How Writing “Best Of” Posts Can Help Rank For Competitive Keywords

A few years back I was doing some reading on SEO. I was trying desperately to rank a golf website for some competitive search terms. I came across a really unique strategy.

In the search engine optimization world we call it longtail keywords. What exactly are longtail keywords? They are search terms that are anywhere from 3-8 words in length. An example of a longtail keyword might be “How to hit a golf driver”. This could be someone looking for tips on how to hit a driver in golf.

The idea of targeting longtail keywords was to target people searching for very specific things. Someone who might search just “golf driver” is going to get fed up with his or her results. They’ll probably see a bunch of results coming up that are companies selling golf drivers. So instead this person might search “how to hit a golf driver”. In the longtail search term they will find the tips on how to hit a driver and hopefully shoot lower scores.

The hidden benefit of targeting the longtail is that you will get more targeted website visitors. In the process your rankings will also improve for the bigger keywords.

Let me explain how this Works

Fast forward a few years now and I still use this strategy for my Vancouver SEO Company. Not only do we use it for ourselves, but we also use it for our clients.

Our goal has been to grow and target lager metropolitan areas. To do this we have created separate pages targeting our SEO services for that city. To boost that pages ranking, we also write a blog post targeting the long tail keyword.

Here’s an Example:

We are now offering our services in Vancouver BC. We created a page for that location. To get a juicy internal link from our blog to that page, we wrote a blog post titled “Who is the best Vancouver SEO company?”

Our goal was also to get some people who are searching for the best SEO companies to land on our page. On that page we list three of our competitors and mention that they rank high for SEO Vancouver search terms. But we mention that the person searched an SEO Vancouver related term and landing on our website, therefore, we’re good at SEO too. This has been great for us.

But as I mentioned earlier, by targeting the longtail you are actually improving your search rankings for the shorter keyword. In the case of the search term “SEO Vancouver”, our blog post targeting the longtail actually ranks ahead of our page that targets that term. It’s ranking in the top 12 and that blog post is just targeting the longtail.

So I suggesting writing a “Who is the best” blog post. You can list a few competitors but be sure to mention who you are and why people should do business with you. In the end, you are going to help your search rankings for that competitive keyword.