Targeting The Long Tail Via Answers

Any good SEO will tell you that keyword research is the first vital step in optimizing a site to rank well in the search engines. If you rank well for terms that no one searches for, you won’t receive any traffic from those rankings. On the other hand, if you can’t rank for any terms in your niche that people are searching for, you once again lose out on valuable search traffic.

Proper keyword research ensures that you optimize for phrases that are being searched. However, you don’t want to concentrate only on the “big money phrases” in your niche. Sure, ranking for those is nice, but searches come in all shapes and sizes. Everyone searches for information in their own unique ways. Ranking well for lots of less competitive phrases (the long tail) can bring in tons of traffic.

I tend to spend more time optimizing traditional web sites than I do for blogs. Why? Blogs just lend themselves to a more natural form of optimization than standard sites do. Blogs are generally less formal and more conversational. While some consideration should be given to presenting well-written blog posts and titles that contain keyword phrases, it is generally more important to really engage the reader in the conversation than it is to present highly optimized text.

So, should you spend time optimizing your blog posts with SEO in mind? To some degree, yes, but keep it natural. Spend more time providing the information that your readers want. One of the best ways to do this is to answer questions that users typically have about your particular niche.

Concentrating on providing answers to reader questions has several advantages. The first, of course, is that you are given ready-made topics to write about. The second advantage, however, is an SEO advantage. By answering user questions, you are able to target search terms that may not be the “big money phrases”, but they are right on point with what people actually search for. You can bet that if several people want to know how to make wodgets dance, then there’s likely lots of people searching for “how to make wodgets dance”.

The best way to find out what questions people have about your niche is to ask them. Not only will you be engaging readers in the conversation by asking them what questions they might have in a blog post, but you are gathering topics to blog about, and researching keyword phrases for your SEO efforts.

Another way to discover questions that people have is to search through some of the “answers” sites, such as Yahoo! Answers. Run a search for your main niche keyword, and scroll through the pages of questions that people have regarding that niche.

Finally, pay attention to how people phrase their questions. Searchers will likely phrase things in a similar manner, so you’ll want to use those phrases in your blog posts.

By answering user questions about your niche, you will:

1. Create topic opportunities for yourself
2. Give users exactly what they want
3. Target phrases that people are likely to be searching for, but are not being targeted by your competitors, in effect, pulling in some long tail searches.

There are other ways of attacking the long tail of search, but answering user questions is one particular way that is especially suitable for bloggers. It is a win-win situation for both the blogger and the readers.