Aaron Hoos

Love this article about long tail keyword research, rejecting the “head” keywords, and how to profit from long tail. Wanted to share it with you.

The long tail of keyword research.

In this video, seomoz talks about how websites get links to them. Website owners take note: It all comes down to value!

I’ve been speaking with a client recently about writing content to market his business. Initially, he was thinking about an offsite blog that would attract traffic and drive it to his landing page. I do like this approach in many cases because a blog gives an opportunity for businesses to position themselves and demonstrate thought leadership through regular content (and yes, there are other benefits as well).

But as we spoke, one of the challenges became clear: Getting an audience to the blog and then sending them on to the landing page was a potential barrier to success. After looking more closely at their situation, I ended up advising that they use online articles to push people directly to the landing page.

There’s a tension in sales: On the one hand, you want your prospect to take baby steps toward buying your product or service so that they never feel like they are pushed. On the other hand, you want to make the line from lead-to-sale to be as clear and easy as possible so prospects can move through it as quickly as possible.

Given that tension, we see the benefits of one marketing method over the other.

In their original option, they wanted to acquire traffic on the blog and then push them to a landing page.
In some cases, this is a good model, but for the client I was just speaking to, there was a huge risk of people falling off between the blog and the landing page.

Instead, I recommended this approach…

… and suggested they use online articles instead of a blog to drive traffic directly to their landing page.

The content is disseminated faster and placed in places where readers are reading, the SEO benefits are direct (backlinks point to the landing page rather than the blog), click-through rates are still measurable, and you dramatically reduce the number of people who fall off.

Bust out your site map for a moment. You know, that org-chart-like thing that you look at from time to time and wonder what to link your shiny new page to?

Got it? Okay, now take a look at each page. What is the purpose of that page? Every page in your website should have a purpose. And, to your great advantage, there aren’t many purposes that each page can have:

1. To compel a client to contact you
2. To sell a product or service
3. As an informational stopping-point along the way to one of the above two purposes

And that’s it.

So, your Contact Me page is very likely is #1. Your ecommerce section/shopping cart/products-page is probably going to be a #2. Your blog, resources, downloadable stuff, and your home page will all likely be #3.

It’s easy. So take out your site map and figure out the primary purpose of each page. Maybe do some color coding with your kids’ markers.

NOW HERE’S THE MOST IMPORTANT PART
Once you know what the purpose of each page is, you need to look at the content on that page and make sure it is doing the job it is supposed to be doing. Is it fulfilling the role you’ve assigned to it?

For example, if your About Me page serves as a stopping point (purpose #3) along the path of having someone telephone you (purpose #1), then your About Me page needs to contain clear, prominent links to your Contact Me page.

And you may find, after doing this exercise, that there are some pages that don’t do anything. Either give them a role from one of the three purposes… or delete them.

Now here are my answers to a couple of objections that some of my readers will have:

• “Don’t my pages serve other purposes?” Yes, there are other purposes that your pages serve (SEO is one example or maybe another example might be that your comments section is a big, happy community of adoring fans). But ultimately, even those are related to at least one of the 3 purposes I’ve listed above.
• “I don’t want to prominently link a next step in my blog! That’s my community and they resist hard-selling.” I would also agree that, in some cases, you aren’t going to blatantly push people in one direction if it is unprofessional. You probably shouldn’t flog your products every time you post a blog; regardless, your blog should still subtly remind people that you are a genius and they would be crazy not to pick up the phone and dial your number right now. So don’t finish every post with “Contact me today”, but maybe, in the footer of your post, have a section that links to the page you want them to go to.

I actually think this article’s title is misleading. This excellent post should be a must-read for every small business owner and aspiring entrepreneur who is creating a website that they want to draw visitors to. Sure it has a copywriting bent to the content but it is really about search engine optimization.

Five Areas to Focus On for Effective SEO Copywriting | Copyblogger.