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My Favorite Way to Find Longtail Keywords – Advanced Niche Site Strategy

I have a really powerful niche site strategy that I am excited to share with you today. Before we hop into that, I first want to quickly discuss the results from the poll I ran in the last post and explain my plans for the future content!

Below are the results from the poll that I ran asking you what you wanted to see for future content here on NSA:

poll-results

The majority of you wanted to see advanced niche site strategies.  The second most votes went to niche site case studies and then rounding it up was website investing. Thank you to everyone who voted!

Since most of you where interested in advanced strategies I have put together this post here as the first post. However, I have decided that I will be creating content for all of the topics mentioned above! So you can expect a wide variety of content from me revolving around niche websites 🙂

Today’s Advanced Strategy – Finding Longtail Keywords Using Semrush + Forums

The strategy that I am covering today is one that I have been using for all of my own niche sites and I have seen some awesome success. This strategy involves finding forums that are relevant to your niche site and plugging them into Semrush. This will provide you with a goldmine of high quality long tail keywords for you to target.

I outline the entire process in the video below:

Make sure to subscribe to my Youtube Channel as there will be a lot more content being produced there.

Basic Outline for this Strategy

I know some if you will not want to watch the video so I will give a basic outline for how to use this strategy. The whole idea behind this tactic is to find forums that are relevant to your niche that you have a website in and find longtail keywords using Semrush.

Why forums?

I really like using forums for this type of research for three reasons:

  1. Any keywords that a forum is ranking for within Google can easily be beat with a decently optimized article. Forums = weak competition
  2. You will find a lot of “out of the box” keywords that you never knew existed
  3. A TON of questions get asked on forums and these are the perfect longtail keywords we want to rank for

Using Semrush, you can quickly see every keyword that a specific forum is ranking for within Google. This is a goldmine for longtail keywords.

The Outline:

  1. Find a forum that is relevant to your niche. Use the search term of  “your niche + forum” in Google to find these forums
  2. Plug the forums into Semrush
  3. View all of their Google rankings and find the keywords that would be relevant to your own site
  4. Export all of the keywords you find into an Excel file so you can go back to them later on

That is all there is to it, however, I would suggest watching the video because I give a lot more explanation and show you exactly how I go about using this strategy.

How Effective is This Strategy?

Good question!

I have put this exact strategy to the test on my own sites and I have seen awesome success. See below for an example:

Month by Month Look at the Traffic Stats

 

2015-total-traffic

Daily Traffic Stats

daily-visits

The reason that I am showing you these screenshots of my Google Analytics account for this one niche site is so that you can understand how powerful longtail keywords are. This one site get’s around 600 visitors a day and you would think that it would be ranking for some keywords that have a high amount of monthly searches.

That’s not the case though!

Below you can see the keywords that drive the most traffic to my site and their monthly searches:

semrush-kws

Not ONE keyword has over 1,000 monthly searches! A handful of the top keywords have only 70 and 90 monthly searches as well. This goes to show how powerful longtail keywords are if you are able to rank for them.

So guys, don’t overlook longtail keywords. There is a huge earning potential when it comes to ranking these keywords. Use the strategy that I outline in this article and start targeting the keywords with high quality content. If you do that then you are on your way to having a successful niche site.

This is also a great strategy for the custom sites we build. We’ll take care of the main keywords, and you can use this strategy to get a ton of additional traffic to the site. It’s a winning combination.

That’s it!

That’s gonna do it for my first full article here at NSA. I hope that you all enjoyed and I hope you can implement this strategy for your own niche sites. It can be very powerful if you do it.

I would love to hear what you think about this article and if you want more stuff like this in the future. Leave me a comment below and let me know your thoughts. Thank you!

Josh
 

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below 21 comments
Vasa - February 10, 2016

2 days ago I purchased semrush and I came up with lots methods for kws , really good tool.
Just be creative, you can scrape for example youtube or articles sites like ezinearticle. If they are rankings in top 10 than everyone can.
Good method.

Reply
    Josh - February 11, 2016

    Hey Vasa,

    Yup, Semrush is awesome! Good idea about using other weap competition site such as youtube, ezine articles. I may even try something like yahoo answers as well. Thanks for the comment Vasa

    Josh

    Reply
Billal Sarker - February 10, 2016

This is really a good idea that people can get more traffic for his/her niche site. I will try to implement the strategy to my next niche site. Thanks mate for such this article.

Reply
    Josh - February 11, 2016

    Thanks Bill, I am glad that you liked it!

    Let me know it works for your own niche site 🙂

    Josh

    Reply
Maz - February 10, 2016

Nice post Josh! I will definitely watch the video later when I have more time. Quick question on your strategy for long tail KWs. Do you write an article for each long tail KW or do you try to stuff a few KWs into one article? What strategy works best for you?

Also, I’ve read that you don’t really need to use backlinks when you target low competition KWs because you can rank pretty quickly for those. Do you agree with that philosophy?

Thanks,
Maz

Reply
    Josh - February 11, 2016

    Hey Maz,

    Very good question and I am planning on doing another article here soon that will explain my strategy for this. However, my basic strategy is to target as many keywords on as possible within one article. I like to find a “basket” of related keywords that i can target with one article.

    As for the type of backlinks, if you do good enough keyword research and find low comp keywords to target you do not need any backlinks because Google will rank you solely due to the fact that your article is the most optimized for that search term.

    Josh

    Reply
Akram - February 11, 2016

This is really nice ideas but i hope you can write about how to insert all keywords in the content .. how many time .. etc … thanks

Reply
    Josh - February 11, 2016

    Hello Akram,

    Yes, I can cover how to target these keywords within content in a future post, thanks for the suggestion my friend

    Josh

    Reply
Harry - February 11, 2016

Brilliant post, the best keyword research video I have seen in a while.
I couldn’t agree with you more about the month search thing. People get so angry when I tell them that they should go after keywords with monthly searches under 1,000. However I am ranking very well with one keyword right now that has 0 monthly searches!!! The variations all added up come to around 4,000 monthly search from this 1 original KW.

I would add that the content still needs to be top notch and a great article that gives useful advice/ information whatever.

Thanks for this, fantastic 🙂

Reply
    Josh - February 11, 2016

    I really appreciate it Harry, thanks for the comment 🙂

    I agree 100% with what you said about writing good content and I think it is just as important as finding longtail keywords

    Josh

    Reply
Miguel Alas - February 11, 2016

Great Post Josh! I must try this strategy for my project. I also have the same questions as Maz said. What’s your advice?

Reply
    Josh - February 11, 2016

    Thank you Miguel 🙂

    I just replied to Maz so you can check that out above!

    Josh

    Reply
tom - February 13, 2016

Sad.

This blog used to be good.

Now is all about selling your custom niche sites.

Reply
    Josh - February 14, 2016

    Hey Tom,

    Sorry to hear that. There will still be high quality free content being produced all of the time, the fact that we are selling custom niche sites doesn’t change anything.

    Josh

    Reply
    Dave - March 8, 2016

    Lighten up Francis, we don’t need your baggage around here. This is a good article with useful tactics. Over the last 24 hours I just re-read everything on the site and 2 things remain consistent – valuable articles and a little promotion of the products being offered on the otherwise free site. Big deal, it’s like commercials on TV. Grow up.

    Reply
Karun - February 21, 2016

I was thinking for a long time how to use SEMRUSH for finding low competition keywords and I think this is the right time to do it. Taking action is everything.

You don’t do it then you don’t get it.

Still one of my sources to find what’s happening with niche sites and tactics these days.

Reply
    Josh - February 27, 2016

    You are 100% correct! Also, it’s good to hear that NSA is still a place that you can come to learn some niche site tactics

    Josh

    Reply
Khayal - February 21, 2016

Thank you for valuable content Josh !

I’m also targeting the longtail keywords, and got some nice results.

However , I have a quick question about this strategy ,

Let’s assume that my niche is : “basketball” , and I have two keywords like “best basketball shoes for men” and “basketball shoes for men” , should I target these two keywords in one article ? Because I think keyword with “best” deserves another pillar article.

What do you think about that ?

Thanks again :).

Reply
    Josh - February 27, 2016

    Hey Khayal,

    Thanks for the comment!

    As for your question, you should target both of them within one article. Hope that helps

    Josh

    Reply
akram - March 24, 2016

Hey .. Thanks for your video Josh very nice method … But I think you can do the exact steps with Google keyword planner
Any Update for showerhead niche site? Looks like you drop it.

Reply
    Josh - March 26, 2016

    Hi,

    Thank you! You can some of the same stuff with the GKP but Semrush makes it a lot easier and more effective. As for the showerhead site, I am not sure what Mike has planned for that, sorry

    Josh

    Reply

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