Free Long-Tail Keyword Generator: (AI-Powered) Niche SEO Keywords & Ideas

Rank Faster in Search Engines with this Free Long-Tail Keyword Generator (to Target Less Competitive SEO Keywords)

If you wanna get traffic from search engines (like Google & Bing), it helps to target less competitive, more niche SEO keywords. That’s where long-tail keywords come into play. Long-tail keywords are longer search terms and topics that get less monthly search volume… yet often also have significantly less competition.

The best long-tail keyword ideas have medium search volume and low keyword difficulty. I built this free long-tail keyword finder tool to help you find the right keyword suggestions that’ll have less competition (with metrics) for free, so you can focus on ranking & driving traffic to your website, faster.

Here’s why long-tail keywords are important: If you start by competing immediately with established websites who’ve been around in your niche for over a decade growing their SEO footprint, you’ll have a hard time outranking them. They’ve been in the game much longer and likely have more resources than you, too.

Of course, your blog content must not only be well-optimized for on-page SEO, but you’ll also have to invest time & effort into promoting your content in ways that’ll attract backlinks, build the authority and trustworthiness of your website in the eyes of search engines like Google. More on that later 😊

What is a Long-Tail Keyword Generator Tool?

A long-tail keyword generator is a tool that helps you identify the right topics & opportunities you should write about, by analyzing keywords for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. It’s the backbone of a proper keyword research process.

This free keyword research tool just needs a main keyword or phrase from you, then it generates a list of related keywords and their search volumes, competition levels and (coming soon) a rankability score. This info helps you figure out the best keywords to use in your content, so you can optimize your blog posts for search engines. Your keyword list gives you an idea of the volume of organic traffic you can expect to generate from relevant Google searches on each long-tail keyword.

The best long-tail keyword research tools will show you metrics like:

• Monthly Search Volume: The (estimated) monthly search volume is how often a keyword or phrase is searched for on a search engine per month. This lets you see the popularity and potential traffic of a keyword and figure out its competitiveness. With long-tail keywords, you’ll usually be looking for volumes around 500–5,000.
• Keyword Difficulty: How easy (or not!) will it be to rank on the first page of Google search results for this keyword? Having a good sense of the keyword difficulty is crucial for identifying the feasibility and potential success of ranking for that long-tail keyword in search engine results. Look for “low” difficulty for your long-tail keywords (consider shooting for “medium” if your site is already ranking well for lots of low difficulty keywords).
• Country-Specific Results: The search volume and difficulty for pretty much every keyword phrase will depend on the country where the searcher is located. Our free long-tail keyword tool shows US (United States) monthly search volume and keyword difficulty by default. Just click on the “US” (at the top right of the search bar) to select to see country-level data for anywhere in the world. This is especially important if you’re trying to boost your local SEO.
• (Optional) CPC (Cost-Per-Click): Cost per click is a pricing model used in ad services like Google AdSense, where the advertiser pays each time a searcher clicks an ad. (You’ll also hear it called PPC, “pay per click”, from the advertiser’s point of view). Google uses this model for ads on its search engine results pages and the CPC for a particular ad is determined by factors like the keywords, targeting, and competition. Advertisers can use CPC data to work out the likely cost and return on investment of their ads over time.

Our free tool gives you all the vital info you need alongside your list of long-tail keywords. We’ve hidden the CPC data, after feedback from users, as we know this isn’t relevant to most bloggers and content creators.

How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for Google Search (SEO) with this Keyword Planner

We’ve covered the basics of keyword research and explained what this long-tail keyword planner tool can help you with, so let’s dive into the detailed SEO strategies that’ll help optimize your blog content to rank higher for all kinds of long-tail keywords. (You can use these tips for short-tail keywords too … just be aware they’re often more difficult to rank for!)

Note: Whether you’re improving old blog posts by reworking them to focus on new keywords or creating content from scratch, you can follow these same steps.

1. Do Keyword Research to Be Sure You’re Pursuing the Best Long-Tail Keywords

The best long-tail keywords to pursue for your blog (especially if you’re relatively early on in your blogging journey), are going to be as close to the intersection of medium to high search volume and low keyword difficulty.

I’ve been a professional blogger for well over a decade, and I’ll be the first to tell you that it can be a challenge to find the right keywords that fit that “sweet spot” of medium search volume and low competition. This is why it’s such a great idea to focus on long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are fantastic, because there won’t be nearly so many specific search results on a particular SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Whatever your exact blog strategy—or content strategy—that you’re using to improve your content marketing ROI, finding these achievable but highly relevant long-tail keywords is vital.

2. Pinpoint Medium Search Volume & Low-Competition Keyword Ideas

A keyword tool helps you figure out the right keyword phrases to target for your blog content. While you might want to chase the most popular blog post ideas millions (or even billions) of people search for answers about, it’s going to be pretty much impossible to rank for these any time soon. Unless your blog is already extremely well-established (and highly authoritative) it would take years of dedicated effort promoting that content and building links to it in order to see the organic search traffic you’re hoping for.

My blogging philosophy is all about balance. Of course it’s good to plant those seeds for longer-term traffic growth on very popular but highly competitive phrases in your blog’s niche … just let go of the expectation that they’ll rank high in Google search in the short-term.

Focus most of your time on pursuing long-tail keyword phrases at the intersection of medium search volume and low competition wherever you can. That’s the sweet spot for actually getting traffic quickly. BTo build momentum (and to stay motivated), you need real people visiting your blog soon. You won’t ever be able to compete with huge websites that have been in your niche for 10+ years, unless you lay the foundation for early traffic growth with realistic keywords you can rank for soon. That might mean targeting much more specific keywords or looking for keyword variations that are a lot more achievable.

So how does this look in terms of the search volume data from this tool? Here’s roughly how I would define low, medium, high, and very high search volume:

• Low Search Volume: 0 to 1,000 monthly searches
• Medium Search Volume: 1,000 to 5,000 monthly searches
• High Search Volume: 5,000 to 10,000 monthly searches
• Very High Search Volume: 10,000+ monthly searches

Your best long-tail keywords will usually fall at the higher end of “low” volume (500+) or in the “medium” range.

Be realistic about where you’re at as a blogger. If you’re relatively new or in the middle of your journey, most of your organic search traffic will come from these low and medium search volume keywords. Invest in your blog’s future by also targeting more competitive (higher volume) keywords, but know that it’ll take months—or in most cases, years, to start ranking for High & Very High competition keyword phrases.

3. Look Closely at the Metrics to Find Relevant Long-Tail Keywords

When you type in any starting search term with this free long-tail keyword tool, you’ll instantly get dozens of related keywords and recommendations for other keywords that are likely to be very relevant to your target audience.

The best keyword research tool isn’t a minor piece of your free SEO tool stack. It’s the foundation of being confident that you’re blogging about the right keyword ideas in the first place. Above, you can see a search for “Sales CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword phrase. The tool instantly gives dozens of options for related keyword phrases—most of which are significantly less competitive than just these top results.

Search Volume: Number of Monthly Google Searches for a Keyword

As we mentioned above, the Search Volume metric in this free long-tail keyword tool displays the number of estimated monthly searches on Google for the corresponding keyword phrase. Essentially, it tells you how popular a given keyword phrase is (or not).

Keyword Difficulty: How Hard it Will Be to Rank for this Keyword

The Keyword Difficulty metric gives you an estimate of how challenging it’ll be to rank for each long-tail keyword phrase. You’ll see a range of keywords with these difficulty scores:

• Low: Most blogs (even relatively new sites) should be able to quickly compete on a low difficulty keyword phrase.
• Medium: Well-established blogs will compete quickly on medium difficulty keywords, but newer blogs will need to put a lot of amount of effort into promoting their content and naturally building backlinks (with strategies like guest blogging & writing for publications) to get a good organic search ranking for that phrase.
• High: Aiming high? This level of difficulty could be a good stretch goal for the next 6 to 12 months if you’re investing a lot of time and effort into growing your blog. If you’re consistently promoting your blog content for months, you could make it to the first page of organic Google search result rankings on high difficulty terms … but it does depend on how authoritative your blog is in the eyes of search engines.
• Very High: I’ll be honest: for “very high” difficulty terms, you’re competing with huge well-established websites and businesses that have a vested interest in defending their search rankings for these keywords. Often, you’ll be going up against companies making millions (or billions) each year. Of course, it’s not impossible to rank for very high difficulty keyword phrases—my blog ranks for many of them—but it’ll take A LOT of time, effort and high quality backlinks from very high authority websites in order to get there. At this level, you’re looking at years of investing time, effort and resources.

In most cases, the difficulty level can be boiled down to how many backlinks your blog post can attract from other authoritative blogs, websites, and publications. One of the main ways Google’s search algorithm determines what content to rank at the top of search results is through authority. This authority is largely defined by the number and quality of links your content has from other authoritative (trustworthy) websites.

Country: Great for Competing in Local SEO

We deliberately built this keyword research tool to offer country-specific monthly search volume & keyword difficulty, because not everyone is based in the United States—or targeting readers based there.

There’s a handy dropdown menu just above the search bar that lets you select & filter your keyword data for any country in the world. By default, our long-tail keyword tool shows data for the United States (US), but you’re always just one click away from seeing results for search activity in any other nation: perfect when you’re looking for local, targeted traffic.

Bonus: Use My Free SEO Checklist Alongside this Keyword Planner Tool

After you’ve used my long-tail keyword research tool to decide what keyword to target in a new (or updated) piece of content, you’ll need to actually to write the blog post. Then, it’s time to optimize your articles for maximum organic search ranking ability (this is called search engine optimization, or blog SEO).

Here’s my step-by-step SEO checklist that I recommend using before hitting publish on a new or updated blog post:

1. Make sure you install (and use!) the Yoast plugin for WordPress
2. Always pick a useful keyword phrase for your audience (think about search intent)
3. Optimize your subheaders for rich snippets and faster indexing
4. Only have one H1 header (this should be your post title at the top)
5. Follow correct header hierarchy (i.e. H2 sub-header sections with H3 subtopics within)
6. Use your primary keyword phrase naturally within your text (don’t go OTT)
7. Add a good mix of internal and external links (with at least 3-5 external links)
8. Craft an enticing meta description that’ll attract readers (include keywords)
9. Write keyword-rich image alt descriptions where appropriate
10. Choose an appropriate length for your blog post (think 1,500+ words at a minimum)
11. Write a meta title (SEO title) that should rank well (use my blog title generator tool)
12. Include your keywords in the post’s URL / permalink (see my permalinks guide)

Making these foundational SEO best practices part of your writing process will help a huge amount with optimizing your content and ranking well in Google. The more you apply these strategies to your long-tail keywords, the faster you’ll see more traffic from relevant keywords in your niche.

The Features of This Free Keyword Tool for Bloggers

We’ve explored a lot already, but let’s quickly run through all the features of my free keyword tool.

Keyword Explorer (Estimated Search Volume)

The Explorer tab of this free keyword research tool (the default tab) shows you the two most important SEO metrics when deciding which keywords to pursue in your blog content strategy:

• Monthly Search Volume
• Keyword Difficulty

With these two metrics to hand, you can make an informed decision about which keyword phrases to pursue for your blog. As we’ve covered, I always recommend focusing primarily on medium search volume and low competition long-tail keywords—with a smaller proportion of more competitive terms that offer longer-term traffic value as your blog grows and gains more authority in the eyes of Google.

Keyword Ideas (Suggested Blog Topics & Ideas)

Struggling to even know where to begin? Instead of typing in popular keywords and hoping to compete against a sea of well-established sites, you can use the long-tail keyword generator to find less competitive keywords to write about—while still giving you the opportunity to generate meaningful organic traffic.

In the future, we want to add even more features like Google autocomplete keyword suggestions, incorporate YouTube keywords & Amazon keywords, add CSV keyword list download functionality, provide click-through rate (CTR) estimates for top-ranking content, and even create a way to show you a rankability score that tells you how likely your site will be to rank for each particular keyword phrase. It’s a good idea to double-check this data with Google Search Console once your blog content starts to rank & get traffic, to make sure you’re optimizing for the very best search terms.

Keyword Tool FAQs & SEO Tips

Got questions about keywords? I know keyword research can feel daunting and I get a lot of questions about it (on social media, in my blogging courses and in the comments across my blog). Here are the answers to the most common questions about using this keyword tool, optimizing content for organic search, and keyword research in general.

Tool built by the incredibly talented @Sup.