Are You Business Blogging with No Tail Keywords?

At this point, telling you once again that keyword stuffing is bad for your business blog – not to mention your business – would be overkill. Hopefully you’ve done your own research into Google’s Panda and Penguin updates and how those will affect content development for online marketing moving forward. We understand that closing your eyes to the future of integrated marketing is tempting. No one wants to hear that the old, easy techniques aren’t going to cut it anymore, but the fact is that the future will be owned by the content creators. And those content creators? Will be blogging circles around you if you let them.

Once upon a time, business blogging was an optional element of online marketing. Seeing a blog on your favorite company’s website was actually a pleasant surprise – even better if the content thereon was good enough to keep you coming back for more. Nowadays, it’s more surprising NOT to see a tab marked blog on a business site’s upper nav and the omission can even be kind of a turn-off. If you’re not business blogging, it’s clearly time to start. And you can’t just toss up an old whitepaper now and then. You have to do this right. Your business blog should be optimized, but not stuffed with keywords. It should be engaging and entertaining and informative. It should make customers and potential clients want to revisit your site, just because.

Now let’s say you’re doing all that and more. You have a pretty crescent fresh business blog, if you do say so yourself. But where, you ask, are all the readers? Where’s the traffic? You’re working like a madman (or madwoman) to create a dope blog for your business and six months later, you’re not seeing any results. What gives?!

Have you considered that you might just be business blogging with what we like to call “no tail” keywords? You’ve no doubt heard of the long tail – and long tail keywords. These are longer keyword phrases that are highly specific and lower search volume than the high search volume terms you are hopefully using in your website copy. They don’t generate a whole lot of traffic, but the searchers tend to be highly motivated to find exactly what they’re looking for. Think “blue widgets for atom carbide drills” versus “blue widgets” or “carbide drills”. No tail keywords, on the other hand, are phrases that you recognize as related to your business – sometimes industry terms – that searchers just aren’t using.

Consider this: It’s not unusual for customers to use different verbiage to refer to your product than you’d use in an internal business meeting, right? You may THINK you know what keywords are just right for your business blog, but unless you’re checking the search volume of those terms using tools like Google’s keyword tool or others you run the risk of striking out. That perfect post on your business blog isn’t attracting any eyeballs because no one is searching for your keywords. They may be highly relevant, but they’re not customer-focused. Would it be awesome if clients used accurate verbiage and even got down and dirty technical with your proper industry terms? Absolutely! But they don’t, and if you’re not focusing on what your customers are looking for, you’re sunk from the start.

So don’t be a cat with no tail – and no readers. Use a keyword tool, find those juicy long-tail keywords, and blog for your business the right way.