Of course you want more traffic to your website. You probably know that you should use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to find keywords that people are searching for. If you use them appropriately on your website, people can find your website.
But it’s hard to compete against larger and older websites, especially in popular niches.
So, what to do?
Finding the right long-tail keywords
One way you can compete is to use very specific phrases of several words. These are called long-tail keywords because of the shape of the graph when you measure keywords and the amount of people searching for them. Some keywords get searched for a lot, but there’s a long tail of phrases that are searched for less often.
By focusing on a long-tail phrase, you can gain traffic even if you are a small player.
With a free Google Adwords account, you can use Google’s free keyword planner. Click here and sign up or log in. Under Find New Keywords, choose Search for Keywords Using a Phrase, Website, or Category. You can actually put in anything you want. Below you can see that I entered online business.
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There are a few other settings that you can use, too, such as language, location, and some filters. Notice that I chose Low and Medium competition–that means that there aren’t so many other websites using these keywords. Then click Get Ideas at the bottom as you see in this screenshot.
You’ll now see a column chart showing average monthly searches for the last 12 months. These show the short-tail results of your short phrase. Click the Keyword Ideas tab.
Look at some of the ideas. Your goal is to find relevant keywords (ones that your target market might search for) with low or medium competition but a significant number of monthly searches. In this case, I found this:
I like it because my free offer is called 13 Steps to Create a Successful Internet Business. Google says that 1,900 people search for that phrase each month and the competition is Medium.
What could I do? I could write a blog post called “Steps to Starting a Business.”
At the lower right, you can click the right arrow to see the rest of the entries — Google only displays 30 at a time.
Once you have a phrase that you like, you can put it in the search box to get more variations. There are tools that will expand phrases for you. For a great article on how to use long-tail keywords, see How To Generate 20,000 Monthly Visitors Through Long-Tail Search by Neil Patel.
Be specific
But look what happens when I start to be really specific–like using a brand name. Here, I’ve done a search for Mad Mimi, the name of the email service I use. It gets 8,100 searches each month and has low competition!
So, suppose I wrote a blog post about MadMimi? Suppose I added the names of other email services? I have a blog post called Comparing email services: Aweber, iContact, ConstantContact, MailChimp, and MadMimi. This post consistently ranks in my top 30. Here you can see that the post brought me 70 visits and was my 29th most-often visited page. That might not sound like a lot, but remember that I didn’t do anything to get that traffic — I didn’t promote it. My top pages will almost always be recent posts or sales pages that I’ve promoted. I wrote that post 2 years ago and it’s still bringing me traffic!
In fact, if you look carefully at the many comments on Neil Patel’s post, you’ll see mine, in which I recommend using brand names and you can see that he agreed in his response.
A challenge to you
Do the research, find a long-tail phrase, and write a blog post using it. Then leave a comment with the blog title and a link to it.