Long Tail Pro is a veteran in the keyword research scene.
It’s recommended by a lot of people, and it packs quite the punch.
You can use it to find keywords, determine keyword competitiveness, do backlink analysis and even track your ranking.
That sounds great, but do these features help you grow your online business?
Is Long Tail Pro one of the best keyword research tools?
Let’s take it step by step in our Long Tail Pro Review.
The Intuitive User Interface
Long Tail Pro’s interface is seamless and beautiful.
At times, it can be a bit cluttered, and if you’re not used to it you’ll need to adapt.
For example, the SERP analysis dashboard has a lot of features and views that you’ll need to get used to.
On top, some options blend into the background, such as targeting a certain language or country:
But all in all, it’s easy to use and intuitive. Even beginners can grasp (most of) the platform in under 10 minutes, and veteran SEOs will be able to jump on it in no time.
Finding Long Tail Keywords
Keyword research is pretty advanced with Long Tail Pro.
First, you plug seed keywords in the platform:
Just remember that you can add multiple keywords, so you shouldn’t waste time checking everything individually.
As soon as you have a few keywords to research, you can click retrieve and find suggestions:
Long Tail Pro immediately serves low competition long tail keywords, with search volume estimates and competition metrics.
This is great because you can find the best keyword for your content marketing efforts faster.
That’s one difference between Long Tail Pro and any other keyword research tool: their algorithms do a great job of sorting through all your opportunities and only displaying targetable long tail phrases.
You can also check the keywords your competitor ranks for, and if you want to turn off their sorting algorithm, you can do a manual keyword research for any seed keyword.
However, this is where Long Tail gets a bit harder to use.
If you just retrieve more seed keywords, they’ll get stacked with everything you researched before. This is because Long Tail Pro saves all previous searches and displays them at the same time.
For example, I had retrieved keyword suggestions for “best dremel” and then I wanted to do some keyword research on aha.io.
This is what my list looked like:
This can work against you. If you have a website doing laptop reviews, all the Dell keywords will get mixed up with the MacBook keywords.
The workaround is easy. Just start a new list before you find keywords on a different topic:
If you use it right, saving all keyword searches is actually an advantage. You can have similar topics, with their Google search results and competitors grouped.
Besides these research options, you can also customize your dashboard:
I only did that to deactivate paid results metrics, since I don’t want to advertise on the Google search network.
But you can also use it to declutter the interface, if you’re a beginner and all those metrics are a bit confusing.
This turns Long Tail into a versatile keyword research tool.
On top, you can also filter keywords based on these dashboard options:
This is great if you want to target keywords with specific metrics. For example, you can have Long Tail Pro only display phrases with a keyword competitiveness under 30 and with over 1000 searches per month.
All in all, Long Tail Pro simplifies keyword research quite a bit, all while offering a lot of customization options for advanced SEOs that need more data to review their ranking opportunities.
But that’s not all there is to it.
Finding the best keyword to rank for also means analyzing your competition.
SEO Difficulty and Long Tail Pro
Whenever you get keyword recommendations, you also get the keyword competitiveness score:
The numbers are pretty accurate, at least to give you an idea of how hard it will be to rank with no authority.
The color coding could be improved since it’s just yellow, green, or steer clear.
But whenever you research keyword search volume and suggestions, you can also corroborate the keyword competition metric with the rank value.
This the average money you can make off of the page divided by the average Google Ads bid amount.
You shouldn’t really count on it from the get-go, since different monetization methods will make this vary a lot.
But you can edit it yourself by going to the bulk actions dropdown and clicking on Set Rank Value.
This will help you determine the value of ranking for a certain keyword, which can indicate how competitive the SERP is, or may be in the future.
Metrics for PPC?
You’ll notice that Long Tail Pro has metrics for paid advertising on the search network.
This may seem weird to some of you.
After all, you do long tail keyword research to find organic traffic opportunities, so why the fuss?
Well, this feature can actually help eCommerce websites. If you’re researching a niche you want to expand into you get both keyword suggestions for organic traffic, and an estimate of how hard it will be to run a paid campaign.
That’s especially true due to the average bid estimate, but the Google Ads competition estimate helps too:
These features are not revolutionary.
It’s just Google’s data packaged next to their keyword suggestions.
Still, it can help you research a niche when you have all this data in one place.
Even if you don’t have an eCommerce website, you can get a basic estimate of how much money affiliate marketing can bring for a certain keyword.
It’s not the best way to research that, but it’s one way to get started.
SERP Analysis
SERP Analysis is probably one of the best features of LongTail Pro.
keyword research tools will either have a lot of information on your SERP, in which case they’re a bit harder to navigate.
Or they’ll try to make an easy to use interface, and chop a lot of features along the way.
With Long Tail Pro, you get the perfect mix.
To get started, you’ll need to plug a seed keyword to track it’s SERP.
Yeah, that can be a lot to unpack for a beginner.
But let’s talk about each feature.
You get a quick overview of your SERP, with the average search volume and the keyword competitiveness.
You also have an awesome results breakdown, and the top competitor, with their color coded domain difficulty.
If you want to go in-depth just scroll down and you’ll get all the keyword data you might need.
For beginners, this may be overwhelming, but there are a lot of metrics that help you manually analyze a SERP.
You can’t just trust the SEO difficulty score for keywords.
So these are the metrics Long Tail Pro throws your way:
Domain Keyword Competition – The overall score for the domain measuring all the other metrics
- Trust flow – The backlink profile of the page
- Citation flow – The number of citations to the page
- Domain TF & CF – Trust Flow and Citation Flow, but for the domain
- External Backlinks – The number of backlinks to the page
- Page Ref Domains – The number of unique domains that link to the page
- Root Ref – The number of domains referring to the root domain
- Indexed URLs – The number of Indexed URLs of the target domain
- Internal links – The number of internal links
So yeah, you get a lot of data.
This can be overwhelming for beginners, so it would help if you were able to customize this dashboard to include less metrics.
But every metric is helpful. For example, the Root Ref can help you figure out if the domain offers a valuable service, because the Root Ref would be comparatively higher than that of domains with similar keywords scores that get traffic on their articles.
The number of indexed URLs can give you an idea of that website’s content size.
All in all, it’s a helpful research tool if you want to determine which keywords from your shortlist are the most profitable.
But these numbers are only valuable in perspective, so make sure you analyze each column carefully and only determine a SERP to be a good opportunity if you see flaws in more departments.
A bad Root Ref for 5 or 6 of the listings doesn’t mean it’s easy to compete in the SERP.
But bad metrics all around for Trust Flow and Citation Flow can point to a less competitive SERP.
Finding the right keywords for your site is a lot of work, but if you take it slowly you should find some long tail gems in no time.
The Rank Tracker
You can also use Long Tail Pro to track your keywords over time.
First, the bad stuff – it doesn’t automatically crawl your site, so you’ll need to add keywords manually.
A workaround is to copy and paste the keywords you’re ranking for, since this field supports multiple entries.
But still, Ahrefs does all of that for you.
And if you’re just starting out, you may not have a list saved anywhere.
However, you can get pretty helpful insights about your keywords ranking.
You can see a good overview, and you get valuable progression metrics on individual keywords:
It’s not anything you wouldn’t be able to see in the Search Console. It’s just a bit better packaged.
However, you can get information on your competition’s keywords and backlinks.
And here’s where any form of automatic indexing would help, because you can’t guess your competition’s top performing keywords.
But you can mix Long Tail Pro with a free research tool like SimilarWeb and you’ll be able to track their Google favorites.
Backlink Analysis
Backlink analysis is an add-on feature, which is not the best pricing model (more about that in a bit).
But if you want to give it a try, you can contact support about it, and maybe they’ll throw some free test crawls for you.
If you have the add-on, just add a domain and check the metrics. It’ll display the numbers from the SERP analysis, and list each individual backlink:
Great to see how your competition is doing, especially since you can enter a specific URL and see the backlinks to that specific page.
But again…
Ahrefs does that automatically, at no extra cost.
In fact, their system is way better. You see the backlinks to a specific page in the keywords suggestion dashboard:
Nonetheless, Long Tail Pro can help you kickstart the outreach process for link building.
So it’s a plus on this end as well.
Pricing And Support
We kept comparing Long Tail Pro with Ahrefs, so it’s only fair we do the same when it comes to pricing.
Long Tail’s most expensive plan is cheaper than most Ahrefs subscriptions:
On top, you have more wiggle room when researching keywords. Long Tail Pro’s most expensive plan lets you research 2500 keywords a day, while you only get 100 keywords a day for the same money over at Ahrefs.
But that doesn’t mean Long Tail is a cheap tool.
It will cost you between $25 and $98 each month when paid for annually.
And if you actually want a monthly subscription, Long Tail Pro will cost you between $37 and $147 each month.
That’s a bit more than your average keyword research tool.
But Long Tail Pro is one of the best keyword research tools, so it can be justified for the right person.
Besides, their support is great. They have a huge knowledge center, webinars and they run on Intercom, which means you’ll be able to quickly browse their support center.
Plus, their agents are really helpful.
They could improve the response time (it’s about an hour now) but it still works if you’re not under time pressure.
So Should You Buy Long Tail Pro?
If you’re a beginner, I’d say just take the free trial and give it a shot.
It may be what you need to find the best keywords.
But you’d still be better off with something like KWFinder.
However, if you’re an experienced SEO, Long Tail Pro is definitely worth adding to your toolset if you don’t have a subscription to a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush already.
It makes it easy to find keywords, analyze the Google search page and get accurate metrics like search volume or keyword competition.
If something you read in our review turned you away, make sure you also read our Ahrefs review and our Ubersuggest review for alternatives.
