Writing follow-up posts is a great blogging tactic that allows to:
- Better target your audience needs: the fist post discussion shows the blogger what appeals to the readers;
- Research various angles of the topic in more detail.
Additionally, the tactic provides some essential SEO benefit:
- You can link to the previous post(s) in the series and thus build solid internal site linking increasing its chances to rank higher;
- You can modify your keyword strategy based on the first post performance.
Talking of the second benefit, there is one very important thing you need to keep in mind when writing a follow-up post: avoid targeting same set of keywords as the first post.
In other words, be sure to focus on another keyword phrase (e.g. different long tail set) both in title and content to avoid keyword cannibalization. Let me demonstrated this via the example:
> First post: “SEO Tools – the Ultimate Collection”
> Follow-up post: “Part 2: SEO Tools – the Ultimate Collection”
Whereas:
> First post: “SEO Tools – the Ultimate Collection”
> Follow-up post: “Desktop SEO Tools – Useful Free SEO Software“
See the idea? The follow-up post focuses on a different angle and, what is (more) important, targets different (but related) key terms.
Here are a few tips to help you dig into your site search referrals to get more ideas on what can / should be followed up:
- How to organize your keyword modifiers: by category, position, level.
- Use specialized internal analytics tools to discover and organize keyword modifiers: Concentrateme (paid) is one option to consider;
- Discover most frequent modifiers with Excel;
- Discover new promising long tail based on your current rankings.
