4 Creative Ways To Use Long Tail Pro

If you caught my review of Long Tail Pro, then you’re well aware that it’s one of my favorite online marketing tools ever. In my review, I went over some of the basic functionality of this keyword research tool, and what its purpose is. You can do all the keyword research you need to with Long Tail Pro, but there are some other ways you can use it too outside of just finding long tail keywords.

I wanted to take the time to do a little write up on some of the different ways I use LTP outside of strictly to find low-competition keywords and exact match domains. By thinking beyond just keywords, you can save a lot of money on unnecessary tools by using LTP to its full potential. Here’s how.

1: Anchor text

After all of Google’s changes to their search algorithm, one thing that most online marketers agree on is that having 10,000 backlinks pointing to your site with the same exact anchor text is no longer effective. In fact, it can kill your SEO efforts altogether. These days, the way that myself and others are having more success with ranking websites is VARIED ANCHOR TEXT.

Google wants you to earn links naturally. A natural backlink profile has a ton of anchor text variety because if 10 people link to your blog post about “Dog Training”, there’s a good chance that all ten of them aren’t going to use “best dog training” as the anchor text. The anchor text they choose would depend on the context of their article.

So where does LTP come into play here? Let’s stick with our dog training example, and suppose our website is “bestdogtrainingtips.com” and the keyword we’re trying to rank for is “best dog training”. When building backlinks for the site, most people would consider anchor text variation as:

• Use the URL – bestdogtrainingtips.com
• Use the website name – Best Dog Training Tips
• Variations of the main keyword – dog training tips, dog training tips best, best tips for training dogs
• “Generic” anchor text – click here, more info, check this out!

Varying your anchor text like that might work, but with LTP, you can take it to the next level. You know the list of suggested keywords LTP gives you when you input your seed keyword? Those make for some AWESOME anchor text. They are related to your topic, and are words that would appear completely natural in Google’s eyes.

In our example from above, here are some results I got with LTP:

Ignoring the location specific suggestions, you have a great list of over 100 different phrases you could use for anchor text that would look completely natural in Google’s eyes. You should include some of those phrases on the page you’re trying to rank for too in order to really help boost your rankings.

2: Article topics

When I’m struggling to come up with new topics for articles, I open up LTP, put in the topic/niche of my blog and get a shit ton of ideas for articles with ease. Sure, there are other ways to get ideas like looking at questions people are asking on Yahoo Answers or looking at related blogs in your niche. But why go through all that trouble when you can use LTP to get infinite amounts of article ideas for topics that people are searching for within a matter of seconds.

All you’re doing is using the suggested keywords/phrases that LTP gives you as the starting point for your new articles. If we were in the affiliate marketing tips niche (kind of like me!), you could just run a search for “blogging tips” in LTP, and you’d get results like this:

I did a search for phrases with a minimum 500/searches per month. You could use these results to come up with a ton of new articles centered around those keywords like:

• What are the best affiliate programs?
• Top 10 Affiliate networks for noobs
• What is affiliate marketing?
• Wealthy Affiliate Review – Is it a scam?

You pretty much get the idea. I used this exact method to come up with over 50 article topics for a niche site of mine, and now I have articles targeting a ton of medium search keywords that have relatively low competition. Winning!

3: On-page SEO tips

Don’t you ever just wish that Google would just tell you what the hell you need to do in order to outrank your competitors? Well, guess what. With LTP, you can find out exactly what you should be doing as far as on page SEO to outrank your competition.

If you already have LTP, then you’re well aware of the Competitor Analysis feature. But what most people look at here is the off page stats that LTP gives you like Page Authority, Juice page links, Domain authority etc. Don’t just stop there. The creator of LTP, Spencer Haws, also recommends checking the URL and page title to see if the keyword you’re trying to outrank is present. But on page SEO is much more than just the URL and page title.

What I like to do is go through each of the sites ranking in the top 10 results, and analyze their on-page SEO factors. Some of the things I look for are:

• Related keywords they use within the content
• Images and the alt tags used in the images
• Social shares
• What keywords they’re using in their headings
• Any sites they’re linking out to

Using that info, I can get a pretty idea of what type of content I need to include for my site/page that I’m going to build to outrank them. There’s a very good chance that you’ll notice some common keywords mentioned in all of the pages that rank. I always make sure to use those same phrases somewhere within my site.

If most of the sites ranking are blogs, I even go as far to look at their page structure, and what other topics they’ve written about. Remember, these are all factors that contribute to your on page SEO, so you need to study them. You should try to keep your page structure similar, and write articles targeting some of the same keywords as your competitors.

4: Finding guest posting opportunities

Another overlooked way to use LTP is to find guest posting opportunities. Getting links from sites that rank in the top 10 results for your main keyword or related ones is one of the best ways to see some nice ranking improvements. Remember, Google treats backlinks as “votes” from a website that signal that your site is relevant for different search queries. Getting a backlink from a site that Google has deemed to be extremely relevant for your target keyword is like having one of the popular kids in school tell everyone that you’re cool too.

When you go this route, I avoid reaching out to small niche sites that are direct competitors because they will more than likely reject you because you’re trying to outrank them. So instead of looking at the top 10 results for the exact keyword you’re trying to rank for, do a search for words that are related, but not direct competitors.

For example, let’s say we have a site about the best adjustable dummbells (a very popular niche following this case study by Tung). Looking at the top 10 ranking sites, a lot of them are small niche sites created by people who are specifically trying to rank for “best adjustable dumbbells”. So you more than likely won’t be able to get a guest post on their site.

But one of the suggested keywords that LTP recommended from my search was “best dummbell workouts”. Now, looking at the top 10 results for that, I see a few opportunities from related sites that I could probably get a guest post on since they’re related to my site/niche, but not direct competitors.

A benefit of using LTP to do this is that you get to see the different stats for these websites all in once place, so you have an idea of how powerful a link from one of the sites you want to guest post on has. Look at the Domain authority and age. The page authority probably won’t be so relevant because your post will be on a separate page. But the stats LTP give you are definitely good indicators of how good of a link you’re going to be getting.

And there you have it. These are 4 ways that I personally use LTP outside of just finding keywords to create new niche sites for. Stop thinking of Long Tail Pro as just a keyword research tool, and start using it to its full potential. You might be surprised by how much use you can get out of it.