In the long tail of keyword searches, the great value comes from having hundreds or thousands of unique, valuable content pages written on a niche subject. The millions of completely unique search terms that hit the engines each day help to bring in traffic that a purely "designed" strategy could never receive.
What's fascinating about the long tail targeting process is that its largely an accidental system. There's little or no "intent" behind the use of terms or phrases in the pages, but for anyone who's tried writing a few hundred blog entries a year or adding unique articles to a site, the return on investment is clear.
The tough part is generating a strategy to that creates the content. Internally, we have a few methods that we use and recommend to clients:
- Brainstorm attitudes, questions, concerns and interests from different perspectives about the industry - vendors, consumers, regulators, outsiders, financial side, bizdev side, marketing side, advertising side, sales, etc.
- Approach from a "hobby" angle - does anyone do this for fun? If so, what aspects are they interested in?
- Hit the communities - use forums and message boards to generate new topics (this is a great way to stay timely and relevant, too)
- Subscribe to the newswires - as industry related news comes in, you can find new topics to fit in
Does anyone else have a methodology they follow or a practice they like in order to generate long tail content?
Keyword research to identify general categories and then more keyword research to drill into specific verticals. Then write highly detailed and high quality content.
"Approach from a "hobby" angle - does anyone do this for fun? If so, what aspects are they interested in?"
Great point! Using this approach, I realized that if you create content for a site to get rankings, you aught to join and contribute to forums and blogs that concern this content and this will draw attention to you and your site and links will follow from people who are into the type of content you are providing - and they will be relevant since you targeted them specifically...
Write, write, write.
If you know your business or niche really well, the long tail happens without trying. Simply create as many interesting posts throughout the month as possible and before you know it the long tail traffic starts rolling in as your posts find there way to the top of non-competitive, but most of the time "important" search queries.
This is why so many diaries based blogs, websites and forums find themselves at the top of local type search queries. Given that these websites have the basics of on-site optimization implemented you will see them appearing at the top when using more language based queries.
These websites usually ramble on about local events, yet still chat on global issues within their personal lives or business. This natural fills a large void in the search query world that many optimizers or business neglect or just flat out miss. We are so pressed into plugging our keyword research into Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery because ourselves as SEOers are not the business owners/experts. So we must to do research on finding out the most competitive terms within the industry.
I find a lot more of my time recently is best used for "coaching" the client to bloging themselves in a natural fashion which will lead to happier visitors to their website and like I mentioned above eventually lead to large amount of long tail traffic.
Here's a cliche. Think outside the box like going on vacation in Miami during the winter.
I use this technique for some of my clients. The hard part is either turning these visitors to customers or being able to explain the value otherwise. It's not a random thing though. We pick topics that have a direct relation to what the client does, but is outside their specific business or product offering.
For many people it's a great way to get their product/organization in people's minds other than advertising.
Its a good topic and you have good suggestions. I've been lazy. I generally use the first method and have added content that delivers traffic and conversion traffic.
I do the other 3 things...and what a dummy I am. Except for two times I haven't added that content. thanks for the reminder.
Dave
Markov Chains
For the non-math set out there, this might help to give a good idea of what Geoff's on about.
Am I right?
And if one were to combine the first 100 result for "search engine optimization" from MSN with the "SEO Book", they would have the makings of a very nasty (but TEMPORARILY effective) black hat cloaking site.
Sounds dangerous!