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The Long-Tail Paradox
If you’re deliberately writing content to target less-competitive “long-tail” keywords, are you not then writing content specifically for search engines (i.e. Google), which goes against a key guideline of Google’s when it comes to creating quality content?
Yes, I’m sure those who spend hours researching “long-tail” keywords just happen to be experts/authorities on those topics, even though those keywords never occurred to them prior to them digging them up.
In my opinion, the best content is written by a true expert/authority with no regard for search engines. What a lot of you seem to be doing is to try fo find an easy keyword to rank for, and then pretend to be an expert/authority on this. It’s just completely ass-backwards.
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1 Reply
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Keyword targeting has nothing to do with quality of the content. Quality is broader term covering multitude of things like: outline structure & optimization around topic; value add via info, references, imagery etc; engagement like CTR , time on page and conversion..
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**Regarding targeting the long-tail**
>If you’re deliberately writing content to target less-competitive “long-tail” keywords, are you not then writing content specifically for search engines (i.e. Google), which goes against a key guideline of Google’s when it comes to creating quality content?
It does not matter if you write content for “iPhone” or “how to update the iOS on my iPhone via USB cable if no wifi is available”. In both cases, you choose to either just write some text full of keywords for Google or you can try to understand the user intent and produce the best content to answer their question or solve their problem.
Whether you deliberately target less-competitive (low-volume) keywords or high-volume (more-competitive) keywords really does not matter for the question of whether or not a piece of content is written for humans or Google.
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**Regarding experts/authorities**
>Yes, I’m sure those who spend hours researching “long-tail” keywords just happen to be experts/authorities on those topics, even though those keywords never occurred to them prior to them digging them up.
In some cases these people are experts/authorities, in other cases, they are not. Again, this is not related to keywords being long-tail or not. You can write about Joe Biden either being an expert or not.
One way to answer a user’s question is to research the current answers and provide a curated summary. For YMYL (your money your life) keywords, that is not enough. You still need to be an expert to interpret what you find. That is why Google cares a lot about E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) for these queries.
But for a search like “*why are some episodes of Better Call Saul season 6 in black and white?*”, you really do not need to be an expert. You can spend 60 minutes researching the official statements and most common theories, summarize them, and publish a document that is more holistic and informative yet easier to consume than previous documents. Thus, it becomes the best content for Google to rank because it is the best content for users.
Most journalists work this way. Very few journalists are actually experts in all the topics they have to cover. That does not mean they cannot produce a good content piece with a combination of research and writing skills.
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**The real paradox**
I believe the actual paradox here is not long-tail related. The actual paradox is this:
>I want to rank in Google. I believe content written for humans ranks the best in Google. Now I write my content for humans so that it performs well in search engines. Is it still content written for search engines and thus against the Google guidelines?
My answer is: no. Google does not care about your intentions. Google cares about the outcome. So producing content for humans to rank well in Google is absolutely fine with Google.
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Nowadays everybody gets their information via search engines. What’s shown is the most optimized stuff. Optimizing text for engines is clearly not what experts sit around doing. That’s what marketers to. As a consequence, most things we find online is content marketing. Whereas in previous times information was sorted and distilled through human intervention.
Ironically, finding solid information has become harder in the age of information overload.
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