Today this post will again be about SEO and rankings, but with an emphasis on keywords as only ranking factor. More precisely, long tail keywords, and even more precisely keywords groups.
Long Tail Keyword Groups
So what is a keyword group? Well I guess many internet marketers will have their own answer but for me these are keywords that share the same seed keywords. We could of course add to the group some other LSI keywords, which will be related terms, but if you write naturally these ters should come naturally too in your brain and land in your copy.
The purpose of targetting long tail keyword groups is to get traffic. Easier rankings. I know this is nothing new, buth then why many people still target only one keyword per page and use only one or two anchor text when doing link building to these pages?
Another important thing to keep in mind is the fact that pages, or more generally content if you prefer, can and will rank for multiple keywords. Just check your Analytics account or any other visits tracking tools you may use and you will admit this is entirely true. These many different keywords may even not be the ones you would like to target. Still, they brought you traffic. Maybe it’s actually 1, 2 or 3 visits in the whole month, still these people found you thanks to a related term, a keyword in the group.
What most of us have been told about keyword research and selection is to go for the long tail of course, generally 3 to 4 words. Indeed 1 and 2 word phrases are more competitive, and very broad. Sure. These head keywords, or seed keywords will anyway be part of your content, since they are the seed in any of your long tail. Still here?
The idea (and I swear it’s not only my idea), is to go for the keywords that not only are of 2, 3 or 4 words, but also for longer ones and even if your keyword research tool indicates they only get less than 100 searches a month. I remember a video demonstration from the guys at Link Emperor saying they’ve been targetting tons of keywords with low search volume, and they got success.
It is not surprising, less search volume generally means less competition, easier rankings. So by keeping in mind that your content will rank:
- for multiple keywords
- more easily with long tail and low competition/traffic keywords
… we can assume we can build and optimize content in two various ways:
- creating more posts or pages, each made for one of these keywords
- creating posts and pages that include (let’s say “target”) multiple keywords from the group.
In the first case, we may just need lower words count articles, because the competition is not really focusing on the specific keyword
In the second case we can write longer articles, say over 1000 words upto 2000 words and incorporate several keywords from the group.
One of the other great things is that you can definitely get awesome buying keywords to ranking easily using these strategies. I guess you have to put it to the test yourself to see if for the same keyword you can get the same traffic using both strategies. But still, when I say low competition, I’m saying that the first page is not even full. Like… 5 results, 2 results and sometimes 0 results if you can anticipate things (okay I’ll expand on this later).
But the point is that the longer tail a keyword has, the more targeted it becomes. And with targeted buying keywords… you can certianly make money.
Example of Long Tail Keyword Research and Use
I guess a quick example will be helpful. I have several websites in the video game niche. I build sites around the game name keywords and I’m going to show you things that may will find profitbale (I hope so).
Recently, Fifa 12, a soccer game was released. Now you have to know that the highest traffic is certainly when the game is going to be released and shortly after. But, it doesn’t really matter for now, since what we can immediately check is the competition.
So one of the most used buying keyword modifier is “review”. Let’s type it in Google in quotes (YES, people don’t type in quotes, still we’re searching for real competing pages that are clearly optimizing for this keyword, not pages that may have randomly the words fifa, 12 and review in their content).
I find… 8,790,000 for “Fifa 12 review” – Google currently shows 8,100 global monthly searches for the exact match, and 1,600 locally (US) and 2,900 locallu (UK).
Now an additional modifier like… PS3
“Fifa 12 review PS3” only has 590 global monthly searches, 110 in the USA and 260 in the UK, but the competition is now revealing 216,000 pages. That’s still many to compete with, though easier.
The key is to find keywords that interested people would type if they wanted to know more before they buy. I’m going to reveal one of the modifiers you can use: questions.
In the video game case, this is what I mentioned earlier about anticipating, because Google and many other keyword research tools will not reveal any traffic datas. Still, Google Suggest show you those, but more importantly we can know that these are going to be used. Why? Because they are universal, and because there are many other similar product names which show traffic. Confused?
Type into google “is fifa 12 worth buying” – and see about 124 results. Not too much traffic but when I see a keyword phrase containing BUYING, I guess that’s a BUYING keyword. It does have a very little search volume, 46 global monthly…
Before you decide it’s not worth it, I told you about anticipation and how other similar products show traffic for these same long tail keywords. For example, I see that “is fallout new vegas worth buying” has 720 global monthly search, and 480 locally. It now has over 4,000 pages competiting for that term (in quotes) but I guess that if you created the page before the game was out you would have an advantage (anticipating).
Another key, the sites ranking for these questions are answer sites such as Yahoo Answers, and various forums. So even without a website you could place your link there. I know some have been making tons of money exploiting Yahoo! Answers.
Again this tactic will not require you to have big content produced if you decide to go for each of the long tail in the group. Still you want to provide quality to your readers. This will ensure that anyway LSI terms and related keywords land on the page. For example in this post LSI terms naturally get into the content.
I didn’t try to, and I didn’t optimize this post for a single keyword, but if the seed keyword was in the title I guses it would have been “Long Tail Keywords”. LSI terms would then have been “long tail keyword groups, keyword research, keyword research tool, LSI keywords, traffic, link building, rankings, SEO, Google.” Now at the end of this post I will go through it and optimize it with little bolding, h tags and such.
For bigger articles, integrating many long tail with low competitions and traffic can lead to an amazing traffic boost. If you decide to go this route, then your site will become an authority in its niche. Becaue your content will have a lots of good information and contain all related keywords, all the keywords in the group. Not necessarily in the same post. You can certainly imagine various posts that have the same keywords. These posts will fall into a category, and maybe even sub categories.
This will create a very specific themed site and organized content that both your readers and search engines will love.
Long Tail Keyword Case Study Coming
I hope to have a case study soon to show real and more concrete results (cash). I know I said in the past I wanted to do more case studies and though I did, I didn’t really post much here. So I’ll try to do something this week and track results over time with what’s been discussed here.
I also want to remind everyone that using these kind of keyword strategy means less off site SEO, and you may even not have to create backlinks to these posts. Remember content pages rank for multiple keywords anyway, just shoot easy targets in mass and bank.
Most of us have already found pennies in the street, small value coins. Rarely do we find a case full of hundreds of dollars in green tickets. However with keywords, even what seems to be a value keyword can be related to a high ticket product, and big commission. Wow, thought of the day. (If you quote me be sure to link to this post ;))
Christmas is coming. Target product names, you don’t necessarily need to buy a domain for all. Try to theme them all under one site, or even use free platforms that can easily rank anyway when you go for the lowest competition keywords.
PLEASE, do your homework. Get out there and find these little nuggets and ask yourself if it would not be possible to create some content with these keywords and see how things go. Take action, it’s an easy one this time.
Hope to have something worthwile to say soon.
Tom
