I've said for a long time, that the most important aspect of SEO is keyword research. In addition, I've shown how simply having relevant keywords in your titles or articles can get you to the top of Google over more "authoritative sites"; all because of keyword relevancy. This is an absolutely critical aspect you simply must understand!
This is so critical to understand, because as you do keyword research, you will see sites that have PageRank or lots of links, but they still might be VERY easy to beat if they are not really relevant to the keyword being searched for.
Keyword relevancy is a huge deal. In fact, the really long tail keywords usually have very few sites if any targeting the search term. What does this mean?
If you can find lots of long tail keywords that other sites are not targeting, you can rank quickly with little or no link building whatsoever.
In reality the keyword research strategy is a lot like small niche sites, instead, each post is optimized for a new keyword. However, instead of targeting just 1 keyword for a small niche site, you can target hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords for your authority site. This is what I have been doing for a long time. When I go to write a post, I decide what I want to write about, then I find related keywords. I find keywords that I may not have thought of on my own, then I adjust the title of my post based on what I found. A pretty simple tactic, but its had a huge impact on my blog.
I get a large volume of traffic from Google every single day for free from people searching for these keywords or related ones. To be exact, my site has received hundreds of visitors from Search Engines (mostly Google) in October so far (1st through 15th). That means, I get visitors from search engines every single day! Not bad. (I get lots of traffic from referrals, return visitors, and more as well).
Oh yeah, and I don't build links to my posts. (These DO come naturally though, so I have plenty of links, but I just don't put any effort into it). Its because my posts are relevant to the keywords they are searching.
This is what you should be doing for your authority sites or blogs. If not, you are leaving free traffic on the table that you could have had by simply tweaking your titles and content just a little.
So, how does this apply directly to your authority sites or blog? Here is the strategy I am applying to my new large niche sites.
Target 1 primary keyword that has search volume around 4k to 20k exact match searches each month (this volume could vary on the competition). Target 1 new long tail keyword for each new article I write on the site. So, the article on the homepage will target my large primary keyword. Then each additional post will be about a related but different keyword that is MUCH easier to rank for than my selected primary keyword.
Lets say I decided to create a site on getting rid of bugs in your house. I input "bugs", "get rid of bugs", "flies", and "insect removal", and hit search. This returns dozens of results, but with my filters of only keywords between 4k and 20k, I'm left with 58 results. The next step is competitor analysis, which I'll cover more in depth in another post (but you can see an old example here). But lets say I pick the keyword, "Do it yourself pest control".
This is my primary keyword. It gets 5,400 exact match searches per month. After doing my research, I would write an in depth article about this topic. Perhaps I would title it, "The 10 Best Practices for Do it Yourself Pest Control". This would be a sticky post on my homepage (meaning it would stay there), and perhaps each of the 10 points in my article will link to additional articles on my site.
No comments:
Post a Comment