Earlier this week, while I was reviewing my blog’s analytics, I noticed an interesting search someone typed into Google and that had brought them to my blog:
happy birthday from me and or i and
What shocked me was that the search brings up 24 million results. And, cool story, one of my posts was the top result. And it’s only 6 months old.
So, how did I do it?
Well, this December marks 17 years that I’ve been blogging. I’ve learned a few tricks along the way to generate traffic and create awareness of old content. Here’s one particular trick I like to use that works particularly well on blogs with a lot of content.
Skip the keywords.
Or more specifically, stop trying to target popular keywords, especially if you’re in a saturated space. There are so many grammar blogs out there, that I’d never be able to compete on popular phrases. Going after the popular keywords is too much work for the headache that comes with it.
Instead, focus on quality content rich with good keywords, but not necessarily the most popular ones. Consider the long tail.
In the above graph, the green represents the most popular keywords. The yellow represents less popular keywords, or the long tail. The funny thing is that long tail search engine results often account for more combined traffic than popular keywords.
My most popular blog post discusses the difference between sitting and seating. In fact, it’s so popular, that it garners 75% more traffic than my home page does. Visitors arrive to the post through a variety of search terms, not just popular ones:
- seating or sitting
- difference between seating and sitting
- difference between sitting and seating
- difference between sit and seat
- sitting or seating
- difference between seat and sit
- sitting and seating
- what is the difference between sit and seat
- sit and seat difference
- sitted or seated
- seating and sitting
- what is the difference between sitting and seating
- seat and sit difference
- sitting and seating difference
- seating arrangement or sitting arrangement
- seating sitting
- difference between sitting arrangement and seating arrangement
- different between seat and sit
- differences between sit and seat
- sitting seating
And those are just the top 20 search phrases. The list goes on forever.
I did with the post I referenced at the beginning of this post. I wrote the content, not even worrying about popular keywords.
So remember, stop obsessing over popular keywords. Create compelling, well-written content that has the information people want to read. The traffic will come on its own. Especially the more you write.
What tricks do you use to raise awareness of your old content? Let me know in the comments.
