The old trend of long-tail SEO is no longer a viable strategy. This earlier technique, which was primarily traffic-centric, had little or no consideration for user experience. The next steps were: search for as many long-tail keywords as possible, create a landing page for each one, place key phrases in title and header tags, write content full of key phrases, and focus only on conversions. For example, create a list of all possible long-tail keywords related to a search term “SEO company,” such as B. “Best SEO Companies”, “Great SEO Companies”, “Top 10 SEO” companies and more, and using them here and there in your content is an outdated long-tail SEO strategy, although many of these yet to follow.
In 2013 and beyond, the focus is primarily on relevant information. The simple reason is that search engines, especially Google, are now offering users sites that provide authoritative information, rather than sites that only allow for easy conversion and have virtually no informational value.
If you have a growing business and want to optimize your content for long-tail keywords, here are some innovative strategies you can follow.
Get the best out of your team
The first step would be to get your team together and talk about the pages or content you want to create. Discuss different aspects of the content based on your experience and get suggestions from your team. Your in-house team has great expertise and can easily come up with the right and most effective ideas.
For example, if your business is targeting the local market, you should make your content attractive to local customers. You can discuss the latest trends in local search with your team, how to implement them in your content and other related stuff.
Thoroughly understand user requirements
Once you have a clear idea of the content requirements, determine the real needs of the users. Think about what users expect when they arrive at your page or content. You can interview previous users, conduct a survey for prospects, or do online research to get the information you need. As you match content that will appeal to a larger number of users, you can discover which long-tail keywords work best for you. For example, if you own a juice store, you can use interviews and surveys to find out which products are most popular with users. If most of them prefer grape juice, you can use the long-tail keyword “Best Grapes Juice Company”.
In addition to looking for what people expect from your product or service, you should look for things that people want that you don’t offer. Based on this information, you can create a more comprehensive solution guide for users, rather than just highlighting the ones you offer directly. This helps identify long-tail keywords that may not be related to your business.
Research competitor websites
If you’re new to the business, reviewing competitor sites’ strategies will help you establish a starting point. For example, when you first created a page for your jewelry business, you can search other websites to find out how they placed the content that describes the qualities of their products and used the long-tail keywords. However, copying their approach is not a good strategy. Use their approach as a base and come up with your own ideas. Check out the websites of relevant competitors. These pages will help you for more than a baseline. By examining what they do differently, you can easily come up with fresh, creative ideas.
Quantitative research based on information value
It’s a good idea to do some keyword volume research to prioritize the most important ones. However, that doesn’t mean you should consider volume before user experience. If a keyword is searched for about 500 times and it doesn’t bring any value to your visitor, there’s no benefit in exploiting that keyword. Therefore, prioritize the meaningfulness of the content and then consider the keyword volume.
Create a sample design and get feedback
Create pattern designs and get feedback through various mockup services including UserTesting.com, Mechanical Turk, and others. Liven up the pages/content according to the feedback.
Check page relevance
You should verify that the page or content you are creating is relevant to your site or the web. The page or content should be of real value if it is to be relevant. This can be verified at any stage of the page creation process.
Any of these strategies only work best when there is a dedicated team implementing them. The best approach would be to seek assistance from a professional SEO company that offers reliable keyword research services.
