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All over the internet there’s ads popping up saying “SEO is Dead” or “This is the end of the SEO industry” however that really couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is as long as there are search engines like Google, Bing, Ask, AOL, and Yahoo and as long as there are hundreds of millions of people using search engines, SEO will be alive in well.
What is happening is a change in the SEO industry. As someone who has been involved in search engine marketing for over 5 years now, this is a common occurrence in SEO. However what is happening right now is the people who are “newer” to SEO don’t know how to adapt from their current strategy to continue to help their clients see high ROI’s through SEO. Well, we do know how to adapt which is why we’re writing this article about attracting more traffic via long tail keywords.
What Are Long Tail Keywords?
We’ve blogged before about long tail keywords, for example in this post which talks about how important long tail keywords really are as well as this post which talks about the difference between long tail keywords and short tail or competitive keywords. In short, long tail keywords are keywords that are less competitive than traditional keywords however they also have less traffic than traditional keywords but are easier to rank for than traditional keywords. An example would be trying to rank for the term “Buy used cars” as a competitive keyword vs the term “buy used Audi’s in Chicago” as a long tail keyword.
Why Use Long Tail Keywords For SEO?
As the SEO world continues to shift, it’s becoming more and more difficult to consistently rank for competitive keywords without any fluctuation in rankings. Is it possible? Yes, we have tons of clients who are still #1 or top 3 for their competitive keywords and they are doing great receiving tons of traffic and leads, however as a way to diversify and ensure stable traffic we are also highly recommending and shifting towards a long tail approach to SEO.
The number one question we receive is does ranking for long tail keywords really send traffic? And the answer is yes, we just published a short case study about this last week which I would encourage you to review if you still question whether or not long tail keywords or content marketing can really drive organic traffic.
5 Easy Ways To Attract Long Tail Traffic
With all that background information out of the way, here are five easy ways to attract long tail traffic to any website in any niche at any point in time. These tips have helped us and our clients drive hundreds of thousands of new visitors to our websites and will continue to work well into the future.
1: Blog, Blog, Blog
Even if you don’t know if your blog post will rank for a long tail phrase or not, it’s important to generate content on your website’s blog. If your website doesn’t have a blog, well it needs one. If it has a blog that you don’t update, then it needs to be regularly updated. And if you’ve been updating it but only posting so-so content then you need to step it up and write high quality content.
2: Reorganize Your Site
Is your site cluttered and hard to navigate? Do you have pages that are outdated or thin on content? Are your pages descriptive of what is actually on the page and what is actually important to your company? By making changes to your website pages, you can rank those pages for long tail phrases and attract search traffic. As an example of this, when you search for “Chicago Construction Website Design” our site comes up in the top 3. That isn’t by chance, it’s because our page talking about construction web design in Chicago is properly organized and structured to rank well. Make sure your entire site from the top of the page to the bottom of the page, from the homepage to the deepest interior page is well organized and well structured to potentially rank well for long tail phrases.
3: Add Pages Based On Products/Services
Is there at least one page on your site that really describes each one of your products or services? Most businesses have broad pages but don’t have descriptive interior pages describing all they offer. As an example, one of our clients offers portable dog fences. They had a page outlining their fences, but were lacking a quality page with information about their portable dog fences. After building out the page for them, optimizing it, and promoting it, they now rank #1 for the search term “portable dog fences”. Make sure your site has quality pages for all your products and services and make sure all those pages are properly structured to ensure they have a chance of ranking well.
4: Represent Your Locations Properly
This is probably the biggest problem local businesses face. They are located in a city or suburb and rank well in that one city or suburb, but they don’t properly represent all the areas they service. For example, if you’re a bakery located in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, you likely don’t just want to attract the 30,000 residents of Skokie but rather the 2 million residents of the city of Chicago. Make sure you have unique, quality pages describing all the areas you service and why you service those areas or what you offer them to ensure you’ll rank well in various cities and locations. Note: Search engines hate door-way pages and thin/duplicate pages just to rank for certain cities, so if you’re unsure how to properly position yourself in various cities you may want to work with an SEO company to ensure you set this up properly.
5: Work With An SEO Company
The best way to attract more long tail traffic is to work with a pro. We have years of experience in dozens of different industries in gaining more long tail traffic for our own websites as well as our clients, so if you’re serious about gaining a large amount of new long tail traffic to your website contact us for a free consultation to learn about how we can work hand in hand to drive more business to your website.
Following these 5 tips will get you well positioned to drive more traffic to your website and ensure that traffic is consistent and doesn’t highly fluctuate due to search engine updates.