How to choose long tail keywords?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Bill Hartzer: Find all your competitors’ sites, crawl their sites, and look at their title tags for keywords.
  
  You can also use tools like semrush to see what they are ranking for. Also, you can see what keywords they are paying for on ppc. If they are paying then it’s probably a good keyword to target.
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  Michael Martinez: You should be targeting keywords around your neighborhood(s) regardless of search volume.
  
  Crawling other people`s sites without their permission is unethical, even if popular. But the problem with using other people`s keyword data is you don`t know if they are targeting the right keywords.
  
  If you know your neighborhood and how people find it, your gut instinct will be the best guide for you.
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  Neil Cheesman: Do you already have the website and set up GSC? If so, then maybe also take a look at existing traffic that are getting impressions.
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  Olivia Rose: Thank you all so much! I already have the website set up but I have very few visitors. My competitors primarily use "boston short term rentals" but there is very high competition so I`ve been looking for lower competition alternatives. I really appreciate your help and insight!
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  Ammon Johns: Obviously in the current situation, the most important part is going to be taking pre-bookings, as `shelter in place` has wrecked the economy for rental property generally.
  
  Long term rental is a different market, of course, to holiday/vacation rental, and the length of contracts you offer can be one of the most important long-tail keywords.
  
  I`m assuming this is a dedicated business site, or section of a wider property website that is dedicated to a variety of local short-term lets/rentals? This means that the longest of the long-tail should be on the actual page detailing a specific property, as you`ll quite naturally be using the words on the page to describe the property size, location, terms of rental, etc. Doing so allows it to rank for the ultra-long tail that is almost specific to exactly that kind of property.
  
  If you have category or `listings` pages for multiple properties in an area, then those should target the broader terms that are still locational, but you`ll still be finding some long-tail in there.
  
  My advice on this kind of thing is to never be more generic than your actual service/product truly is. So if you only cover property to rent in Boston, then never really try to target broader `property to rent` or `rental apartments` without the locality. You ideally don`t want anyone who is automatically going to be disappointed landing on your site (they searched for "rental apartments" from Cleveland and hoped they`d get local results, and somehow landed on your site.
  
  It may not be immediately apparent that this is a bad thing, after all, more traffic than you can use sounds like a good thing. But that`s not how psychology works. Just an hour after landing on a site that disappointed them, people have already forgotten exactly what they searched for - they just remember the site`s brand somewhat, and that it disappointed them. If one of their friends or family then asked them if they`d heard of your site when it was one of the potential ones they could deal with for a property in Boston, all they remember, and vaguely at that, is that your site was `bad` when they heard of it.
  
  Anyway, the information architecture of the site itself, how you divide and categorize, should be doing half of the keyword selection for you anyway. The rest is simply using your words well on the page in a way that informs and convinces those who visit.
  
  It`s the inbound links where you`ll need to be more conscious of the text used in a small snippet, so getting the Title element of each page right is the main part of keyword focus at this stage.
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  Olivia Rose: Thank you so much for your thoughtful, detailed feedback! In a time of such uncertainty, I am very grateful for your willingness to provide such detailed insight. Our property consists of fully furnished studio & 1 bedroom apartments in one building for short & long term rentals. Do you think that even if a longtail keyword like "short term furnished studio rental boston" has limited/no search data on google, it is worth experimenting with? Or should I direct my focus more on long-tail keywords that show data despite more high competition
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  Olivia Rose: The website that I made is theuptonboston.com
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  Ammon Johns: Hi Olivia, I`m a little busy this evening, but I promise I`ll look at your added questions and information properly as soon as I can and get back to you. Consider this as a `placeholder` and virtual "IOU" in the meantime. :)
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  Olivia Rose: Ammon Johns No rush at all! I really appreciate your time, help, and thoughtfulness. Thank you again!
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  Stockbridge Truslow: You want to make sure you`ve got the Apartment Schema on there. https://schema.org/Apartment or https://schema.org/House (and remember - there are other formats that will fit in too - like an Apartment is part of an ApartmentComplex https://schema.org/ApartmentComplex etc.)
  
  Ideally your apartment searching system (not sure what you`re using, if anything) would have appropriate filter methods to match the various facets. (e.g. Locations, Furnished/Unfurnished, # of bedrooms, etc. etc.)
  
  Organize the listings by primary (probably by location) and then offer up all the filters in there to narrow things down. So if I`m on the Southie page, I can then choose my furnished/unfurnished, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, has Garage, and all that.
  
  Because of all the structured data and the filtering system that`s in place, now that South End page should be optimized for EVERY combination of classifier one might type into search...
  
  South End 1br furnished apartment
  South End 2br with garage
  South End 5br with man cave
  
  All those things (if you have them as filters and properly listed in the structured data should line up to make that one South End page rank for all permutations of "South End Apartment" (Or South End House Rental or whatever).
  
  It`s a lot and you need to know what you`re doing, but this niche is pretty competitive all around - so if you aren`t doing it, you`re going to be at a disadvantage right out of the gate. The volume of any specific long stem phrase won`t matter as much since one page will catch all the permutations for that town/area.
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  Olivia Rose: Stockbridge Truslow Thank you so much! All of this information is very helpful. Unfortunately, I use a third party website right now for my booking agent so I don`t have control over the apartment listings and filter. I`m working on changing booking managers now so that I can have complete control over the listings & filters and have a booking plugin on my site. I didn`t know that there was a schema for apartments and now I`m definitely going to configure them when I can. Thank you again for your help and time, I really appreciate it!