Longtail keyword strings are great.

Find the right ones and they can bring you a decent flow of targeted, relevant visitors to your site.

Arm yourself with a wide enough collection of longtails and you can tick another item off your checklist of “Things to do to optimize my website for the search engines.”

But how do you find the right ones and decide which longtails you want to grab?

Identifying Longtails Using Keyword Research Tools

Well duh!  I hear you mutter.  You just plug your target term into any keyword tool worth its salt and scroll down to the bottom of the page, right?

Well, yeah, that can be a good starting point and it’s a great way to brainstorm ideas for content because you’re finding out what terms and phrases related to your target people are actually searching for.

But it’s likely to mean that you’ll need to create a whole load of new material from scratch in order to catch those searches.  And you’ll need to remember to carefully review the list of phrases that you discover to ensure that you’re choosing to target longtail phrases that are likely to bring you visitors who are relevant to your site’s goals.  Sure, they may be searching for something that uses one of the keywords you’re optimizing for, but the rest of the words used in their longtail search will give you a clue as to their intent.  If a visitor who arrives via a search for a particular longtail phrase isn’t likely to convert into a customer or a subscriber (depending on your site’s goals) are they really a visitor that you need to spend time trying to draw into your site in the first place?  Probably not.

What About Longtail Keyword Phrases You Didn’t Realise You Were Already Hitting?

Have a look through your analytics package of choice and check out the phrases that have already brought visitors to your site from the search engines.

I guarantee you’ll see some queries in there that make you stop and think, “Really?  They came to my site looking for that?”

Then ask yourself, “what was the intent behind that searcher’s query?  Would they have found the answer they were seeking on my site?  Do I want to bring more people who are looking for that to my site?”

If you check out Michael Martinez’s SEO-Theory blog, you’ll see that every now and then Michael will write a post where he lists all the odd/esoteric longtail search queries that bring visitors to his blog and he’ll try to provide clear and succinct answers to them, along with links to previous posts he’s written that should provide the searcher with a more detailed answer.
This not only gives him a way of targetting extra long tail queries, but it’s also a good way of encouraging the search engine spiders to crawl deeper into the archives of his older posts.

I always knew he was a clever bloke.

How About The Longtail Queries That You’re Not Quite Hitting Yet?

Now this is an interesting one.

Sure you can do your keyword research and find new longtail terms to target.

And you can cherry pick the phrases that have already sent you a handful of visits and tweak your pages to encourage more people to click through to your site from the SERPs.

But there’s a middle ground between these two extremes that’s a potential goldmine of longtail search visits.  The lowest-hanging of the low-hanging longtail fruit, if you will.

Go and log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account.

See that link on the overview page for Top Search Queries?  Click it.

Now, have a look at the list that appears on the left hand side of the page.  These are all the search queries (well, the Top 20 anyway) that Google has been kind enough to rank your site for, regardless of whether or not the searcher then clicked through to your site from the result or chose to go elsewhere.
You can segment the results to see which regional version of Google the searcher used and whether it was a straight forward web search or a blog search.

The pane on the right hand side of the page shows you the results that people have actually clicked to visit your site, but as with everything that the Big G is willing to share with webmasters, the data tends to be incomplete and sketchy at best.

But it’s this list on the left that we’re most interested in.  These are your longtail search query also-rans.  The phrases and terms that Google already thinks you’re relevant enough for to warrant a place in the SERPs, but maybe not high enough yet to entice people to actually visit your site for.

These are the phrases that just need a little bit of tweaking, the pages that just want a little sprinkling of that SEO pixie-dust, the articles that just need a couple of extra links with suitably tailored anchor text, or perhaps the starting point for a brand new article or series that will cater to these searchers’ needs more effectively.

So go and check out your longtail query near misses and see which ones you think could bring your site more of the kind of visitors you want.