Blogging Can Help You Compete With The Big Brands
Let’s face it, when it comes to some of the big brands the average small online business is always going to find it difficult to rank for any of the common keywords. In fact, if your online business is new you may find it difficult to rank. Blogging is one tool which, if used intelligently, could help you compete and survive in what is has become an extremely competitive online marketplace.
Having a company blog will not do the trick on its own. You need to undertake some careful research and you need a plan of attack – and you need to stick to that plan. Like any business venture, the plan is one of the most crucial elements to its success. A strong SEO program is also essential to your success.
How do you compete with big names?
Bottom line – you don’t! At least, you don’t compete directly. There is too much competition and most of these businesses have a considerable head start. It is a little like a race with the customer standing in the middle of the field. In this race, there are no straight lines. The big names may have straightened some of the bends, but there are plenty of twists left. Instead of trying to overtake the big names on their track – build your own track and take a different course.
The big name players have all the primary keywords tied up. However, there are thousands of secondary keywords – or more importantly in today’s online world, long tail keywords that you can target. A primary keyword may, for arguments sake, receive 1000 queries per day. If you can find ten long tails that receive 100 queries per day – you are still targeting a total of 100 per day.
How does blogging help?
You have ten long tail phrases to target. The easiest approach is to simply write to each of those phrases in rotation. Each phrase will get attentions once every ten days, or, if you are clever and can optimize your content for two phrases each post, you can cover each every five days. The former is better option, covering a singe phrase in each post.
If you have the time, you can be a little smarter by writing a keypost for each phrase, then managing your internal links so that each related post linked back to that keypost only. In other words, each post will have one link only, and that is to the parent post. This develops a lot of strength in that keypost and will help it to climb to the top of the search rankings.
You don’t need to compete with the big players directly. You will never catch them let along pass them. Instead, build your own blogging plan that get’s you to the customer before them. Chances are, the traffic you gain from search engines will be better targeted because of the long tail, than traffic derived from a common keyword. Research is showing that searchers are either entering a common keyword, then refining that by adding additional terms to the search, or diving in with a long tail query from the start.
Capitalize on those long tails and one of the best ways to do that is by blogging to a plan. Don’t blog for the sake of blogging – make each post count.
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