A prospect coming in to your website from a long-tail keyword is often more valuable than someone searching for something generic, because:
• They are further down the buying cycle and have done adequate research.
• The customer knows exactly what he’s looking for.
• Conversion rates are typically better with long-tail keywords.
It is typically very hard to locate long-tail keywords that have search traffic in order to optimize your website to rank for them.
None of the popular keyword research tools including Wordtracker, Google Adwords Tool provide in-depth analysis on long tail terms with traffic.
In this post, I’ll be showing you five easy ways to locate long-tail keywords that have search traffic and can help you become more profitable:

1. Google Suggest Scrape
Google provides keyword suggestions when you type in a key phrase into the search box, the suggestions that you see on top are typically keywords that have more search traffic than the ones down below.
A great way to find long-tail traffic that converts is using the google suggest scraper tool developed by thinkpragmatic.com
This tool scrapes the suggestions provided by Google for a root keyword and also appends the alphabets ‘a to z’ for that keyword to scrape more useful long-tail terms.

2. Books and Magazines
It’s always useful to read popular industry books and magazines and scoop out new articles. These articles often contain popular jargon, terms and concepts that you can use to optimize for.
Since these terms are published in industry books and magazines, they already have search traffic that you can exploit. If you’re the first to optimize for these terms as soon as they’re published, you have a better chance of dominating the first spot in the search engines.

3. Google Blog Search
Google Blog Search is a great way to save time on research by using other people’s long-tail research as references. If you enter a keyword into Google Blog Search, it shows you the latest related blog posts that have been published across the world wide web.
Using this tool, you can find out what long-tails other people in your industry are going after and optimize for them.

4. Large Ecommerce Sites
If you’re trying to find long-tail keywords for your ecommerce sites, a large ecommerce site will be a great source of long-tail product terms to optimize.
Sites like eBay and Amazon have a huge catalog of items that you could browse to come up with long-tail product keywords as well as topics for articles to write and optimize.

5. SpyFu, Market Samurai and other competitive research tools
Tools like SpyFu and Market Samurai allow you to search for a domain or keyword and see what other keywords users are advertising relevant to the domain or keyword.
These usually contain plenty of long-tails that you can use for your campaigns.
More than selecting these long-tail terms, its also important to track these using a powerful analytics tool to see if they’re generating positive return on investment.
It is advisable and easier to optimize a keyword that generates revenue to rank better rather than try and research a new one which may or may not produce positive results.