When I started blogging in 2007, ranking for keywords was like a child’s play. You write something random and book, you were there on the first page of Google.
2007 was still the start of blogging and not many content sites were there, almost every blog was a single authored blog.
9 years later, in 2016, the blogging scene is completely different from 2007, there are less single-authored blogs, there were many sources of traffic a blog can go for.
Instead of ranking for keywords with one or two words, there are better chances for ranking for longer or long tail keywords with 3 to 5 words in them.
And that has been my strategy from last few years. Instead of writing un ultimate guide on a broad topic and then praying for it to appear on the first page of Google, I now break that bigger blog post and write multiple posts of sub-topics.
Not all my posts get to the first page, but even if one of them does, it makes up for the effort I put on all others.
I’ve found using long tail keywords to be the best content strategy that works for any blog type, I’ve tried it myself in several niches.
For beginners who are not aware of the long tail keywords, these are the keywords that contain more than 3 words and the intent of the searcher is something specific.
Now the thing is, if we could know which one of the long tail keyword we can rank for easily, it would save so much of our time as we can only work on the ones that are going to rank.
All these years, we’ve been told by Google to create the best content and forget the rest as the rest will be taken care by them, they will rank our websites and we will be rewarded for our efforts with lots of visitors.
Unfortunately, it didn’t happen for every post I wrote.
I don’t blame Google for this, they rely on their Algorithm for showing the best results to their users, and Algorithm considers more than 200 factors to decide which is the best content to show.
Even if the content on those sites was not better than mine, but their overall ratings were more than my pages, which includes things like Domain Authority, Page Authority, Domain Age, Top Relevancy etc.
Now, there are tools to figure these things out.
The basic idea to rank for your long tail keywords is to find topics that are not written by sites with good ratings in PA, DA and Domain Age etc.
The Manual Method
To do all things without the use of any automated tools, it’s going to take a little time, but it still can be done. And it is almost the same as my older method. With just one more step
Step 1: First thing is to make search for a term related to your niche.
Step 2: Then go at the bottom of the Google search results, you will find some related searches. These are your potential long tail keywords you can choose to write a post about.
Step 3: You can open a notepad and save these searches, then put the in the Google search box one by one.
Step 4: You have to look at the first page results for each of these ‘related searches’ Keywords.
Step 4: Then click on each result (at least first five) and open them in a new tab. Then analyse each result manually. Take a look at their content, the way the presented it, how fast is their site.
Step 5: You can even take the domain names and check the Domain Authority by using Moz Open Site Explorer. This gives you an idea how competitive it is to rank for the particular keyword.
Go through each step for all the results for every keyword. For example, 5 Steps x 5 results x 10 keywords = 250 steps. So, if each step takes 1 minute to perform, it might take 300 minutes = 5 hours to research 10 keywords.
The Automated Method
Analysing the websites manually is going to take a little time, that’s why I would recommend investing in a tool like Long Tail Pro.
It does at one place and it’s automated. You just have to type in a few words related to the topic you are willing to write. This tool will pull a list of keywords which can be sorted according to many parameters.
Like, the number of words, local search volume (you get to choose the country in the tool) global search volume.
And the search results for each keyword gets displayed within the software, where you can check out the scores like Page Authority, Domain Authority for each result.
This making research pretty easy and fast. I’ve literally found hundred of keywords within an hour of opening the Long Tail Pro App.
Whichever route you choose, writing Articles using long tail keyword is the only way a single authored blog can survive in today’s world.
Because you cannot compete with blog loaded with a team of writers writing every topic under the sun.
I hope this article serves its purpose of telling you the importance doing a bit of research for writing content that attracts visitors via Search Engines.
You can check out the Long Tail Pro Software Yourself
