Long Tail Keywords: The Greatest Key to Business Blogging Success

Most small business blogs stink. I’m sorry if that offends you. Fact is, it’s true. There are many reasons for it, but none more important than what I want to briefly talk about and then show you(via video) today.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog about long-tail keywords and what they are. Although I don’t want to go into too much depth here regarding this ‘low hanging fruit’ of the world wide web, suffices to say that long tail keywords consist of longer phrases (usually at least 3 words or more)that internet searches are entering in order to find more specific data regarding a particular niche. Here is an example:

• Short Tail: Chicken
• Medium Tail: Rotisserie Chicken
• Long Tail: How to Prepare Rotisserie Chicken

Because internet users are becoming more and more adroit at searching and finding information online, the floodgates are wide open for any businesses that is able to aggressively go after these ‘longer phrases’ and beat others to the punch.

This process of developing a killer small business blog and dominating your niche via the long-tail is not as hard as it might sound, and in my opinion really only requires 3 essential qualities:

1. Think like a homeowner
2. Write Homeowner Friendly Blog Titles and Articles
3. Consistency in Post Frequency

Business owners and employees have a big problem when it comes to content marketing: they often think like business owners and employees. You may snicker at this but it’s absolutely true. The curse of knowledge can kill anyone’s ability to speak at the level of their audience.

In order to overcome this problem, the most important exercise a business owner or content marketer can do for his or her blog is to sit down and write the 20 most prominent questions consumers ask regarding his or her product. These questions formulate perfect titles for blog articles and combined with solid content and regularity (post at least twice a week), a blog’s traffic will quickly skyrocket because of its consumer-centric appeal. If you haven’t ever done this exercise, stop putting it off. It works.

Remember: Any question, and I really mean ANY, that a consumer asks regarding a product or service is worth writing about. And it’s the businesses that are most aware of these questions that end up producing the best content for search engines and eventually garnering the most viewers.

I can say this because my swimming pool blog is easily the most popular in its industry. Also, our traffic is in the 99^th percentile for swimming pool companies. So by simply going after longer phrases with our blog articles (thinking like consumers), we’ve been able to bypass other companies that are multi-million dollar operations. In fact, our traffic is so prolific throughout the United States and Canada that I’m now partnering up with consumer-lead services because we get a mountain of leads outside of our consumer area and I just hate throwing them all away. But to see exactly what I’m talking about, please check out the following video. It’s a snapshot of my company’s analytics (Hubspot Software) and you’ll be blown away once you see how much organic (free) traffic our business is getting simply because we know how to blog effectively.

Well I hope this article has helped s you to have a better feel for how to establish a successful long-tail keyword strategy with your business’ blog. If you have any further questions about this important form of content marketing, or would like to share some of the success you’ve experienced with your blog, please feel free to add your thoughts below.

Tagged as: blogging for salespersons, How to be a sales doctor, Lead Generation, Small Business Marketing, webpage design