Using long-tail keywords in content

I have some questions about Long Tail Keywords and the use of those keywords in my content.

I’ve conducted LTK research as well as outsourced on Fiverr so I feel like I’ve got a good 30 LTK to work from. My question concerns the use of these LTK in my content. For example I have a particular keyword as follows, “side of foot pain”. It appears to have low competition and is something I could rank for. But from a grammar standpoint I’m not sure I can exactly match this LTK in my content. A variation such as “pain on the side of my foot” would seem to flow much easier.

I’ve done some reading and the idea of Latent Semantic Indexing would seem to address my question as “pain on the side of the foot” would just be another variation of the keyword. SERP results present the same sites for both LTK.

So my question would be: should I go ahead and target "pain on the outside of the foot" as this will flow more naturally in my content?

Another question is that I have a LTK with favorable ranking numbers but the SERP produces big boy e-commerce sites, am I correct in thinking that I should stay away from this LTK as I feel pretty certain that it would be hard to rank well against these sites.

Thanks in advance for you thoughts/comments

I would personally go for what flows better, so "pain on the side of my foot." But you could do something like:

"Why do I have pain on the side of my foot, and what are the best treatments for side of foot pains?"

If you word it correctly, for some reason it seems to flow better when you try to add phrases that don't flow quite as well. At least in my opinion - a similar approach works well for me. YMMV.

Sometimes if you want to rank for an odd keyword you just have to shoehorn it in there somehow. Also, I don't think something like "Remedies for side of foot pain" sounds horribly out of place. A lot of times if you're creative you can fit even the oddest keywords in naturally.

phr0zt said:

I would personally go for what flows better, so "pain on the side of my foot." But you could do something like:

"Why do I have pain on the side of my foot, and what are the best treatments for side of foot pains?"

If you word it correctly, for some reason it seems to flow better when you try to add phrases that don't flow quite as well. At least in my opinion - a similar approach works well for me. YMMV.

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Thanks for the advice, that totally makes sense. Kinda mad I didn't think of that combo myself!

SimpleSiteSolutions said:

Sometimes if you want to rank for an odd keyword you just have to shoehorn it in there somehow. Also, I don't think something like "Remedies for side of foot pain" sounds horribly out of place. A lot of times if you're creative you can fit even the oddest keywords in naturally.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the input!

Even though you cant outrank the big boys, you can still get some traffic through the keyword with quality content, and what have tou got to lose. Drop it in somwher. U might be surprised.

Type the "weird" worded keyword into Google.

Slowly scroll through the search results. Google will highlight parts of Titles, descriptions and URLs for you.

Is the exact phrase being highlighted?

If not, use the highlighted version in your copy. In any case mimic what the top guys are doing.

Nowadays, Google is rankings topics more than simply keywords.