Why Blogging Won’t Target Long Tail Searches
In the other day’s webinar from SEOmoz, a point Rand Fishkin made really stuck out. During the section on Real Time Search, Rand mentioned: “Your blog doesn’t really target long tail searches”. The reason this point stuck out is because I’ve always talked about how blogposts are a great way to leverage the long tail.
With over 200 posts under its belt, this blog has built up a fair amount of trust over the past two years. However, 200 posts aren’t much when it comes to long tail searchers – targeting more or less 250 odd long tail keywords isn’t going to bring in much traffic.
Rand mentioned UGC (user-generated content) websites like Wikipedia…
…that boast over 40 million unique pages and targeted articles. Talk about targeting long tail searchers.
How can you target the long tail?
Just because you have less than 1 million posts doesn’t mean you should throw your hands up and give up on your blog. You can still target those long tail searchers – slowly but surely, and here are a few ways:
- Use tools like WordTracker Keyword Questions to get long tail questions the community has actually asked.
- Don’t neglect Google Analytics. Be sure to check the keyword section – especially near the bottom (with 1 or 2 searches) to see what long tail terms your visitors are already using. You can also leverage search terms in order to optimize better for what people can’t find.
- Use questions your customers ask you in real life; chances are, they’re asking them online too.
- A little experimentation. The sad truth is, long tail keyword research is nearly impossible, and sometimes it’s about taking the keywords you’ve already discovered as powerful and putting a different spin on them.
Tags: long tail search