Long Tail Pro Review: Is it A Keyword Research Tool Worth Having?

Today I am going to do a review on Long Tail Pro, a tool originally developed by the team of Spencer Haws, which aims to help you research for keywords that are easy to rank for, and with a decent amount of search volume.

What is Long Tail Pro

Long Tail Pro is a keyword research tool to help you find easy to rank keywords with ease. The software was actually launched in 2011 as a desktop application, though it’s been acquired by a new company in 2016.

A lot of changes happened after that, especially due to the changes in the Google Keyword Planner which was integrated to the software before. It came a time when the Keyword Planner started to spit out search results where it only provides the volume range instead of the actual search volume.

This actually made the search results somewhat useless, and order to address this issue, The Long Tail Pro team made several changes to the software, which also decommissioned the desktop version of the software and rolled out a cloud based version instead

As of today, more than 70,000 clients and SEO folks  are using this, which makes it as one of the most used keyword research tool in the market today.

Why Do Keyword Research?

In everything you do when you want to start an online venture and you plan to get your traffic from organic search, the first thing you really need to do is keyword research.

Keyword research is actually one the most important things you need to consider when your focus is in search engine optimization and you aim for organic traffic as it can really make or break your business – research for a wrong keyword and you won’t even rank in Google, but if you research for the right one, sooner or later, you’ll find your site on the first page of Google, which will definitely give you targeted traffic and potential sales.

Why Use Long Tail Keywords?

Now before we go into details, I just like to tell you that there are 2 main types of keywords – first is the Head Keyword, and the next is the Long Tail Keyword.

Below is an example of a Head Keyword

Travel

Now, what you can see below is an example of a Long Tail Keyword

Places to travel on a tight budget

Unless you own a highly authoritative site like Wikipedia or Yahoo, I would suggest you don’t even bother ranking for a Head Keyword as it would be impossible to rank, or maybe you could still rank but it will definitely cost you a lot of money, time, and effort, and there is still no guarantee of ranking for that keyword.

But for Long Tail Keywords, that is actually what you want to find and rank for, because these are the more specific and more targeted terms, and although the search volume is a lot lower compared to Head Keywords, these kinds of keywords actually converts a lot more because these are the keywords that people are actually searching for

Now that you already know about long tail keywords, the next thing you might want to ask is how you can find them, and here is where Long Tail Pro actually comes into play, because this software can help you research for those long tail keywords that are easy to rank for.

Software Walkthrough

The Dashboard

After logging to your account, you will see the main dashboard like what you see in the screenshot below

Target Keyword Competitiveness

One of the nice feature in Long Tail Pro is it gives you the range of Keyword Competitiveness (KC) your website can potentially rank for.

To do this, just enter your website’s domain name in the text field then just press “Add” afterwards

After a few seconds, it will show you the range of the Keyword Competitiveness your website can rank

In the case of WPisLife, it says the website can rank for keywords with KC less than 25, and with some link building efforts, I will be able to rank for keywords with KC between 25-30.

Keyword Research

In using the keyword research, you have 2 options, first is the Google Adwords Suggestions and the second is the Manual Keyword Entry.

The difference between the two is for the Google Adwords Suggestions, it will provide you analysis for several keyword suggestions while for the Manual Keyword Entry, it will only provide analysis to the keywords that you entered.

In my example, we will use the Google Adwords Suggestions to give us some keyword ideas.

To start using Long Tail Pro for keyword research, enter a phrase or a word on the “Seed Keywords”. If you want, you can input more than one keyword by separating them with a comma.

You can also choose how many keyword suggestions it will spit out by entering a number at the “Suggestions per keyword”

You can also enable the “Advanced Options” to provide additional filter to your results. In my case, I specified to provide only keyword suggestions with a minimum of 100 searches per month

Once you’re done with the setup, just click the “Retrieve” button.

The process takes about a minute or more, or depending on how many keyword suggestions you specified, then once the process is done, Long Tail Pro will show you the results in a neat table

The cool thing about the result is it highlights the keywords whose keyword competitiveness fall within the range where you have the potential to rank.

You can also arrange the results based on the table headers. In my example, I arranged my results according to increasing Average Keyword Competitiveness score (Avg. KC).

You can also show the competition analysis of a certain keyword by clicking it. In this example, I clicked the term “keyword generator”

Then it will show you a detailed competition analysis for that chosen keyword

Another thing you can do here is to generate more terms from the suggested keywords. You can do this by clicking the “+20” button beside that keyword

Also, when you clicked the checkbox at the left of the keyword, you will have the option to delete it, copy it or move it to a different project folder.

And if you want, you can also export all the keywords you researched by clicking the export icon which you will find at the upper right corner of the keyword suggestions.

Rank Tracker

Long Tail Pro also comes with a rank tracker. I actually did not use this as I am already using a different one, though this would be helpful if you want to have your keyword research tool and rank tracker in one place

Video Tutorials

You will also find the video tutorials on your account, which is also called the “Long Tail Bootcamp”. The training is composed of 14 videos that will show you how to use the software properly as well as other neat tips and tricks to get the most out of the software

Monitoring Your Credits

To monitor your credits, just look at the bottom left hand side of your screen and you will see the details on how many search credits and rank tracking credits are still available in your account.

And that’s basically how you use Long Tail Pro. It’s very easy to use by the way so I would suggest you try it to see for yourself

What I Like About Long Tail Pro

Easy to Use

What I like about the software is its ease of use as it does not require any technical skill to operate it. All you need to do is to set it up once then you just need to provide some seed keywords and all the dirty work will be done by the software.

Cloud Based

Another thing I like about Long Tail Pro is it being cloud-based. This means you don’t have to install the software in your PC. And since it’s on the cloud, it is highly accessible from any device as long as you have an internet connection.

Provides Keyword Competitiveness and Other Important Metrics

One of the cool features of Long Tail Pro is its Keyword Competitiveness at it will give you an idea whether a keyword is easy to rank or not. The Keyword Competitiveness gives you a score from 0 – 100, the higher the score, the competitive the keyword is, so I personally recommend finding keywords with a Keyword Competitiveness score of 20 or lower.

What I Don’t Like

Not for Very Light Users (which includes me)

The only thing I don’t like about Long Tail Pro is that the plans are not suited for very light users like me. Even their cheapest plan gives you 10k search credits a month, which for me is too much.

In my case, I think I can only use up around 1000-3000 search credits or even less in a month, and there might also some months where I will not use the software at all, so getting even the cheapest plan is impractical for me, though what I would like to suggest is if they can provide prepaid plans that you just have to buy top ups whenever you consumed all your credits, I think that would be awesome.

Pricing

Long Tail Pro comes in three subscription plans – The Starter Plan, the Pro Plan, and the Agency Plan. In all plans, you have the option to subscribe on a monthly or on a yearly basis.

For the monthly plan, below is what you are expecting to pay

And if you opt for a yearly payment, below are the prices that you will pay. The nice thing about the yearly plan is you can save a lot of cash compared if you subscribe on a monthly plan

By the way, the folks at Long Tail Pro provided me a 30% discount to whoever buys using my link. Just click the link below if you wish to avail the discount

Get Long Tail Pro at 30% Off

Wrapping Up

And that wraps up my review. Keyword research is definitely not something you take for granted especially if your focus is on organic search. You have to make sure that you are doing your keyword research the right way, and one of the way of doing this properly is with the help of Long Tail Pro.

Long Tail Pro is definitely something I would recommend of using, and with its several cool features like the Keyword Competitiveness and other ranking metrics, it would really give you a good idea whether a certain keyword is rankable or not.

As what I have said earlier, keyword research is not something you can take for granted but mind you, it is not something  you can easily do, especially if you don’t have a tool like Long Tail Pro, so if you want to make your life a bit easier when it comes to keyword research, just click the button below. The folks at Long Tail Pro provided me a nice 30% discount so you can give it a try at a more affordable price.

Get Long Tail Pro