SEO is evolving at a faster rate than ever before. As many agencies, industry figureheads and blogs are more than happy to point out, “SEO is not just SEO anymore”. Most of us in digital marketing know the days are gone where you can whip out the Google keywords tool, find some juicy targets and create mini-pages/sites optimized for those individual keywords. A lot of writers use the phrase “back in the day” when talking about these easy days of SEO; implying that simple rankings are some sort of hazy memory. But in reality, things still are easy (just not in a way that rewards blatant spam tactics as much).

Today’s SEO landscape is more focused on taking a holistic approach which is more authoritative and natural. It does take more effort and “real” marketing to succeed; but positive results are still well within reaching distance. I like to look on it this way, you still have 24 hours in a day, and you’re still going to be doing SEO... it’s just that the tactics required to succeed are different.

This post will look specifically at how to squeeze much more longtail traffic out of content targeting head terms. In the past, we saw many sites setting up a large number of pages, each targeting variations of what was essentially the same search (in terms of user intent). What we’re looking at in this piece is how to build a more sustainable content strategy that doesn’t rely on such shortsighted techniques.

Content strategy is something which IMO hasn’t changed as drastically as link building in the post Panda/Penguin world. However, there are still a lot of SEOs and webmasters using outdated and rigid SEO content strategies. You need to keep ahead of the curve and focus on doing what’s going to be rewarded after every Google update, not just for the next 3-6 months.

Setting up multiple landing pages for small variants of thematically close searches is old hat. Not only is it a strategy that has been largely made ineffective by the many variants of the Google Panda update, but it’s terrible for branding too! Imagine someone reading through your blog section and seeing post after post on topics like ‘Blue widgets are great’, ‘Why are blue widgets great?’ and ‘Are blue widgets still great?’ As a user you’re going to lose user trust in the authority/integrity of that site’s content; thus devaluing the brand. A more rewarding approach is to focus on “big content” that is expansive, thorough and covers several angles of discussion all in one piece. This means writing content with the bigger picture in mind, thinking about how it will be socially shared, picked up on by external communities and impact your brand on top of just search rankings.

As I see it, the aim in developing “big content” (in technical terms) is to have a smaller number of overall pages attracting authoritative links, social shares, good user interaction statistics and other trust signals. Doing so will make the page act like a super sponge, not only soaking up the targeted head term, but a far greater amount of longtail traffic.

Be warned, this type of content strategy DOES take more time than spanking up quick articles targeting medium to long tail keywords and pointing easy links at them. However, what you will end up with is a solid asset, which will rank for phrases you wouldn’t even consider focusing on when following a micro-strategy. It’s like making the decision to carry cargo on a single container ship or split it up between thousands of smaller individual yachts. In the unlikely event that the container ship sinks, you lose all of your cargo... but as a vessel it is MUCH stronger and able to overcome the bumps and waves which rock the little guys around.

Creating content that attracts traffic for a huge number of keywords isn’t that hard, and essentially comes down to the following points:

1. Good editorial planning
2. More intelligent keyword research
3. The ability to develop points more comprehensively over a larger word count

1. Good Editorial Planning

Planning out your content carefully is one of the key steps to success in engaging your audience; and ultimately dominating the SERPs. Sure you could splash out 600 words that is balanced and optimized for a range of phrases; but if it’s garbage it won’t stick at the top of the SERPs in the long run (see here on the importance of user data).

There are strong indications that Panda is a learning algorithm, which takes into account user interactions such as ‘bounce rates’ and ‘time spent on page’. If over time your content is showing higher bounces/lower engagement than its competitors it’s not going to be sticking around in the long term. You need to really take a step back and ask yourself if your content satisfies the needs behind your targeted search phrase.

Each writer works differently; so I’m not going to try and lay out a step-by-step content planning process here. But what I will do is try to outlay some of the key weapons you should be holding by the time your fingers hit the keys.

• A main point you want to be evident over the entirety of the content
• Considered counter arguments to your point which you will address
• The audience and personas you are targeting
• The action you want the user to take or emotions/thoughts you want to provoke

With these factors in your mind, you can begin to write with a purpose other than simply driving search traffic. It’s all very well getting traffic to a page; but if it doesn’t do anything then that traffic might as well not be there. Content with a clear purpose or message is the type of content that people naturally engage with, discuss, share and link to.

2. More intelligent keyword research

Okay so if the extent of your research is using tools to find volume terms with penetrable SERPs you’re missing out...Big time!

Here I’m going to show you some neat methods to build really broad content in terms of keyword diversity. This content not only looks natural and engages users, but should also appear on Google’s radar every time they’re delivering results thematically related to your topic area. Please note, before you read on, that I’m not advocating using a formulaic keyword integration strategy here. What I’m trying to get across are techniques that can broaden your reach, and help develop stronger themes throughout your content.

So a large number of you are probably thinking I’m going to start talking about using synonyms and LSI keywords right? Yes, I am, but in a more intelligent way than simply slapping them in willy-nilly! If you’ve not read Ian Lurie’s post on random affinities then I suggest you do so now. It’s a great thought provoker, looking at how to tie in topic areas that are not going to be easily found by using SEO keyword research tools.

You need to think about secondary areas, which are thematically relevant and semantically close to your core topic area. But try and do this in a way that requires real human knowledge to make the connection. For example if you’re writing a piece on people’s fear of flying secondary topics may be air crash statistics, relaxation techniques, anxiety medication and airplane safety checks. Some of these would not be directly flagged up by keyword research tools. However, it’s highly likely that they would all be relevant and bring value to the user behind the original search “fear of flying”.

Once you have these secondary topic areas planned out you need to decide in what proportions you’re going to cover them. This will help you decide how to breakdown your keyword checklist (something I’ll cover later on). Let’s say you decide to breakdown your article content roughly in the following proportions:

• 70% Core fear of flying (will be covered from an angle of your choosing)
• 10% crash stats
• 10% airplane safety checks
• 5% relaxation techniques
• 5% anxiety medications

After you have this breakdown in your head, it’s time to go back to good old traditional keyword research. I like to use the following tools to get the maximum reach out of my keyword research:

1. Google Keyword Planner Tool (Replaced Keyword Tool)
2. UberSuggest
3. ScrapeBox Keyword Suggest Tool
4. Google Keyword Planner Tool (Again)
5. LSI Keywords Tool
6. Microsoft Excel

Stage 1

The first thing you want to do is start with the basics, crack open the trusty old Google keywords tool (now revamped as the keyword planner). Here you’re going to find your head term that you want to target, and use it to find some very obvious long tail keywords too. For the purpose of this article, we’ll continue along the arbitrary 'fear of flying' example.

Okay so we’ll start by entering the main topic we want to focus our article on which is ‘Fear of Flying’. Remember and make sure that you're working on [Exact Match] as your search type (if you don’t know the difference between broad, exact and phrase match see this guide).

Looking through the keyword ideas I came up with the following additional key phrases which I feel would fit into the topic of my example article.

The Google keywords planner is pretty good at picking up on what theme you’re going for based on a narrow range of keywords. Therefore you don’t need to pump in huge volumes of keywords into the search field to get relevant results for keyword ideas/suggestions.

Stage 2

The next phrase is to use a cool online tool called UberSuggest which scrapes Google suggested searches for your keywords. This will help you to see what sort of specific content people are looking for in relation to your targeted head term.

What you need to remember when using uber suggest, is that to get maximum impact you’ll want to search in question format as well as simply typing in your head term.

After entering your query and selecting the type of results you want to scrape (web, shopping, images etc.) you will be presented with an alphabetized list of Google suggested searches following your main term. What you will want to do is go through the list, and click the plus sign next to the suggested searches you feel may be relevant to your article.

After doing this through the entire alphabetical list click the ‘Get’ button which will give you an easy text list off all the suggested searches to copy or download. You’ll want to repeat this process for other similar phrases that will trigger a lot of relevant suggested searches. A good example in this case would be ‘is fear of flying...’ or ‘is a fear of flying...’

Stage 3

The next stage in gathering you rich longtail keywords is to use the keyword scraper tool that comes with ScrapeBox (yes there are white hat uses for scrapebox). Please note that ScrapeBox is a paid tool that requires a one off license payment. Therefore, if you don’t have this software you can skip this step as it’s not absolutely essential.

In the main Scrapebox window, click the drop-down scrape menu which is below the keyword field in the harvester. Then from there select the keyword scraper tool, all you have to do now is select the sources you want to scrape from and enter your keywords.

Scrapebox uses suggested search as well but from a much wider range of sources than UberSuggest; so it can sometimes pick up a couple of gems that it missed out on.

Stage 4

Now it’s time to consolidate all of the keyword data you’ve gathered so far and put it to the test. This means creating a single list from all the keywords you’ve gathered from your initial Google keyword research, UberSuggest and ScrapeBox usage.

Once you’ve got this mega list made up it’s time to put it back through a keyword tool for some final checks. The Google keyword tool used to be great for this as it could take up to 2000 keywords at once. But the new keywords planner is less receptive to this type of bulk research; therefore 3rd party tools may be more suitable. This process will help you to prioritize what you definitely want to include in your content. The remainder can be used as secondary keywords that are sprinkled in where appropriate throughout your writing.

It’s probably a good idea to create a cutoff point in terms of search volume for what keywords you are definitely going to include in your article/content. The rest can be used interchangeably to help theme the page and give it overall longtail authority.

Once you have these keywords sorted out by volume, and broken down into core/secondary groups, you’re going to want to find out what your LSI keywords are. The easiest way to do so is to use the website www.lsikeywords.com. This is a tool which analyses the top 5-10 results on Google for any search term, and finds out commonly occurring words and phrases contained within the ranking pages. The thinking behind this is that if there are strong common keyword themes between the top ranking pages, Google is either directly/indirectly rewarding such content. Whether or not this is correlation or causation I don’t exactly know; but it can’t hurt to have a look and consider this data when writing content.

Stage 5

It’s at this point that you’re going to want to load up Microsoft excel (or alternative spreadsheet software such as Open Office or Google Docs). Spreadsheet programs are simple and easy to use for creating keyword checklists.

Depending on the length of your article you’re going to want to do this for your secondary topics as well. I find having a single merged spreadsheet for both core and secondary topics is the best way to go about things. Doing so helps your article flow better, making it seem more holistic and less like a bunch of conjoined mini-articles.

You now have a handy well-researched keyword checklist sheet that you can refer to whilst writing. As you use keywords/topics in content, highlight them on the spreadsheet. This way you can let yourself know they have been included at least once by checking them off. The majority of the time you’ll find that there isn’t a natural place for all of your identified targets to go. Don’t stress about this; if you’re using a keyword checklist, you’ll deliver much more diverse and rich semantic signals to the search engines anyway. It doesn’t matter if there are a few casualties along the way.

3. The ability to develop points more comprehensively over a larger word count

Having the ability to develop points in a more in-depth manner usually requires a larger word count. In short, you need to be a good writer, or at least someone who knows the topic area well. If you qualify for neither of the previous criteria, then you’ll likely struggle to hold the audience’s attention. This will result in two inevitable outcomes; the first being that your reader is unlikely to engage with your site in the way you want them to. The second is that your user engagement statistics will be below that of higher quality competing content. User interaction statistics are something Google is looking into, and likely to make a much larger part of their algorithm in the near future.

This can present challenges for freelance writers who often try and write content on everything and anything by simply doing a bit of online searching. The problem with this is that you’re unlikely to be writing anything new or adding value to the web. It will simply be a reincarnation of articles already out there, or some sort of reworded Frankenstein of several other writer’s content.

When writing “big content” you should be looking to tick the following boxes:

1. Engage the audience and encourage them to take action
2. Have semantically broad content that will be considered by Google for a number of long-tail searches
3. Attracts natural links, mentions and shares

To do so, you need to know what you’re talking about, and be able to make the underlying links between topic areas. Simply writing a large piece of content, that roughly covers all of the areas a searcher may be interested in, will just not cut it in today’s search landscape.

In short; you need to consider how the different areas of your article relate to each other. This means thinking about if they overlap, have an impact on each other (either directly or indirectly) or even contradict each other. Making your content one large piece of considered output, where the points made interact with each other is critical to engaging the audience.

It doesn’t matter whether this is done by mind mapping before writing, or taking a step back once your article is done, and analysing how the content flows/interacts. Going through this process in some way will help strengthen and enrich your overall message. It will also make you consider the points you’re putting out to the reader more carefully. It is all too easy to get lost bashing out words, and not think about how the finished piece works as a whole.

Final Remarks

Content writing, specifically content which is targeting specific ‘head term’ keywords requires a lot of work. It is not easy, and nor should it be! Head terms are those that are most searched in a certain vertical or niche. Therefore Google doesn’t want to serve poorly slapped together junk in their results for them.

The principles in this article try to cover how to create a valuable and engaging piece of content. Specifically focusing on how you cannot only capture traffic for your intended head term, but also a host of longtail variants too.

SEO content writing is an activity that involves a mixture of technical on-page optimisation and adding genuine editorial value. It needs to satisfy the criteria of being semantically relevant to a large number of searches, whilst reading naturally and being of interest to the end user. This is no easy task, which is why top SEO content writers can charge a premium for the services they deliver.

Conclusion

The take home message from this article is that you need to branch out much further than your head term when writing optimised content. In this guide I covered a number of techniques to help identify a rich array of long term variants and thematically similar keywords. However, please don’t think I’m advocating the approach of SEO circa 2005, such as “2-4% keyword density for the main term, and once each for the secondary terms”. Writing to such a rigid structure will only create horrible patterns and make your content seem unnatural to search engines. Google is more than smart enough to rank content for a keyphrase without it being specifically mentioned on the page.

Try and take this article as more of a general guide, covering how to identify the most relevant secondary topics you can highlight throughout your articles. Yes you will want to have a balance between your targeted head terms and secondary phrases. But don’t take it to the extremes of trying to drill keyword density down to individual percentages (Google just doesn’t work like that). Taking a more naturalistic approach like will give positive results, whilst simultaneously not setting you up to take a hit as the Panda algorithm evolves.

What are your thoughts? Do you think you should just write content without tools, or is doing this sort of research essential to success in the SERPs? I look forward to hearing the Moz community’s feedback.

About petemcal - Pete McAllister is a digital marketer from Scotland in the UK. He loves to network and learn from like-minded SEO geeks! You can connect with Pete on Twitter @1petemcallister or on Google+.