With content marketing becoming more and more popular, we wanted to walk you through a rather easy process of extracting long-tail keywords from your Google Analytics account. With these keywords you'll be able to plan some content marketing strategies with a tangible plan of action at hand. First off, what is a long-tail keyword? Long tail keywords are keyword phrases composed of three or more words that collectively are more specific than a single keyword. Long tail keywords are more likely to convert to sales than shorter, more generic keywords because there is less competition for them. Now let's look at how we can make use of these long-tail keywords: Fire up Google Analytics and load up the reports for your website. Click through to Queries (Acquisition>Search Engine Optimisation>Queries). At this point you'll be presented with a long list of keywords: 
The next few steps are important: 
What we have now is a long list of keywords that people are searching for and arriving at your website, as well as some metrics to go with it (impressions, clicks, average position and click through ratio). You can sort using the metrics to narrow down to the most useful keywords. As it is, this information can assist you but it's not exactly what we wanted so please read on: 
Now we're making progress! These are long-tail phrases that your website is being seen for in people's searches. These keywords typically aren't your first choose keywords but they're often the ones that have a decent CTR and/or conversion because they're specific and if your content matches them there's a strong chance that you'll increase your conversion rate and that's the point of this post. In the keyword set you have 5 columns, what would be really useful is a column next to impressions entitled "potential traffic". Good news is that this is something we can do quite easily through Google's Keyword Planner. Open the Planner, sign into your Google account and choose the second option available to you that shows you search volume: 
You can extract this information and put it into your spreadsheet. What we have now is a list of long-tail keywords along with some very useful metrics. What you want to do now is taylor some blog posts / evergreen content to target these long-tail keywords. Write content that is very specific to the long-tail keyword and enjoy not only potentially ranking higher in the search results for the keyword, but enjoy the increase in conversions as people land on a page they find useful! If you're not all for the content side of things, the information you've extracted could be used for a Google AdWords campaign too. It's a very simple strategy to execute and with some trial and error it's normally possible to get some good extra clicks onto high converting pages which ultimately adds to your bottom line. Drop us a line if you give this a go, we'd love to hear your feedback.
The next few steps are important: - You'll currently see 10 queries on your screen, you want to look for "show rows" at the bottom and increase this to at least 500.
- Locate the "export" option at the top of the screen and export everything in CSV format.
- Launch Excel and import the file you've just exported.
What we have now is a long list of keywords that people are searching for and arriving at your website, as well as some metrics to go with it (impressions, clicks, average position and click through ratio). You can sort using the metrics to narrow down to the most useful keywords. As it is, this information can assist you but it's not exactly what we wanted so please read on: - As we're looking for long-tail, you want to remove all the one or two-word keywords from the spreadsheet.
- Use the metrics to now arrange the long-tail keywords.
- Remove any nonsense keywords in the list.
Now we're making progress! These are long-tail phrases that your website is being seen for in people's searches. These keywords typically aren't your first choose keywords but they're often the ones that have a decent CTR and/or conversion because they're specific and if your content matches them there's a strong chance that you'll increase your conversion rate and that's the point of this post. In the keyword set you have 5 columns, what would be really useful is a column next to impressions entitled "potential traffic". Good news is that this is something we can do quite easily through Google's Keyword Planner. Open the Planner, sign into your Google account and choose the second option available to you that shows you search volume: You can extract this information and put it into your spreadsheet. What we have now is a list of long-tail keywords along with some very useful metrics. What you want to do now is taylor some blog posts / evergreen content to target these long-tail keywords. Write content that is very specific to the long-tail keyword and enjoy not only potentially ranking higher in the search results for the keyword, but enjoy the increase in conversions as people land on a page they find useful! If you're not all for the content side of things, the information you've extracted could be used for a Google AdWords campaign too. It's a very simple strategy to execute and with some trial and error it's normally possible to get some good extra clicks onto high converting pages which ultimately adds to your bottom line. Drop us a line if you give this a go, we'd love to hear your feedback. 