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Blog Engage $500 USD Guest Blogging Qualifying Article

You are a mommy blogger. You create great content that other mommies love. You recently wrote a popular post on the dangers of cribs with drop down sides. It was complete with diagrams and pictures. As you are reading this, 5 moms who just heard about crib recalls, are sitting at their computer looking at the blinking pipe character inside of Google’s search bar. The blinking bar jumps across the screen populating the search box with the desired search queries. Each hits enter…and they are off. Did all 5 mommies find your blog? How about 3 mommies? How about 1 mommy?

Lets back up a little bit, how many of these mommies are you actually targeting. If you are ignoring the long tail, you are only competing for 1 or 2 of them. Each mommy has her own style, personality, and creativity. This is reflected in the way she does everything including how she searches to finds out if her baby’s crib is safe. Other variables such as computer knowledge, screaming children in the background, and details she already knows also play a part.

Five moms, five searches

Mommy #1

She has three kids and two of them are in cribs, twins. All of her kids are under the age of three and she feels like she never gets a moment to herself. The reason she feels that way is well, she doesn’t. After hearing the report about faulty cribs designs causing fatalities she tries not to imagine that happening to one of her children. She decides to research the issue on the limited time she has while the twins nap.

Her search:

  • crib recalls

The search falls into the main keyword used by most searchers when researching this subject. It is also highly competitive term because major news publishers and and major bloggers are targeting the phrase. The first organic search results would send from around 10,000 visits per month.

Mommy #2

This mommy has one little one at home. She is concerned about her baby’s safety and takes the same approach as mommy one. But she recalls one other bit of information, a year associated with the recall.

Her search:

  • crib recalls 2011

This search term is used less by searchers, therefore there is less competition. The number one ranking would bring around 300 visits per month.

Mommy #3

This working out of the house mommy has three kids with one still in a crib. She sees an article on Yahoo! about the issue but it lacks any detailed information about her crib. So, she heads on over to Google and conducts a search.

Her search:

  • crib recall list

The focus of the search eliminates some competitors, but the search traffic is also down. The number one listing should get at least 500 visits or more.

Mommy #4

This mommy is very put together, as a matter of fact her friends describe her as slightly OCD. When she hears the report of the dangerous cribs, she immediately pulls the file with the information on the specific crib where her toddler is fast asleep. Her search is even more defined.

Her search:

  • graco crib recall

Mommy #5

This mommy is a free spirit and prefers to search in the same way she would have a conversation with a real person. Her unique search could be very hard to predict since it may be more humanistic in nature.

Her search:

  • Is my baby safe in her graco crib

This is a classic long tail search. Very few pages (if any) target this exact phrase.

Even though one of the main (fat head) keywords sends more traffic than a long tail keyword search, there are many more searchers using the long tail as opposed to the main keywords. By being a little creative you can bring in more traffic than major competitors.

Why should I target a term with less traffic?

I learned about the long tail in one of the first SEO projects I took on as a consultant. I felt long tail would serve as a way to keep the client happy until we scored our major keyword objectives. The domain was completely new and was not an exact match for any keyword targets. After six months of working on the long tail, sales started to take off. I couldn’t wait until we scored the major keywords in his industry so we could dominate the search results.

After about 10 months we were in the top spot outranking  major sites like Amazon.com.  It was a nice traffic jump, but it turned out that major keywords were only a small fraction of traffic compared to the long tail.  As a matter of fact, it accounted for less than 5% of related traffic for each related product category.

Attention: Compete Here, Win Here

*I left 5% out of the graph as a margin of error.

While everybody else is trying to rank for “crib recalls” they are creating an opportunity for the little guys to sneak in underneath the radar and take the most traffic for closely related search terms in the long tail.

Ways To Harness the Power

Conduct in depth keyword research

We know that many of the searches are going to be brand and model number specific. Google’s Adword tool does not provide great long tail information. Use a combination of different keyword research tools to tackle the issue.

  • graco crib recalls
  • graco lauren crib recalls
  • graco shelby crib recalls
  • graco side rail
  • graco lauren side rail
  • graco shelby side rail
  • etc.

Bonus tip: spend some time on Yahoo! answers reading through questions and answers around your niche. You will find quite a few long tail phrase ideas.

Implement a structured content strategy

The way content appears on a page can have a significant impact on how well it performs. Keeping a clear and concise structure to your content will help the search engines rank “sections” of the page for the keyword.

You can see from the screenshot above Google knows what section of the page is most relevant to the keyword search. In the mommy blog case, you could take a couple of approaches like write long copy with a sub-heading and several paragraphs focused on each keyword phrase. Or Make sure each section is focused on a separate long tail keyword phrase.

Hit all of these main SEO points in your content:

  • Include more than just the article title (headline) in the title tag. You are better off shortening the article title in the title headline and including other keyword phrases
  • Make sure the headline has at least one keyword phrase
  • Use subheadings to clearly define each section of content.
  • Support subheadings by using the same keyword in the first sentence of the first paragraph after each subheading
  • In our example, I would include a table containing a master list of all cribs and their recall information

Long tail link building tips

  • Love thyself by linking to thyself over and over again from within your own blog using different anchor text
  • Get links to deep pages
  • Vary anchor text as much as possible to deep pages
  • Even if a site doesn’t pass PageRank, it still tells Google something about your site. Nofollow and crappy links can actually help you.

Image(s): FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About Jason Capshaw

Jason Capshaw is the Internet Marketing Manager for Active Home Solutions, more of his writings can be found on his blog mywebtronics.

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