Increase your website traffic
Following on from last week`s Are You Missing Out On Valuable Traffic To Your Website article where we touched on using Google`s Keyword Planner to help you find what keywords people are searching for, we are now going to take that one step further to help you tap in to a rich source of valuable traffic.
Going back to the Google Keyword Planner we are going to look at that list of keywords that you downloaded as a spreadsheet.
Remember we created a list of valuable keywords that had, hopefully, large numbers of people searching for them each month? Now we are going to take that one step further and enter them valuable keywords back in to the Keyword Planner and search for even more valuable search terms.
What we are aiming to do is find valuable search terms to use as Blog post titles and use them within our content.
We are going to put our most valuable search terms, say 5 of them, in to the box titled `Search for new keyword and group ideas` and we are going to do a search.
Once we get the results we will hit the `Keyword Ideas` tab at the top and see the figures for that particular search. For example I will use the terms `Pinterest`, `How to use Pinterest` and `Pinterest for Business`
We can see from the results that Pinterest has a very high search volume with around 1,000,000 seaches per month! However this term is probably far too broad and would not bring us much quality traffic to our website for our specific Blog post.
If we were to write a Blog post on `How to use Pinterest` it would be far less traffic but it would be far more targeted at people searching for that term rather than just the broad term `Pinterest`. We would still be aiming to capture around 1,000 searches per month with that particular term. Coupled with `pinterest for business` with only 590 searches per month it is still a captive audience who are searching for that particular subject.
What I advise doing then is writing an article as a Blog post titled `How To Use Pinterest` and make this your H1 tag* and use the term `Pinterest for Business` as your H2 tag.
(*What is an H1 tag? – An H1 tag, or <H1> tag, is an HTML tag that defines the first, largest and most important heading on a page. Including keywords in the H1 tag can communicate to search engines that the page is relevant to those keywords.You can only have one H1 tag per page but can have more than one H2 tags. Think of them as newspaper headlines and sub-headlines)
We then need to download those results in to a spreadsheet again using the link at the top of the page labelled `Download` and trawl through the results looking for other relevant search terms with a decent number of searches per month. The spreadsheet will also give you other ideas for Blog subjects and titles in the future, as you can see from the above image we can see that the search term `social networking sites` attracts 12,100 searches per month, so maybe that is a subject and title for tomorrow`s or next week`s blog post. For example title it `Why use Social Networking Sites?` and then do a further search using that search term.
Ok, there are some terms that are completely irrelevant and not suitable but you can then see that the terms `social media` and `social network` attract a decent number of onthly searches. So these could now be used within your H2 or H3 tags, or let`s call them your sub-headlines.
Can you see where I`m going with this?
Many write blog posts for the sake of it and that have little searches per month for that subject or title. What is the point of writing a blog if nobody is searching for it? Yes you can distribute it across your Social Media channels but you also want to drive traffic to it via the organic search results with terms that are relevant to the article and being searched for in decent numbers.
So look for those long-tail keywords, remember the example above…`Pinterest` is too broad a term, so go for the long-tail phrases such as `Pinterest for business` or `how to use pinterest`. Yes they have a far lower search volume but they are specific terms to the blog you are writing about, it will be far better quality traffic coming to your website than just somebody searching `Pinterest`. In my opinion I would rather have 1,590 people searching for those long-tail keywords than I would have 1,000,000 searching for Pinterest.
Website Analytics
Then you want to have a look at your website analytics to see if that particular blog post is a good source of traffic to your website. Google Analytics is perfect, it`s free and I highly recommend using it.
I use this method all the time and advise clients to use this strategy and it has produced some excellent results, so much so that 1 client went awat and wrote a blog post after we did some digging with the Google Keyword Planner and she was on Page 1 within 24 hours for a term that was attracting over 20,000 searches per month.
In my opinion it is a great way to attract relevant traffic to your website.
Give it a go and let me know how you get on.
Until next time
Martin
I offer effective social media training, 1-2-1 consultancy and strategies to help you & your business to benefit from the power of social media. If you would be interested in a 1-2-1 consulation or social media training with me please contact me on 01603 383435 or e-mail me here
You can follow me on Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook
