After the HCU and later updates, I became very wary of long tail keywords such as:
“how much are home cleaning services in Nashville?”
After auditing many sites, I started to see a dangerous pattern that is harming SEO lately, says Taleb Kabbara.
When sites start ranking for “how much are home cleaning services in Nashville?”
Google will not only rank this keyword, but naturally start ranking your page for tens of other keywords (which is fair and logical because there aren’t any pages that rank in top 10 for 1 keyword only, it’s almost impossible, or at least I haven’t seen a page that ranks in top 10 for just 1 keyword).
This is where it gets dangerous:
The tens of keywords that rank for that particular page will have shorter tail and broader keywords (i call them edge terms) such as:
“home cleaning” “home cleaning services” “how much is home cleaning”
To add insult to injury, the page starts to steer away with ranking for easier terms related to these “edge terms”, diluting the main page’s keyword.
Google then wakes up (after several weeks/months) and starts dropping these “edge terms” one by one and eventually dropping the traffic and ranking of the page.
Someone would ask: but why would the algorithms rank these “edge terms” to begin with? I have no idea.
What’s worse is why does the algorithm wake up so late?
I have avoided ranking for long term keywords for blog articles and instead focussed all the effort on ranking transactional/commerical service pages instead.
Informational content is dangerous because the content branches out to edge terms.
While service pages don’t usually contain much content:
Nashville home cleaning: provide the pricing, and jump straight to the call-to-action (request quote or book an appointment) without getting too much into the details.
Slap a little questionnaire form to identify needs and qualify leads and that’s about it.
Will this page rank? If it’s a commercial keyword (always keep an eye on the SERPs), there’s no reason for it not to rank other than high competition.
In that case, we focus our efforts on building links to that page.
More content will not only dilute the page to edge terms, but will convert the service page into informational (for example adding FAQ to the page and adding informational sections).
Some example on how I would do it:
This page (not my client) ranks number 1 for the keyword:
“garden cleaning leicester”
- Brief introduction (minimal words, no unnecessary details).
- Clear presentation of services offered.
- Content addresses users’ search intentions.
- Straightforward contact form.
- Authentic and genuine images from work in progress.
- Contact phone number provided.
- Page not intentionally optimized for ranking.
- Appears genuine and trustworthy.
- Ranks for approximately 10 keywords.
- Generates 30 organic search visits per month.
Notice how it doesn’t rank high for gardener jobs because that’s a stupid random algorithmic glitch.
All in all, just sweet & simple.