Kicking Butt on the Long Tail

Are you close to hitting your keyword mark?

When McDougall Interactive signed up for HubSpot software and training, they asked us how many leads we wanted. After we told them, they told us that, assuming a two percent conversion rate, we would need x number of website visitors a month. In order to get that many visitors, we’d need to blog five times per week with clear calls to action subtly built in to the right column and posts. HubSpot also told us the blog posts should be largely targeting realistic niche keyphrases to rank for or long tail keywords. The keywords should get about 200 searches a month (based on Google’s Keyword Planner) with a competition score of less than 60 (via SEOMoz’s tool).

Striving for higher search volume is okay, but not so much higher that it is unrealistic to rank for. Not that you can’t also target top keywords like “golf clubs,” but targeting something like “Taylormade golf clubs for tall women” can be very effective. It will get you top-ranked faster and at least get you a small amount of real traffic rather than getting you ranked #62 (on about the sixth page of the Google search results, which few potential visitors will ever look at) or worse for “golf clubs.”

Having hundreds or more posts on your blog is like having many fishhooks in the water because it enables you to catch more fish and eventually rank for the short tail search terms because the volumes of content and engagement will start to show Google you deserve more than just long tail ranks.

So start small initially and build your way up as you start to see results. Create a spreadsheet with blog title ideas that use the fully researched long tail keywords you’ve come up with. Given that the long tail is where most searches are done, always be building volumes of posts and pages that target more and more keywords. Also keep in mind that Google admits 20% or more of the searches done each day are for keywords no one has ever typed in before, so the more content you have, the more likely your site will come up for all kinds of different search terms that nobody could predict would help you.

While the point underlying the strategic comments HubSpot gave us was not really new to us, it was the matter-of-fact way in which they framed it as more of a math problem than some magic fairy dust that gave me an “aha” moment. You simply can’t just talk about writing and we at McDougall Interactive simply can’t link-build our clients into great rankings anymore. You simply must build a huge base of content that grows weekly (or ideally, daily) if you want your web marketing to be sustainable.