Blog Writing, Long-Tail Keywords & Mobile Optimization
Whether you’re new to blogging for search engines, or a seasoned pro, you can always improve your blog SEO approach and content marketing strategies. Bloggers who can produce excellent content while incorporating keyword research and mobile optimization into their process will generate the best results.
Consider the following three questions that you might be asking yourself on a regular basis:
- How do I develop content for my blog?
- How do I know what keywords to target?
- How do I make my blog mobile friendly?
At first glance, these might seem like three separate initiatives. But writing SEO-friendly blogs requires you to work on all three of these simultaneously—and that’s exactly what I’m going to teach you in this guide.
Why You Need to Combine Content Creation, Keyword Research, and Mobile Optimization
To illustrate the importance of these three subjects working together, let’s look at a few scenarios where at least one of them is missing:
- You could write amazing content. But without proper keyword research, you could be writing about a topic that nobody is searching for.
- If your keyword research is great but you haven’t optimized your content for mobile searches, you’re neglecting the 61.35% of total web traffic that comes from smartphones.
- Even if your site is optimized for mobile searches and you have excellent keyword research, your content won’t be seen and won’t resonate with readers if you can’t produce quality blog posts.
In simple terms, even if you’re doing any two of these three things really well, you’ll still fall short if you’re not doing all three. And rather than doing each of them in isolation, it’s much more effective to combine them all with a unified approach.
Blog Writing – What to Write About
The biggest challenge in blog writing is finding authoritative topics that people want to know about, are talking about, and asking about. To be really clear on this point, because it is ultra-important: these are NOT the same as topics YOU want to tell them about.
Some people struggle with blogging because they don’t have good writing skills or writing talent at their disposal. But in reality, there are several different types of blog formats that you can use that are equally effective.
- Articles – Keep it authoritative: How-tos, resources, sharable funny stories, images. AVOID news, especially regurgitated or stolen news content.
- Videos – Keep them short and focused: Two minutes MAX for ONE topic. Always produce them professionally if possible, and style it for your industry (dress, background etc.). Use a logo intro and contact info with a call-to-action, such as “learn more on our website”, at the end.
- Podcasts – Talk about what you do and ANSWER questions your customers might ask: Interview format is a great way to approach this. A one-hour podcast recording session can yield multiple blog posts—one for each topic discussed, and an e-book for same.
The first step is to brainstorm some blog writing topics for any of the above types of posts. A great way to do this is to get your customer-facing staff together for a lunch. Have them each write down the top ten questions they get asked by customers. The answers to those questions are your blog writing topics! Remember to make your blog posts sharable. Include social media and email sharing buttons!
The above process automatically gives you authority marketing content.
Long-Tail Keyword Research
A long-tail keyword is any search phrase that is three words or more, and usually three to five words. They have far less search volume than other keyword phrases, but are usually much more targeted to specific buyers and clients, and therefore produce much more qualified leads. There is much less competition for those phrases, and in PPC these keyword phrases are thus much less expensive. This makes them an excellent choice for your blog writing!
Remember those “answers” you and your team wrote down in your blog topics brainstorm session I outlined above? Those answers also contain the “seed” terms for your long-tail keyword search terms. Pick the key descriptive terms out of your blog article titles and dump them into a keyword research tool like keywordtool.io or Google Keyword Planner. The catch with the latter is that you must have a Google Ads account to use it. I highly suggest you think about opening an account to take advantage of this tool. If you don’t want to really use it, just set up a $1.00 daily budget, with one ad, and one keyword, with a max bid of 10 cents. There are plenty of resources online to help you set it up and use the Keyword Planner tool.
Need another great way to discover new long-tail terms?
Set up “social listening” streams on a platform like Hootsuite. You can set up “listening” streams based on your known converting “head” terms, long tail terms, or even your brand. By monitoring discussions about your chosen terms on social media, you can discover keywords that Google doesn’t even know about yet, and doesn’t include in their keyword search volume numbers. Why is this? It is because approximately 15% of ALL searches on Google have never been searched before, and these are mostly long-tail keyword searches. This means the terms have limited or even NO competition, so are cheap in PPC, and easy to rank for organically! How’s that for a win-win-win for your blog writing efforts?
Mobile Optimization
People LOVE their phones. Maybe a little TOO much. This means optimizing for mobile devices is critical in this day and age. People now often search using voice commands.
Mobile visits have officially out-paced desktop worldwide. So regardless of your industry, it’s safe to assume that the majority of of your website traffic is coming from a mobile device. contacts” are now on mobile, so a bad mobile experience can mean your top-of-the-funnel lead generation suffers greatly!
There are easy ways for even the smallest website owner to test their site’s mobile display and user interface. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to test your mobile usability with a quick overview report. It’s a great initial overview of your site’s mobile setup, and you can lick each error for more details and recommendations.
You can also run some user tests to get real input from people browsing your website from their smartphone or tablet. This information is truly invaluable, as it goes beyond the basics for what’s “required” for mobile optimization compared to what people actually want to see.
Combining Long-Tail Keyword Research With Mobile Optimization
It’s important to understand that people use different search terms depending on the devices they use. Conventional wisdom previously told us that mobile searches are shorter, because it’s easier for people to type on a desktop-sized keyboard compared to a smaller phone.
But that’s no longer the case. Surprisingly, mobile searches are actually longer than desktop searches.
In fact, a recent study found that the average mobile search contained 15.5 characters whereas the average desktop search contained just 13.8 characters. This means that you still need to prioritize long-tail keywords even when you’re optimizing searches for mobile devices.
But that’s not all.
Voice search is also increasing in popularity, with more than 50% of adults worldwide using it on a daily basis. These queries are even longer, since it requires much less effort to speak than it does to type.
Final Thoughts
This is inbound marketing at its finest.
You need to discover what people are searching for and then write about it on your blog while simultaneously making it easy to get found. Answer the questions that people are asking, and remember that most people search for longer terms (especially from their mobile devices and via voice search).
Make sure that you have at least a basic mobile optimization strategy implemented.
Now go out there and show everyone how great you are by answering the pressing questions people want to know about, with your blog writing expertise. Be seen as a thought-leader in your industry. Give your site visitors a great mobile device experience with easy ways to contact you.
