Time To Look At My Results
Spending time doing keyword research, tracking results, optimizing- and keeping content up to date is important to keep your current Google rankings, or the position on search engines your content shows up, and this is what makes content long lasting instead of having to push out new content frequently. This is simply put what leads to natural, organic growth long after content have been published.
I know that I have published optimized content in the past, where the sole reason has been to generate traffic over time. Targeting "low-hanging fruit" or in other words long-tail keywords that has a low search volume and are low competitive is a superb starter point for anyone looking to generate organic traffic over time. I have been doing various things, and even though I have recently published some content that I personally believe has rather high chances of being picked up nicely by Google, I need to look at older articles, as it takes time for Google to rank content properly.
Keep Or Improve Your Rankings
There are different ways of doing things, but a good start is to go to Simpleanalytics, change the time period to 365 days, enter your username and look at Google in the referral list to the left:
Right click on the images and open them in a new window for fullscreen.
In the last image we can see the posts that has generated the most page views during the last 365 days from Google. While page views and unique visitors are different from each other, it can still give us a decent idea of how our content is doing in terms of organic traffic.
How Often Should You Buy And Sell Crypto? - has generated 246 page views since the day I published it, which is 11 months ago.
How To Earn Crypto From Blogging In 2022 - has generated 40 page views in total over the same time period.
My recommendation to Hive-bloggers is to look at these details and keep these posts up to date, as it would most likely only require some minor edits to keep the content fresh, and you will strengthen or improve your current Google rankings by doing that, which ultimately leads to more traffic being generated over time. Traffic is growth and you will by doing this, automatically bring traffic with content you have published in the past.
More Advanced
The more advanced method is to use a tool like UberSuggest and look into more details of each post you've successfully ranked on Google.
While the general idea when ranking content is to rank keywords with as much search volume as possible, it often goes hand in hand with being extremely difficult as well, because of the competition. Meaning, trying to out-rank other content that might have been published several years ago. A better approach is to try to go with keywords with less competition and as high search volume as possible.
This could also be called going for “low-hanging fruit”, which basically means targeting keywords that you think people will search for in the future, or targeting keywords that you know has low search volume but can lead to some extra traffic.
The search volume for this specific keyword is 10 per month and it is a very low competitive keyword with a SEO difficulty of 11. This basically means easy to rank and the potential traffic is low as well. Not the greatest keyword to be targeting. In fact, it is a poor- yet very common mistake to make when you're experimenting with keywords.
- Can it really be called a mistake when it's still generating traffic though?
Going For Even More Details
While looking at the different keyword variations, search volume and SEO difficulty, we are basically doing something that is called "keyword research", and this is where most of the magic happens, or could happen. This is definitely where you can take your content to the next level in terms of organic traffic.
While my article, "How Often Should You Buy And Sell Crypto?" has estimated visits of 15 users per month despite my poor keyword decision, we can look at some other variations of it as well, as something is still generating traffic to that article.
Looking at the screenshot above, we can see that:
"how often can you buy and sell cryptocurrency" has a search volume of 70 and estimated visits of 11. The SEO difficulty is high sitting on 71, but my content gets 11 visits whenever someone is searching for that specific keyword. So I generate traffic for a keyword I'm not even targeting.
The same goes for "how often can you buy and sell crypto", which obviously is very similar to the keyword I am targeting. A search volume of 40 and estimated visits of 4. That basically means that 10% of the searches are coming to my content, which is somewhat decent to say the least.
- This is the true power of optimized content and keywords.