How to use long-tail keywords to increase traffic to your small business blog
Some companies and copywriters would have you believe that SEO is ever-changing and hard and best left to the pros.
They are right, you know?
However, if your small business is just starting out or maybe your budget is stretched thin and you want to do redesign in-house, there are a few things to keep your attention on for maximum SEO, or search engine optimization. Using long-tail keywords as part of your SEO copywriting strategy can greatly increase organic search traffic to your business blog.
Search engine optimization is essential in order for your website, blog, or other content to rank well on the search engines. Google, Bing, and the other major search engines have complicated algorithms (math programs) that change constantly to prevent spammers and black-hat SEO tactics.
Black-hat, White-Hat. Ummm…What?
OK, let’s blow the lid off this whole "hat" nonsense and elaborate, shall we?
White-Hat SEO: White-hat SEO practice is the “right” way to rank well in search. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the wide-range of social media channels all have different ways to gauge exposure, reach, and interactions by tallying shares, likes, keyword density, click-through engagement, and the value of your content to determine who's web page will appear up first in search results.
This result is called "organic ranking" which means simply that you did not pay to appear higher up in the results. Rather, your rank is determined by "naturally" occurring SEO best practices.
Since they all have their own algorithms, most of these web platforms have a list of best practices so that their spiders (the automated programs that “crawl” or read every web page on-line to check the content updates) can access and understand the content on your web page. Then, the algorithm does its thing and companies like MOZ, Alexa, SemRush and the like use these SEO scores to issue ratings on a domain's
- Authority
- Backlinks
- Keyword density
- Trust index
- Spam Index
- and other scores
Once a site or domain has been weighed, measured, and listed on the search engines based on what keywords your visitor's type in the search box. The “organic search” is the goal here unless you’ve got a budget for PPC Keywords and Paid-Search campaigns (more on these in a future article).
A domains organic search is the rating of keyword density and relevance to the specific words in a visitors search query.
So, to optimize our organic search results we want to properly use keywords that our buyer persona would type into a search engine to find answers to their question.
Using long-tail keywords to increase traffic to a small business blog
Let’s say we were to use Google and type in "content".
Google and the others search engines will find all web pages that rank for that keyword, and some it assumes would be close.
Let’s just say upfront that the word “content” is too vague for a productive search result and also, an impossible keyword to accurately rank for organically.
Using Long-tail Keywords greatly improves organic search engine results and at little to no cost. Learn the best practices for each search engine to greatly improve your sites keyword density and relevance, organic search results, and overall visibility on the web.
To implement a long-tail keyword is part common sense and part good planning. This can be done fairly easily and straightforward if you know your ideal customer and their particular pain points.
We can get a look into our ideal customer's needs by creating buyer personas or semi-fictional yet detailed information about our target audience, their position & role in their company, their buying habits, and also their challenges and objections. This also helps us create informative content as part of the inbound marketing strategy to guide them along their buyer's journey.
In addition to giving us insight into our desired audience, buyer personas also help us to identify the possible questions your potential visitors might type into Google or Bing when looking for answers.
Once we know their problems & their potential questions, we can create targeted content to help educate them, earn their trust, and move them along the journey from awareness to consideration to their decision.
For instance, if your ideal visitor might be a small business owner in need of help to create great content to rank better in search and attract better leads for their small business blog or website.
So, instead of using a broad keyword like “content”, we can use our buyer persona to tell us that our small business owner might need a specific question answered. A more detailed search question they might type into Google might be
“How to create great content for a small business website”
If we were to try and use “content” as our keyword, we probably wouldn’t have much luck driving loads of traffic to our site, and any traffic we did gain would be very vague around our target.
Plus, although search engines are getting smarter, they still can’t tell the difference between content as in “content marketing” or content as in, “I am content” without some sort of context to go with it. So, we should be more specific.
Content without context will miss the mark
The problem with using such a broad keyword is that there are thousands if not millions of pages on the Internet are trying to rank in the search engines for the word content or some long-tail version of it.
This means that “content” as your main keyword will never get you a first-page search result.
Another issue is that the word content with no other information could cause your keyword to be mistaken for another word.
“The art of being content” is not going to bring home the information our small business owner wants.
The B2B clientele that we want might find our site, but due to our confusing lack of context, most likely we’ll also get a whole heard of confused and frustrated self-help seekers which will confuse our website analytics.
Using long-tail keywords to improve your websites search engine ranking
Now, if we were to narrow down our keyword query by being more specific and trying for say
“creating great content”
If we were to take this a step further and narrow our keyword down even further by using a long-tail keyword such as
“How to create great content”
Or
“How to create great content for a small business website”
Now, we have defined a specific client question that they might type into Google to search for help with their problem. In other words, the more specific we are with our long-tail keywords, the easier it is for the right visitors to find the information they are looking for.
Where to place your long-tail keywords
- Title: Our long-tail keyword should appear word for word, directly in the title of our blog post to start.
- Subheadings: Our keyword should appear in our subheadings, either as an exact match or some other variation of it such as, “creating content that converts”.
- Body: Obviously, we want to utilize our keyword in the main body section of the article as often, but as naturally as possible. This can include any variation of our long-tail keyword or contextually matching our keyword. Using “content”, “creating content”, “content creation” and so on will help to rank our keyword higher in the SERP’s.
- Social Media Posts: In order to rank well for our keyword, we want to use it when we share our article on social media, email, and any other place we push our blog post. The key to ranking for a long-tail keyword as a brand is to use it often and as naturally as possible, making sure it all links back to our blog post.
By using better, more well-defined long-tail keywords, we can attract the right visitors to our content, and spend less time trying to find leads for our business. Instead, they find us.
Of course, this frees us up to create more great content, sell more of our services or products, and focus on serving our true clientele.
Creating amazingly helpful optimized content in the form of blog articles, whitepapers, e-books and other educational information for the right audience is the building block of inbound marketing. It is the pivotal first step to the inbound process, which is to ATTRACT the right people to our content and landing pages.
There are a variety of keyword tools out there, and they are NOT all equal. Hubspot, SemRush, and MOZ all have great keyword research tools that are both helpful and easy to learn.
But, in reality, the easiest way to killer long-tail keyword optimization to drive traffic to your business blog post requires is a bit of common sense, attention to your buyer persona details and following Google’s best practices.
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