If you are a small business owner who blogs and you want more traffic to your site, I am going to teach you a powerful blogging tactic today that will produce immediate results for you in the world of SEO.
This isn’t a magic trick, nor will it take you a month to get through the technical jargon of SEO. It’s a simple shift in your thinking, as well as your writing, that works.
Have you heard of keywords, as they relate to the world of blogging? Keywords are words that you write into your posts, as well as include in the blog “tags” field.
Let me illustrate with this example:
Imagine that I wanted to write a blog post about how to make a perfect pizza crust. I sit down, write the piece, and finish up the blog post by putting in my keywords, perhaps an image, and a killer title.
The Keyword Problem
Okay, here is what most people are currently doing when it comes to thinking about keywords: They are using individual words in their posts as the tags or keywords. These individual keywords are known as short tail keywords.
Short tail keyword: pizza
The problem with short tail keywords is that if you go to Google and search “pizza”, you get 217,000,000 results. This means that it is highly likely your post will never be seen.
Mid tail keywords very much fall into the same category as short tail keywords: they aren’t specific enough.
Mid tail keyword: pizza crust
This time, if you hop over to Google and type in “pizza crust,” you get 20,100,000 results. Yes, the results yielded are much smaller, but you still haven’t become specific enough.
The Keyword Solution
But, the real way to dominate the world of SEO is through long tail keywords.
Long tail keyword: recipe for crispy pizza crust
A search using this long tail keyword yields 1,380,000 results.
The lesson: The more you start thinking like the person on the other side of the computer who is searching for your blog posts, the better your keywords will become.
Now, let’s look quickly at another example—one that isn’t so common as pizza.
A Quick Keyword Case Study
Imagine that you own a business which services swimming pools when there is some type of problem. You sit down and write a beautiful piece about taking care of a vinyl swimming pool.
- Short tail keyword: pools (70,500,000 results)
- Mid tail keyword: vinyl pools (17,800,000 results)
- Long tail keywords:
- how to take care of vinyl pool liners (1,110,000 results)
- vinyl pool liner care (214,000 results)
- there’s a hole in my vinyl pool liner (46,300 results)
Do you see the difference? Long-tail keywords are much more specific and targeted to your audience and what they NEED. This is what makes long tail keywords so effective. And thinking from a business point of view, would you rather have a customer/lead who searched “pools” or one who searched “there’s a hole in my vinyl pool liner?”
There’s one last tip I want to give you today about long-tail keywords: Don’t be afraid to put 3 or 4 long tail keywords into each blog post. The more specific and targeted you become, and the more you think like your ideal clients/customers, the more your blog posts will be found and read.
The Keyword Recap
To Dominate SEO with Long Tail Keywords:
- Start thinking and acting like your customer/client.
- Target specific problems/needs in each blog post.
- Use 3 to 4 long tail keywords in each blog post.
- Post consistently at least 2 times per week.
That’s it— pretty simple and straightforward, huh? I promise you that if you follow this tiny shift in thinking about keywords, you will increase the traffic to your site, which will mean more leads and sales for your company.
