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 in this 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?
Editor Note: Neil was the opening speaker for our SEJ Summit in Santa Monica this year. Want to learn more from speakers like him at our Summits throughout the year: in NYC, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Miami, and London? Sign up for a FREE ticket, covered by our partner, Searchmetrics.
This post originally appeared on Quick Sprout, and is re-published with permission.
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I actually just helped rebrand a company in Ireland and I used this method. We have only been live a week and we are already seeing some great organic placements for long tails keywords in the niche. I expected a few weeks before I saw any really decent placements. I don’t think long tail keyword placements will ever go out of style.
Great post!
Hello, so I have WP SEO by YOAST installed and I tried using a long tail keyword. It did not turn up as positive during my page analysis. It somehow did not recognize the long tail keyword. Maybe I am separating it in the title and post through punctuation. eg: JIM THE CARPENTER is the keyword. If the title is – ” JIM – THE CARPENTER” and the post was – ” Jim who worked as THE carpenter of our town … ”
Does that make sense? Am I still making it in terms of keyword usage?
And also, are they case sensitive?
While I’m not an SEO Expert by any means, I have worked with yoast and from my experience, no they are not case sensitive and yes it does require you to have the long tail KWs in the exact order without words between them in order for the plugin to give you a green light. However, I’m not sure how that affects SEO/ranking results. Maybe test it? On a few pages have everything exact with content and long tail KWs and a few change it up a bit and see how it does? Unless someone else has experience in this already – I’d love to hear it!
Yeah, I agree with Neil Patel.
It is one of the most easy-to-marketing way.
Very well written article. The strategy was, is and will work forever. But we must keep the keyword density in control on the webpage.
Hey Neil !
I have already learnt it on QuickSprout but thanks for keeping me revised.
Nice read! – This strategy works great if your site is an old established site. For newer sites, it might not work in a desired way.
Long Tail keywords are a great way to score some quick wins. Nice post.
For anyone interested, here’s a related post on Long Tail KWs we did last month:
http://oziti.com.au/seo/harness-the-power-of-long-tail-keywords
@Neil I think i read this post on your Quicksprout as well. Are you putting copied content on both place?
We have actually used this method for years. Seems counter productive to target competitive single words or short phrases.
Hello,
thank you for the great post and excellent tips
Question: after you have updated the post with more long tail keywords, do you use fetch as google to get the updated post indexed faster? Or do you just wait until google indexes your post? Please let me know.
Thank you,
Ralf