Long-tail your content marketing SEO

Why do you need SEO when you can reach several thousand subscribers via your email newsletter?

Well, email is great. And we should all be building lists. But SEO is crucial. It will keep dripping traffic through to your article long after your email has been trashed.

Here’s one way to look at your SEO: work out your long-tail.

Find the keywords

Discovering the important keywords for your company begins using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner. The difference is where you need to concentrate when creating a keyword-driven content strategy.

Rather than focusing on general search queries associated with your company, dig deeper into the long-tail keywords that correspond to what users are actually typing into their searches.

Google uses a method called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to recognise the connections between words that are distinct.

It relies on this to form an idea of what people are interested in and thus provide the most relevant results.

Coming up with LSI keywords is fairly straightforward once you have a base vocabulary. There are several applications to help you do this or instead simply go old-school and use a thesaurus.

As a content marketer, it is possible to integrate LSI keywords. Just make sure they are neatly fitted into your content. It will make it simple for Google to work out your function and relevance to searchers, but the piece also needs to read clearly.

Long-tail keyword requirements

Wouldn’t it be fantastic to rate highly on page 1 for a keyword such as “applications”? Well, perhaps not.
Consider what happens on Amazon as an example; the store may get plenty of searches for the latest Adele album, sending it soaring to the top of the list. But that’s nothing compared to the combined traffic caused by egg timers, pumps, krill oil pills, Marty Robbins and so on.

Overall, Adele is only a tiny proportion of Amazon searches. The vast majority are for miscellaneous and unconnected items.

The long-tail is like this. It features countless searches that are unique and may only run several times on any specified day. But, when taken collectively, they constitute most of the search volume.

Long-tail your content marketing SEO is part of Content24, the blog for London content marketing agency FirstWord.