Writing SEO Content For Long Tail Keywords

This post will present a  step-by-step beginner’s guide to creating website content, articles and blogs that are optimized for search engine traffic. The concepts and strategies presented here are derived from a mixture of professional experience and common industry practices at the date of posting. If you are brand new to SEO, please take the time to my page on What is SEO?

Step 1) Define your website’s focus; segment and focus, again. Then pick a topic to write on.
A common mistake I see in online content (especially blogs) is the lack of central focus. There is no underlying theme that connects all the pieces. This becomes a problem when you are writing for SEO. Although you can rank  “potpourri content” for uncompetitive terms, it becomes difficult for anything moderately competitive. For example, Google will recognize that an active shoe blogger’s post about Kanye West’s new fluorescent high tops is  more relevant than an equally good post by a personal blogger with little or no focus on shoes. Define you website focus early on. Write it down. Then break that central idea into categories. You want your most general ideas targeted on your home page and more specific ideas targeted in subsequent pages. Build out content by expanding categories within your main focus.

Step 2) Identify your target audience / reader; discover your keywords.
Get into the shoes of your reader. Look at the topic you have chosen from their perspective and identify the motive of search. It is very important to identify similar topics to avoid creating a title that will attract the wrong audience.

Example: If you are writing a blog post or article talking about your political views on health care reform, don’t title your post, “The Changing Health Care in the US”. That my might rank you for “changing health care”, but those searchers are probably looking for information on switching health insurance policies.

Avoid artsy or ambiguous titles. SEO requires that you use the exact keywords related to your topic. Put together a list of single category keywords that match your topic.

Step 3) Research long tail keywords w\ semantic variations for latent semantic indexing.

This started off with a lot of big words; let’s look at those first. A long tail keyword is a phrase of 2 or more words. The more unique words contained in the phrase, the longer the tail. Semantics is the linguistic study of relationships between words such as homonyms, synonyms and antonyms. Latent semantic indexing is a method by which Google is able to associate related/semantic keywords together. For example, words like cars, autos, automobiles and vehicles can mean the same thing. Google likes to see these words together on a piece of content addressing a car. Now that the vocabulary is out of the way, lets get down to keyword research. I will take you through the process using the base keyword “mechanic”.

Long tail keywords require some digging tools for keyword discovery. I suggest Google’s wonder wheel for the first part of your research. This tool will help you discover long tail searches that users are typing into Google. It ensures that you don’t select a keyword that has ZERO traffic. Look for a long tail keyword that you can focus on, but also gives you options to rank for shorter keywords. For example, a keyword like free online car insurance quotes can rank for something shorter like “car insurance” or “insurance quotes”. Follow the directions in the diagram to get started.

For the sake of demonstration, I have chosen a keyword using the wonder wheel.

Now that we have our keyword, “reliable auto repair san jose”, we want to focus on creating a bank of related keywords to target semantic indexing. Take each word in your phrase and create a spreadsheet table.

Take each of your keywords and enter them in Google search using the tilde command (~). Look through at least 5-10 pages looking for bolded words. These words are considered to be highly relebant by Google’s LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).

Once you have listed all your semantic keywords, add some yourself using basic logic. Although Google might not be showing the relation between these keywords yet, their semantics are always improving to mirror real life. Looking at our list above, I can already see that we should have more words that are similar to reliable. Perhaps trusted, honest, dependable, trustworthy and secure. For the keyword “San Jose”, I might want to focus in on San Jose neighborhoods and major freeways.

Step 4) Format your content.
You are ready to start writing. Follow the tips below:

- If your keyword isn’t grammatically correct, it is okay to correct it. In our case it would be changed from “reliable auto repair San Jose” to “reliable auto repair in San Jose”.

- Integrate the exact keyword into your title. Title example: “The Most Reliable Auto repair in San Jose According to Yelp” Make sure that your title isn’t longer that 65 characters!

- Write your content and try to use as many of the semantic keywords in your list as possible, without sounding unnatural.

- Using html tags like <strong>, <H1> and <H2> can help readers and search engines identify topic keywords.

Step 5) Re-check the reader’s motive.
“Reliable auto repair in San Jose”would have been a great keyword to promote an auto repair shop in San Jose, but what if your initial goal was to promote an auto mechanic training program? You’ve lost focus! Make sure you are thinking about the target audience through out the writing process.

Step 6) Publish and promote.
Link to your new content from your main website to give it some weight, linkjuice, traffic, etc. Blogs do this automatically. Build links to your content from websites of common topics and authority. Guest blogging, article writing and press releases are all good tactics. Also, identify niche social networks and communities like forums that would be interested in your new content  and promote it to them through social interaction (not spamming, no one likes that). Good luck!