Category Archives: Content Writing

How to double or triple your traffic by using long tail keywords in content writing?

Do you know what are long tail keywords? How can you use them, incorporate them, into your content writing? What are the benefits of using long tail keywords when writing content for your website or blog?

In terms of improving your SEO, the concept of long tail keywords isn’t something new. It has been around for many years, but you come to know of it only when you do some careful reading, some persistent reading.

What are long tail keywords?

The phrase “long tail keywords” originates from the dragon-like long tail the traffic graph of long tail keywords generates.

Long tail keywords are those keywords that are low competition, that is, not many people are searching for them, but if some people are searching for them, and if you have optimized your web page or blog post for those long tail keywords, your link can be found by them easily.

To understand better, look at the image given below:

As you can understand, it would be very difficult for me to rank for the phrase “content marketing”. Aside from the fact that it makes no sense to optimize for this particular phrase for me right now simply because no intent can be attributed to the phrase “content marketing”, since thousands of people are already ranking above me, it wouldn’t be worth it for me to spend so much effort trying to rank higher for it.

Although this keyword or phrase is very competitive and may generate lots of traffic for websites ranking high for this keyword, in terms of competition and conversion, it has no value for me.

“Content marketing for my website” on the other hand is a clearly-defined phrase that I would like to rank higher for. A person who wants to use content marketing to promote his or her website should be able to find my website.

But again, it is a highly competitive phrase, though, it can be termed as, by definition, a long tail keyword because it contains more than three words.

Still, thousands of businesses might be looking for “content marketing for my website” because, well, one, almost every business these days has a website, and two, almost every business wants to promote itself some way or the other, and among these businesses, who are aware of the concept, would like to use content marketing to promote themselves.

Now we come to “content marketing for my web design website”. It’s an out and out long tail keyword because fewer people (compared to the two phrases described above) are searching for it and hence, it is not as competitive as the keywords mentioned above.

So, it is easier to rank higher for this phrase and since it is easier to rank higher, even if fewer people are searching for it, it can generate decent traffic.

This example can be applied to any business.

Suppose you sell “handwoven socks” from your website. Although it is a very attractive keyword or key phrase, thousands of people might be searching for “handwoven socks”. On the other hand, if you try to rank for “handwoven socks for babies” or “blue handwoven socks with white pattern” it will be easier to rank higher and get very specific traffic with greater conversion rate.

Such keywords or phrases are called long tail keywords; they are normally 3-4-5 words long and are very specific.

Why you can ill afford to ignore long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are also important because most of your traffic is already coming, or is going to come, from mobile devices. On mobile devices, since search is supported by voice, people tend to use phrases or common sentences to search for information.

There is a greater possibility of someone searching for “content writing service for my boutique website” then “content writing service”.

So, it is better to optimize for search terms and keywords your prospective customers and clients are actually using.

Another big reason is, the more specific the search is, the greater is the chance of the person buying from you.

This is where “intent” comes in.

If someone is searching for “content marketing” you never know what she is looking for.

Does she want to learn about content marketing? Does she want to find websites on content marketing? Is she a journalist writing an article? Maybe she is looking for books, articles and blog posts on content marketing? You can never be sure.

Even if someone is searching for “content marketing for my business” you cannot be sure whether she is looking to hire someone, or she wants to do it on her own.

“Content marketing service for my business” is more targeted and it means someone is looking for a content marketing service for her business.

“Content marketing service for my interior design website” is even more targeted. You know precisely what she is looking for.

Targeting for long tail keywords gives you an edge because it sends you highly targeted traffic that in turn, improves your conversion rate.

How to improve your SEO and double, or even triple your traffic with long tail keywords

As I have already explained above, since long tail keywords are less competitive in terms of SEO and may attract even less traffic, since they are more targeted, they enjoy better conversion rate and easy, higher search engine rankings.

You can either use common sense to create a list of long tail keywords pertaining to your business, industry or profession, or you can use something like LongtailPro (disclaimer: affiliate link) to find the long tail keywords in your niche.

With LongtailPro, you can enter a “seed” keyword and based on that, the app will suggest all the combinations that you can optimize your content for.

A good thing about LongtailPro is that along with giving you all the possible suggestions, it also shows you how competitive a particular phrase is for your website, specifically, and how many queries are done using the phrase for the long tail keyword.

If you don’t want to use LongtailPro, you can also use the Google AdWords tool. Just be wary, since Google would like you to bid on maximum number of keywords and phrases, it throws at you all sorts of keyword combinations that may confuse you. It is better to use the tool to get the ideas but eventually, create your own list, manually.

Remember that the amount of search engine traffic that you get is not important, what is important is, how many people do business with you. For that, you need to target very specific keywords and search terms.

Once you have created the list, start creating content around those long tail keywords.

The best thing to do is, create a web page or blog post with the title having your long tail keyword. For example, I can have something like “How to use long tail keywords for content marketing?” or “how my content writing service can help your restaurant website?”

If you have a TV shop in Lajpat Nagar it doesn’t make any sense trying to optimize for “Sony TV”.

On the other hand, you should optimize for “TV shop in Lajpat Nagar” or better, “Sony TV shop in Lajpat Nagar”, or even better, “Leco Sony TV Lajpat Nagar”, because this is how people search when they really want to buy.

Below I’m summing up how and why optimizing for long tail keywords can improve your search engine rankings as well as conversion rate:

Long tail keywords are less competitive in terms of SEO and hence, you can easily rank higher for them
Since you can easily rank higher for them, even if fewer people are searching for them, they will come to your website
Since search terms for long tail keywords are very specific, the traffic generated through these keywords have a clearly-defined intent and this is why, they enjoy a greater conversion rate

In fact, while writing content for my clients, I have experienced that writing content for long tail keywords is a lot easier than writing content for generic, high competition keywords because, since long tail keywords use logical phrases, it is easier to write conversational, engaging content for them.

How to create engaging content [infographic]

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Creating infographic is a great way of communicating your message convincingly and visually.

In this post I am publishing an infographic sent to me by good folks at MyTasker, an office support company based out of Kolkata. In near future I too am planning to hire such a service so I’m going to save the link.

The person who sent me the infographic has also sent me some textual background information that is to be published along with the infographic. Since I need to work on another blog post I’m going to copy/paste the description as it is. So please excuse in case there are some typos, or if you want to be a good Samaritan, let me know in case I need to correct something.

But the infographic is good.

Here is the textual background information on the infographic:

Why do you think people don’t just seem to care about your Content?

With your field of expertise, you have targeted the right niche community.

You have done your research on keywords and have chosen the interesting ones.

You have shared your content with the right communities.

But still:

Only a few views and a couple of comments.

WHY?

There is absolutely no need to bang your head against the wall for the answer.

Your Content is Boring, and people do not find your writing style interesting.

It hurts, right?

Well, it must.

Because:

You are probably doing everything right in this situation except, writing a Compelling Content that truly Engages with your readers.

Remember this thing:

Trends may come and go but Quality Content is the King of the Viral Kingdom.

There is no rocket science that you need to know to create Engaging Content.

You just need to know a few ingredients that can make any dull content look exciting.

And knowing these ingredients will help you stimulate your readers in a way that they will pay attention to each and every word you write.

And:

If your Readers are paying attention to you, it means you have engaged them to a point where a bond has developed between you two and they will eagerly wait for your next post and the next one.

So, to help you make your content interesting and engaging, the Writing Team at MyTasker has created a visually appealing Infographic where all the essential components of an Engaging Content have been looked into from an average reader’s point of view.

Incorporating some of the components (ideally all) will pleasantly surprise you to see how the quality of your content increases overtime and your readers finally start engaging with you.

Just go through the Infographic and be a Master at creating Engaging Content.

Here is the infographic:

What are topic clusters and pillar pages and how they improve your SEO?

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Neil Patel has published a nice blog post on the concept of creating pillar pages, improving their SEO and in the process improving the overall SEO of your website.

In the beginning of the blog post he has also referred to an older Hubspot post that explains in detail how they have been able to help one of their clients improve their search engine ranking for their chosen keyword through a pillar page in particular and topic clusters in general. I had come across this Hubspot blog post a couple of months ago and had been wanting to write about it but somehow, lost the thread while trying to handle other topics on my blog and website.

The Hubspot blog post explains why creating topic clusters are important due to the way people use search queries these days.

Content marketers and search engine optimization experts believe that, due to the complexity and quantity of content available on the web, search engine users don’t use single-word queries. An average query these days consists of 4-5 words.

One reason is, as mentioned above, there is plenty of useless content available on the web and hence, users want to make sure that they give the search engine as much information as possible to zero-in on the right search results.

After all, as this blog post suggests, if you run a query on Google, you may come across billions of search results. But frankly, not many people go beyond the second or the third search results page unless he or she is doing some really important research and there is no other option but to scour through as many search results as possible.

The point is, if you are competing with “billions of search results”, you need to do something exceptional, something that is not possible for most of the people to achieve, to move your rankings to the first page or at least the second page.

The second reason is that more and more people are using voice to search, mostly on their mobile phones. So, when people speak into their mobile phones, they mostly use phrases, day-to-day expressions, to carry out the search instead of single keywords. Something like, “find the best barber near me” or “where is the nearest eating joint selling vegan food”.

I have written multiple times on my blog that writing to improve your SEO is just one aspect of content publishing and content writing. The other aspect is, writing for your ideal persona. The search engines will be ranking your content, but it will be the human beings who will be reading it and then basing their decisions on how they react to your content.

Creating and maintaining topic clusters allows you to gather relevant and interrelated bits of information around a single source and hence, increase the subject-authority of your website or blog.

What are topic clusters?

A cluster means, a sort of a grouping. It’s coming together of different components of an environment or a topic. The same applies to topic clusters.

Google is constantly looking for authoritative, specialized content. It wants its users to be able to find as much information as possible through a single source, through a single link. For this, Google wants to showcase authority content.

How does it know that you have “authoritative, specialized” content?

One way of finding that out is, of course when your content is being referred to and responded to by lots of people on the Internet in general and social networking websites in particular.

But when it comes to on-site SEO, it means having lots of good quality content around your chosen topic.

Let’s take an example of my website. Suppose I want to increase my search engine rankings for the keyword or key phrase “SEO content writing services“.

The normal route would be creating lots of web pages and blog posts on my website including the search term “SEO content writing services” – I’m still using this method and I need to explore the concept of creating topic clusters more. I will share my progress on this later.

So, I will create lots of blog posts and articles talking about the various aspects of SEO content writing including

What is SEO content writing
Why SEO content writing is important
SEO content writing doesn’t mean low quality content
How to write SEO content
How to target different markets with SEO content
How does Google deal with your SEO content
What type of SEO content writing services I provide
How I can help you improve your SEO with my content
What is my SEO content writing methodology
How much I charge for my SEO content writing services

The list can go on and on.

The problem with the traditional method is that all the blog posts, articles and web pages that you create around your chosen keyword or search term are isolated and scattered. They’re not connected with each other. They’re not part of a cluster. The search engines will crawl them and index them as separate entities.

This sort of content arrangement gets lost in all the hubbub that fills up the Internet.

This sort of content management worked previously because there wasn’t lots of content on the Internet and not many businesses were using content marketing to promote their businesses. Now that content marketing has gone mainstream every business and individual want to use it and hence, your content authority needs to stand out. This you can achieve by creating content clusters, or topic clusters.

The important components of a topic cluster are

The web page containing an introduction to the main topic, in my case that would be “SEO content writing services”
A cluster of blog posts and webpages – on my website as well as on other websites like Medium, Quora and LinkedIn – that lead to the main web page and to each other

Hence, it becomes a cluster.

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page is the main web page to which every other web page, blog post and article links. This is the web page or blog post you want to optimize.

As explained above in the topic cluster section, pillar page exists at the center of your topic cluster. It is the main topic you want to cover. Everything else links to it and it links to everything else. It becomes an Oracle of knowledge about the topic or the search term.

How does creating topic clusters and pillar pages improve your search engine rankings?

Search engines like Google are constantly looking for authority content. They want to provide high-quality information to search engine users.

Since search is becoming very complex Google prefers sources that are packed with very useful and relevant information.

The information doesn’t just have to be useful and relevant, it also needs to be arranged in such a manner that it is easier to consume and understand.

Modular information is easier to consume and understand.

When you create topic clusters you create lots of content pieces and then join them around your pillar page. Your pillar page becomes a sort of a hub for all the information relevant to that particular topic.

Creating topic clusters solves two purposes:

It makes you write/create/gather lots of information around a single topic covering every possible subtopic
It makes it easier for users to navigate through the entire spectrum of the topic through hyperlinks

This further boosts your SEO.

Since all the pages and blog posts are interconnected, even if a single link gets an SEO boost it has a trickle-down effect on all the connected links.

Also, since lots of web pages, blog posts and articles – on your website and outside of your website – are connecting to your pillar page, Google begins to think that it is a very important page about your chosen topic and hence, begins to improve its search engine rankings.

Does it make sense to hire website content writing services?

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I was just writing a website page on my website content writing services and I wanted to address an issue that I didn’t want to touch on that page: does it make sense to hire website content writing services?

What can a professional web content writer write that you cannot write on your own? Why not simply hire a full-time content writer that will always be at your beck-and-call rather than hiring a content writing agency?

Conversely, at Credible Content, what motivates our clients to hire us for our content writing services?

I provide content writing services at two levels:

At the individual level – my clients specifically want to hire me to write their content because they like the way I write.
As a website content writing service – my clients need high-quality, well-written content; more than the writer, they are interested in the quality and the purposefulness of the content.

As I always write on my website and my blog, I never try to convince people into hiring my website content writing services because that’s their own decision.

Nonetheless, there is a reason I feel confident enough to offer my services and sometimes even let people know why it makes sense to work with a professional website content writing company.

Everything has its pros and cons. If you decide to write your own content, it has its pros and cons.

If you decide to hire a full-time content writer or even a team of content writers, it has its pros and cons.

Similarly, if you work with a website content writing service, it has its pros and cons.

It depends on what suits you.

Why people hire our website content writing services

For every one person who can write efficiently, there are thousands who cannot.

Posting on Facebook what you ate this afternoon or where you partied last night, is a lot easier than writing for a web page that is supposed to convince your customers into doing business with you.

This is why, whereas you will find millions of people tweeting night and day on Twitter, compared to them, there are fewer people writing journalistic articles and blog posts.

Again, publishing blog posts are easier because stakes are not very high, but there are very few writers, compared to those who blog and who tweet, who get paid by magazines, newspapers and professional blogs.

Writing involves lots of effort.

Not everyone can spend 2-3 hours researching on a topic and then converting that research into a well-formatted blog post or article.

It is very easy to come up with an exciting title and initial couple of paragraphs for your company web page, but it is difficult to write the entire narrative from start to end.

This is where a professional website content writer can help you.

This is the reason why our clients pay us.

And, it is not just about writing a single blog post or a web page or an email campaign.

In today’s world, you need to publish quality content regularly. Everyday. Every week. Week after week.

You cannot publish quality content regularly unless you are passionate about writing, you are a proficient writer, or you are a professional writer.

Yes, there can be spurts of creativity just as there can be spurts of good singing on a karaoke night, but when it comes to making the real impact, you need a serious writer.

Listed below are a few reasons why clients hire our website content writing services:

They want professionally written content that makes their prospective customers and clients take them seriously.
They want high-quality content regularly to improve their search engine rankings.
They are looking for better website conversion rate.
They want to make sure they leave no stone unturned when it comes to communicating their brand message convincingly.

You will be surprised to know that 80% of the Credible Content clients come from English-speaking countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.

Do these people don’t know how to write in their native tongue? Of course they do.

But they also know the importance of professional writing.

They know the difference between knowing how to write a few impeccable sentences in a few spurts of creativity and knowing how to write complete web pages and blog posts with an underlying narrative.

They want to make an impact.

It takes talent, experience, and of course, the ability to write the way you want to write, to make an impact.

People have it, and people don’t have it.

It’s like music.

Some people can play music or sing songs, some people cannot.

We all have our own abilities.

Some people are good lawyers. Some people are good painters. Some people are good politicians. Some people are good project managers. Some people are good speakers. Some people are good sports persons. Some people can code well.

At Credible Content, we write well.

This is why our clients hire our website content writing services.

The benefits of writing content for existing customers

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Normally when we talk of content writing we mostly have new customers and new leads in mind.

Although lots of content is published to cater to existing customers in the form of FAQs and support pages, active content writing isn’t normally directed towards existing customers.

You may be surprised to know that 61% small and medium-sized businesses admit that half of their revenue comes from existing customers (source).

According to this Econsultancy report, 82% companies agree that retaining existing customers is a lot cheaper than acquiring new customers.

This infographic says that loyal customers are worth 10x as much as new customers.

Content writing for existing customers shouldn’t be a one-time affair. It should be a continuous exercise for multiple reasons.

Content writing for existing customers isn’t just useful in terms of selling to them more, they also help you expand your brand especially when everybody’s pretty much connected to everybody else.

Listed below are some reasons why you should pay more attention to writing content for existing customers.

Cross selling and upselling

Since these are the most alluring reasons for a marketer or a business person, I’m listing them in the beginning itself.

If you haven’t given him or her any reason to dislike you, an existing customer is more likely to do business with you than a new customer because you are familiar to him or her, the customer has already paid you, and he or she has had a positive experience with you.

If you are routinely introducing new products or new updates you would obviously like your existing customers to try them out.

You may also have related products or services that may help your existing customers draw more out of the product or service they have already purchased.

Zoho, for example, has many products that can be better used when combined with each other. You can combine invoicing with CRM. Since you are using their email and collaboration services you might as well try their sales and marketing tools too.

Giving my own example, if your business experiences better search engine rankings through my content writing services, you might as well try out my SEO content writing services to expand your organic reach or my social media content marketing services.

Familiarity and trust are highly coveted attributes on the Internet. Never let them go waste.

If a customer has done business with you, give him or her your best, and then regularly provide quality content to him or her to give him or her a reason to engage with you consistently.

Promoting your content

You never know which of your customers may turn into a celebrity of sorts. Even if not a celebrity, on an average every person these days has 200-300 contacts on various social networking platforms.

Content marketing is an integral part of marketing these days. You need to promote your content.

Your customers are more likely to follow you on Facebook and Twitter. They have already given you their email ID and they expect you to send them email updates related to products or services they have purchased.

You can use these contact channels to encourage them to promote your content among their own friends.

Of course they should deem your content as useful and relevant so by default you should consistently publish high-quality content.

Without building your own network no matter how much high-quality content you publish, it is very difficult to promote it.

Your existing customers are your ready-made network. If they like your product or service, they will eagerly promote your content among their own contacts.

Getting SEO benefits

Search engines like Google give lots of importance to the sort of buzz your content creates. Your search engine rankings improve if more people access your content through social networking websites and through other blogs.

Many of your existing customers may be bloggers or social media influencers. If they are happy with your product or service, they won’t have any problem sharing one of your links on their own timelines or on their own blogs.

This will improve your search engine rankings.

Being there when they need you

When people buy something from you they get into a partnership. If you are a serious entrepreneur you will agree that this might be a long-term or even a lifelong partnership.

If your product or service has many uses (MS Office products, for example) your existing customers may regularly turn to you when they need to know something about the features they cannot use or cannot find.

This is a conventional form of content writing and many businesses already do it in the form of, as already mentioned above, support sections and FAQs.

Many businesses encourage online forums – Google has one – where customers provide help to each other.

If nurturing an online forum isn’t an option, you should publish answers to as many questions and queries as possible on your website.

This will increase and strengthen your customer loyalty. They will know that when they seek answers, you will provide them. They will know that when they have a problem related to your product or service, you will be there to help them.

Encouraging them to stick with you

This might be greatly relevant to subscription-based businesses.

No matter how great a set of features you provide to your subscribers there is a great chance that they are going to leave your service either for another service or they simply lose interest.

Sometimes they just forget that they have to renew their service.

Sometimes they lose track of why they subscribed in the first place.

You can keep them interested in your service or product by continuously providing quality content. Your constant communication keeps them hooked onto your product or service for a long time.

Email marketing

It takes a very long time for businesses to build a verified mailing list.

Your existing customers, since they have already purchased from you, have not just given you their email ids, they have also permitted you to send them regular updates.

Email marketing is an integral part of content marketing.

In fact, your content marketing is incomplete if you are not distributing your content using a mailing list that you have ideally created through your website or blog.

If you are sending just promotional messages to your existing customers they will sooner or later get fed up and unsubscribe from your updates and that will be the end of everything.

Email content writing for existing customers means sending them useful information – information that is relevant to them and would prompt them to stay with you and respond to your messages.

Even if you don’t want to use your major content marketing and content writing resources on existing customers, occasionally targeting them should be an integral part of your marketing.