Longtail Pro Platinum is a keyword research tool that goes beyond simply churning out endless lists of keywords – it will do that, of course, but here is a tool that has much more up its sleeve.

Longtail Pro Platinum performs keyword research tricks that can really make a difference when planning an ad campaign or trying to rank your website in search engine results that are getting ever more competitive. Keyword Difficulty, Competitor Analysis and keyword profitability are just three examples of the kind of extra dimensions added by the LongTail Platinum Pro team of developers.

Longtail Pro lets you see who you are up against for the keywords that you want to rank for or use in a ppc campaign

Keyword Research should never be carried out in isolation. In order to do it properly you should be taking into account various other factors that will affect your choice of keywords, such as your competition and the likely search volumes that are available in your business or niche. Google’s transition into a two-tiered site that differentiates between local searches and global ones has also made a huge difference to the keyword choices that you should make.

Now Longtail Pro Platinum combines these functions into one comprehensive keyword research supertool. It is a paid tool and, as such, it isn’t particularly cheap but not unduly expensive either. If you need keyword research capabilities that go beyond those provided for free by Google with their excellent, but limited, Keyword Planner, (you just need to open an AdWords account – it is not necessary to run any ads), then LongTail Pro Platinum could well be the one for you.

So just what is it that Longtail Pro Platinum offers, over and above that which is available in Google’s Keyword Planner? Why should you feel good about paying for information that may be available elsewhere, for nothing?

Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner is intended for those who wish to run ppc campaigns in AdWords and much of the information given is geared towards building those campaigns – Suggested Bid Price, Competition and Average Monthly Searches being good examples. The tool will suggest related keywords if you enter a “seed” keyword and it can scan your website and come up with suggestions. All good, all useful, all free.

When running an SEO campaign, however, or if you are planning a content marketing campaign and want to know which search phrases to optimise your content for, the meagre information provided by Google probably won’t go far enough.

That’s where Longtail Pro Platinum would start to be very attractive. Whilst it should be made clear that the source of the keyword data is still the same – Longtail Pro takes its data from Google’s Keyword Planner – the additional processing that it provides, especially in the form of competition, keyword difficulty and competitor analysis, makes it worthwhile.

So lets look at the extra data provided by LongTail Pro Platinum, in exchange for your subscription fee, in a bit more detail.

Keyword Competitiveness

This is a value calculated by LongTail Pro based on Google’s data but is different to Google’s own Competition metric for the keywords it supplies. It is calculated as a value from 0-100 and any phrase with a low competititiveness score is suggested a being ideal for using in SEO and Content campaigns where it would be relatively easy to rank your page or article/blog on the first page of Google.

Keyword Difficulty

This metric tells you how difficult it is likely to be to rank your page in the first page of Google for any given keyword. You can enter your domain and get a detailed breakdown of the web pages on other sites that are already ranking for the keyword or phrase in question. The suggested difficulty level to aim for is one less than 30. Armed with this level of information then you can make an informed decision as to which phrases to optimise for.

Domain Metrics

Longtail Pro provides you with data taken from Majestic – one of the leading providers of backlink data – that will help you to see why other sites are ranking highly for the keywords you want to target. Competitors with a high level of good quality backlinks are, generally speaking, likely to be more difficult to rank above.

Keyword Profitability

Here’s a metric that will help you to decide what the likely level of traffic and business is for your targeted keywords. The golden formula would be to find longtail keyword phrases with low competition, low keyword difficulty, high search volume and high keyword profitability.As ever, it is likely to be a question of balance, you probably won’t match all of those criteria but, to paraphrase Meatloaf – three out of four ain’t bad!

Added to the above, LongTail Pro also has strong filtering capabilities which lets you drill down into the initial list of keywords you get and surface those which meet multiple criteria such as including a particular word and having a minimum number of words in the phrase or a minimum number of monthly searches.

You can, of course, export your keyword lists to spreadsheets etc for further analysis and processing and there is also a limited keyword tracking feature included to let you keep track of how your campaigns are doing for the phrases you have targeted.

To conclude, I would suggest that Longtail Pro Platinum is good value for those who need it. If you really are on a budget then you could do a lot of it with free systems, starting of course with Google’s own. Keyword research is important and something that should not be skimped if you are going to invest time and money into marketing campaigns, especially ppc campaigns, so a good keyword research tool is probably a necessary expense for most people.

There are a number of other contenders on the market and some of them offer keywords that are sourced from other tools, not just Google’s. Examples would be WordTracker, which offers keywords from Amazon and YouTube, SEMrush, and Keyword Canine.

The question is, should that investment be in LongTail Pro or another? My advice is to take the free trial for this and as many other packages as you can find time to do. A “Starter” plan with LongTail Pro will cost you a minumum of $37/month, ($25 if you pay annually), so it’s worth having a good look around before you make a purchase.