That is when you either decide to compete with everybody else for a ranking on those keywords or you decide that you will mine deeper in order to discover keywords that may not have as much traffic, but they offer much lower competition because of that lower traffic. While everybody else fights it out for those premium high traffic keywords, you can get ranked for a half a dozen (or more) lower traffic keywords. These keywords will have a fewer amount of people trying to rank for them and you will be able to slide in for a top ranking with all of them.

If the top keyword in your niche receives 100,000 searches per month, then you may very well be able to find 6 "off beat" keywords that receive enough traffic to get the job done for you. You may even find enough off beat keywords that you can exceed the traffic you would receive from the top keywords. This is what we refer to as "going deep" or "drilling deep" in your keyword research.

This doesn't mean that you can't work towards a top ranking with the premium keywords, but understand that it will likely require a lot of effort and a longer period of time to accomplish. You could spend several months or even years trying to rank for such keywords. If your business is like mine, you need income now, and the way you accomplish this is to mine deep to find the long tails that you can rank quickly for. This will bring you traffic right away and if you have everything in place, the sales will follow rather quickly.

Chasing the Long Tail

When you mine deep you will be looking for three, four and even five word keyword phrases. Many times these phrases will incorporate the premium keyword in them. Sometimes you will use a variation of the premium keyword in the phrase. Other instances won't contain any premium words at all.  All of these keyword phrases are known as "long tail keywords".

Let's assume I have a product that shows one how to flatten their abdominals. I'll use the Google External Keyword Tool to mine for some keywords that I think I can rank for.



In the above screenshot I have opened up the Google Keyword Tool and entered the term flatten abs in the yellow shaded window. This is the root keyword for my search. I call it that simply because it is the word or phrase that I chose to begin this particular search. I enter the capcha code and hit the "get keyword ideas" button.

Below is a screenshot of a portion of the results the tool has given me;

I can see immediately that abs exercise would be a premium keyword traffic wise with almost 110,000 searches monthly. That's an awesome amount of traffic. I would assume that there are many sites trying to rank for it though. In order to find out how stiff the competition really is, I simply open a Google search box and enter the term for a search.

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