Long-tail content marketing has two goals.
Goal 1: Drive serious traffic to your site and build a brand. That starts with knowing exactly who your audience is and what they search for online.
It’s often easier to attract the right people by writing about topics around the problem you solve than about the problem itself. That widens your reach in search and brings more visitors to your site. As you’ll see, it sometimes also pulls in “sub-audiences” who bring your ideal customers along with them.
Goal 2: Become a thought leader in your field. Your content can’t be generic or a rehash of what’s already out there.
Look at TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, and Opster. Each one shows who actually pays, and how its long-tail content fits the company’s bigger business strategy.
TripAdvisor publishes a huge amount of content about hotels and destinations around the world. The aim is to attract travelers with broad, up-to-date information on hotels, restaurants, car rentals, tours, guides, historical sites, and more.
Visitors don’t pay for any of it. It’s free and open to everyone. But when you pick a hotel based on TripAdvisor’s recommendations and click “Make a reservation,” you’re sent to a third-party site like Expedia or Booking.com. To be exact, you’re sent to whichever site will pay the most for you at that moment.
In other words, TripAdvisor uses its content to sell, directly and indirectly, a product built on that content. The people who pay (booking sites) are a completely different group from the people who read (travelers).
Glassdoor’s strategy is a bit more sophisticated, and I have a personal story that shows how it works.
Many years ago, when I was CEO of ZoomInfo, our marketing manager came to me with bad news. She’d been trying to hire a candidate, but he was having second thoughts about our offer. He’d read negative reviews of ZoomInfo’s CEO on a site she’d never heard of, called Glassdoor.
Sure enough, the site had five or six very unflattering reviews of me and the company. They were anonymous, but the dates told a simple story. Each one was posted within about two weeks of someone being let go. Sweet, anonymous revenge.
I asked her to call Glassdoor, explain what we’d found, and ask them to remove the reviews.
We weren’t too surprised by the reply. For a modest fee of a few thousand dollars a year, ZoomInfo could get some control over what people saw on its page. We could write a full company profile, explain why we were a great place to work, and respond to the anonymous reviewers.
Finding and hiring great people is slow, hard, and expensive, so we had little choice. We gave in to Glassdoor’s “gentle extortion” and paid the annual fee. Our marketing manager also asked every employee to go on Glassdoor and counter the bad reviews with good ones, about the company and about me as CEO.
Overnight, I became one of the most talented CEOs in Boston. About a hundred glowing reviews completely buried the bad ones.
Here’s the interesting part. On top of the fee, Glassdoor got us to build its brand for it by sending all our employees to the site to write reviews. And when those same employees look for their next job, they’ll almost certainly go to Glassdoor to read up on the companies they’re considering.
That’s how flexible a smart long-tail strategy can be. You can get one audience to make another audience pay, whether that means paying money or just paying attention.
Then there’s Opster, a small company I helped found. Opster builds software tools for managing and maintaining Elasticsearch, a popular open-source search engine with hundreds of thousands of users across many industries.
Opster’s audience is highly technical DevOps engineers who install and maintain Elasticsearch. True to our approach, we set out from day one to build a long tail of content that would bring those engineers to our site.
We needed one theme that could fill several thousand pages for a very specific audience: DevOps engineers who work with Elasticsearch every day.
After weeks of brainstorming, someone casually mentioned that Elasticsearch shows warnings and error messages when it runs into problems. These messages usually describe the symptom, not the root cause. But they’re one of the first things engineers check, and they search for them on Google.
A quick look turned up about 1,200 types of error messages, and we built a separate page for each one. Gradually, Google started sending people to Opster when they typed (or, more accurately, copy-pasted) an Elasticsearch error into the search bar.
The pages were basic. We made them mechanically, without digging deep into each error. But we learned something important: just 70 of the 1,200 messages drove about 80% of the traffic.
So we focused our writing on those 70 and wrote high-quality content for each one. That’s the second goal in action: positioning ourselves as the experts.
Opster’s name started to become synonymous with expertise in installing, managing, and maintaining Elasticsearch. Two and a half years after we founded the company, the site was drawing about 100,000 visitors a month and had become our main source of revenue and new customers.
TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, and Opster are very different companies. But each found its niche and created content tailored to a specific audience to build brand awareness. All three used long-tail content to drive traffic, become leaders in their fields, and turn their audiences into bigger profits.
It starts with knowing the problem you want to solve and who needs the solution. From there, create content that shows your expertise and brings potential customers to your door.
