the high‐competition keywords? Are your competitors also struggling to rank for them? It might be tough… I mean to win this battle.
You know, I’ve got a great solution for you, long‐tail keywords. Why should you listen to my advice? Because long-tail keywords can drive a ton of high‐converting traffic to your WordPress blog and increase the revenue for your business dramatically.
Below you can see this year’s graph that demonstrates the skyrocketing organic traffic to the Ahrefs blog.
Why does this happen? It’s not a matter of luck. We are just actively using the keyword research strategies and I’m ready to share some of them with you.
So, in this article, I’m going to explain how to use long‐tail keywords and increase website traffic I promised you at the beginning of this blog post. By the way, no grand efforts are needed.
OK, let me tell you what are long‐tail keywords and why you should care about them.
What is Long‐tail Keywords
In simple words, long‐tail keywords are unpopular or low-volume search queries. They are highly focused and tend to convert extraordinary well.
I will get back to the question of why are these keywords called “long tails” a bit later.
We analyzed the 1.9 billion keywords in Ahrefs’ US database and were surprised to find that 92.42% of them get ten searches per month or even fewer.
Please take a look at the graph below. Do you see the lilac “tail”? It visualizes the unpopular queries. I am sure now you understand why less popular keywords are called long‐tail keywords.
This happens because they fall on the very long tail of the search demand graph.
Long-tail keywords have nothing to do with the number of words. That is, short search queries can be “long‐tail” keywords, and long queries can be “head” keywords.
For example:
Digital marketing jobs and digital marketing courses are “head” keywords, while am254 and animacrack are long tails.
Are you interested? Would you like to know how to find long-tail keywords and get enormous traffic from them? Just follow me further.
How to Find Long-tail Keywords
Let’s start with the easiest way. Take a broad topic and start typing it into Google. Do you see these Google autocomplete suggestions?
These are more specific and less popular searches that can be related to the overall topic you are searching for.
Check the “People also ask” box as well.
And don’t forget about the “Searches related to” area at the bottom of the search results.
The results featured in the section give some insight into the other less popular but more specific searches people are performing around that topic.
However, I must warn you that collecting these keywords from Google manually can be pretty time‐consuming. So, maybe it would be a wise solution to use a professional keyword research tool to find thousands of nice long‐tail keywords in a matter of seconds.
I use Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer for this purpose. That’s natural as I’m working for the company, but you can use any marketing tool of your choice.
The process is usually simplified to the following actions:
- I enter a seed keyword
- Choose the needed report
- Apply the Volume filter as I want to find keywords with low search volumes in my niche
If I’m looking for more specific queries but not general ones, I can also use the word count filter to find long‐tail keywords consisting of many words.
Keywords Explorer also offers the Questions report. These types of queries are going to probably be “unpopular and specific”, read long‐tail queries.
If you prefer to stay within your budget limits and use mostly free tools, try Answer the Public. It does something similar.
There is another effective way to discover promising long‐tail keywords in your niche/industry. You can browse the keywords for which your competitors are currently ranking.
Again, I do it in Ahrefs, but you can do it in your favorite marketing tool.
I just enter a competitor’s domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, go to the Organic Keywords report, then filter for keywords with low search volumes.
Side note: This is a very informative video on How to Do Keyword Research in 2025.
I am not sure that you have considered this kind of approach to find long‐tail keywords for the content you post on your website.
But that’s not all. I can recap a few more methods to find things that people in your industry may be searching for on Google:
- Step into your customers’ shoes. What language would they use and how to phrase the queries when searching for your products or services?
- There is no better way of finding out what kinds of words, phrases, and language your customers use than talking to them. Talk to your customers.
- Watch the threads in online communities. Visit industry forums to see what questions your customers are asking and how they phrase them. Checking out Facebook groups and other social media platforms also won’t hurt.
How to Use Long‐tail Keywords to Increase Website Oragnic Traffic
It is easier to rank for the long‐tail than for “head” keywords.
For example, some long-tail keywords at the top‐ranking page may have approximately 2,500 monthly searches.
Also, most of the top‐ranking pages will have fewer than 20 referring domains, which means that if you were to create a page on that topic and build some links to it, you could expect to rank in the top 10 quite easily.
If we compare the imaginary long-tail we have just been talking above to some popular “head” term, which has, say, approximately 100,000 monthly searches and all of the top‐ranking pages ranking for it have tons of backlinks, your chances of outranking them all become miserable.
The takeaway is that it’s easier to rank for and get traffic from long‐tail keywords.
However, you can get into the following situation:
You have a couple of keywords that have similar monthly searches. Does this mean it will be easy to rank for either of them?
The answer is no.
Look at the top‐ranking pages first. One of your keywords might turn out to be terrifically competitive. Would you like to know why?
This happens when a search query doesn’t comprise a unique topic of its own and falls under the broader topic.
Let me explain the phenomenon. When different people search for the same things Google understands this and ranks a near‐identical set of pages for all those long‐tail queries.
Here we can arrive at the conclusion – each topic has its own ‘search demand curve’.
If you create a ‘search demand curve’ for your long-tail keywords, you’ll see that while there are a few “head” terms, there’s also a very long tail consisting of thousands of low‐volume keywords. All of those are parts of the same big topic.
But you don’t need to worry about that if you picked out the right keywords with low search volumes.
Over to you
You know, I am a big fan of long-tail keywords and this article is just the tip of an iceberg revealing amazing SEO opportunities of the long tails for WP blogs as well as any other resources having some kind of content on them that requires promotion and high rankings in search engines.
If you are also the evangelist of long-tail keywords, please drop me a line in the comments. If this topic is new to you, your questions/thoughts/suggestions are always welcome down below.
Don’t be shy to share this article on your social media if you consider it valuable.
Cheers!
About the author:
Helga Moreno is a passionate content creator and marketer at Ahrefs bold enough to believe that if there’s a book that she wants to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then she must write it herself.
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