What if I told you that you can increase your traffic without any marketing? That’s right… even if you don’t have a marketing bone in your body, you can generate more traffic and sales.
“How?” you may ask. All you have to do is follow this long tail strategy:
Leveraging long tail SEO
Who doesn’t want to rank for terms like “credit cards” and “auto insurance,” right? Although those terms are lucrative, they are actually extremely difficult to rank for.
On the other hand, long tail keywords are much less competitive, and they will drive the majority of your traffic.
If you look at Quick Sprout, 91% of my search traffic comes from long tail phrases. And just like Quick Sprout’s, the majority of your search traffic comes from long tail traffic too.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t rank for any head terms. It just means that I rank for more long tail phrases. You probably experience the same thing as most sites rank for dozens of head terms and hundreds, if not thousands, of long tail terms.
How do you rank for more long tail terms?
First, you need to log into Google Webmaster Tools. Once you are in, you’ll want to click on “search traffic,” then “search queries.”
You’ll see a page with a list of keywords that looks like this:
The table will list all the keywords you rank for. What you need to do next is take the head keywords (phrases that contain one or two words) you rank for and type them into Google.
For example, I rank for the term “online marketing.” So I typed it into Google and then scrolled all the way to the bottom of the first page until I saw a table that showed “searches related to online marketing.”
These are phrases that Google sees as relevant to a term you already rank for. And the head term is much harder to rank for than those long tail terms.
So if you blend some of those long tail phrases into the page that already ranks for the relevant head term, you’ll start getting more search traffic.
All I am doing is sprinkling in the phrases that make sense, two or three times within the page.
I used this strategy on a monthly basis on Quick Sprout in 2013. And the results were great.
In January 2013, I received 120,365 search visitors:
In December 2013, my search traffic climbed to 174,496 visitors:
Does this strategy still work?
Although I’ve used this strategy a couple of years ago on Quick Sprout, it still works. It doesn’t take a ton of time, and it is really easy… especially if you have a blog.
We do the same thing with our KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg blogs on a monthly basis. I would also continue to do it on Quick Sprout, but I just don’t have the time.
What I’ve found is that if you combine the tip I mentioned above with the marketing tactics inthis blog post on increasing your click-through rate, you should be able to double your search traffic within one year.
Conclusion
You don’t have to know a lot about online marketing to generate traffic or sales. Simple things like adjusting the keywords within your content or tweaking the titles of your blog posts can increase your traffic.
If you are going to use the tactic above, don’t adjust your title tag too much unless you are trying to optimize your click-through rates. Instead, focus your efforts on optimizing the keywords within your content. By adding long tail phrases, you’ll generate more search traffic.
Are you going to give the strategy above a try?