In the long tail of keyword searches, the great value comes from having hundreds or thousands of unique, valuable content pages written on a niche subject. The millions of completely unique search terms that hit the engines each day help to bring in traffic that a purely “designed” strategy could never receive.
What’s fascinating about the long tail targeting process is that its largely an accidental system. There’s little or no “intent” behind the use of terms or phrases in the pages, but for anyone who’s tried writing a few hundred blog entries a year or adding unique articles to a site, the return on investment is clear.
The tough part is generating a strategy to that creates the content. Internally, we have a few methods that we use and recommend to clients:
- Brainstorm attitudes, questions, concerns and interests from different perspectives about the industry – vendors, consumers, regulators, outsiders, financial side, bizdev side, marketing side, advertising side, sales, etc.
- Approach from a “hobby” angle – does anyone do this for fun? If so, what aspects are they interested in?
- Hit the communities – use forums and message boards to generate new topics (this is a great way to stay timely and relevant, too)
- Subscribe to the newswires – as industry related news comes in, you can find new topics to fit in
Does anyone else have a methodology they follow or a practice they like in order to generate long tail content?
