Case Study: Attracting More Blog Traffic with Long Tail Keywords

My blog gets 80-90% of its traffic through search engines. When I started my blog I didn’t know the meaning of SEO. I just wrote articles and over time these articles got high places in search engines. Now I get tons of traffic everyday from Google, Yahoo, Bing and many sites that I haven’t heard of.

Now if you don’t know what the heck does SEO means, S.E.O. is Search Engine Optimization. A type of internet marketing where you optimize your pages so that it will appear higher on search (Google).

For an example when you search “BlogKori” my blog will come up on top of the search results. This is because my blog is optimized for this term. I will write a brief guide in the upcoming weeks on blog SEO, for now let us continue.

So when it comes to getting traffic for new blogs, it is a very painful to get new people to visit your website. As blogging is like a business, things take time to mature. In this post I will give you some examples of how blogging helped me get search positions and how I get extra visitors every day.

Case Study #1

For this I will take you back to May 2012. This was the time when I attended odesk meetup in Dhaka. By the way if you want to know [what odesk is and how to start freelancing](http://www.onlineearningking.com/start-freelancing-career-odesk-odesk-review-beginners/ "oDesk Review – Guide For New Freelancers Who Want To Start"), then read this post.


Also see the other pictures of this event

In this event I met a fellow blogger Delwar Jahan from BlogRon.com. So we talked a lot about blogging and internet marketing. At one occasion he told me about long term keyword benefits. He also mentioned about an article that is #1 at google. I quickly searched the term. And found that yes he is #1 and one other post from my blog is sitting at #4. The term was this one (This screenshot is from May, 2012)


As you can see, his blog (SMSkotha) is leading at #1. While one of my post that is not directly about this topic is ranked #4.

Something happened to me that time. I wanted to rule this search term. I felt that I can do better than these competing blog posts. I silently accepted it as a challenge.

So few days later I wrote an article with the exact keyword, I named it according to the keyword, you can read it here.

I wrote this article making it damn simple about the process. I also highlighted the terms in bold, italic and underline. I also linked to Wikipedia’s mastercard page from it.

Then I shared this article on facebook, amazingly this article got over 80 shares on facebook which also helped boost its SEO.

After few months I was expecting the results. I searched google, I saw my article at #3 while Delwar’s article is at #4. Recently he moved from SMSkotha.com to BlogRon.com so his position was decreased.

Now I was still confused why my article is still not #1?

I visited the other articles that were in top positions. I found that these articles are not of any good quality and sooner or later google will make my article #1.

I also figured out that these articles have comments. When I wrote this article, for some reasons I didn’t wanted comments. So I enabled comments and also removed some extra use of keywords.

After few more weeks I finally hit the #1 spot with this keyword,


Now what are the results?
This keyword is not very popular but still the trend is on the rise as ecommerce and internet marketing is getting hype.

Here is a screen shot of this month’s traffic. (A 557% increase from last month, because it jumped to #1)


Pretty good huh? Good because I am getting an extra 700 visitors a month (and it will keep growing.)

Case Study #2

For this I will take you even longer, back to 2008. I saw a long term keyword which is getting good traction. I wanted to quickly gain the #1 spot and get traffic.

I wrote an article where I share ways to make money online. This article was a hit and it also gained close to 2000+ hits from StumbleUpon.

But my ultimate goal for making it #1 was not fulfilled. Even worse it was not even in top 10 list of google or anywhere.

But time to time google did sent me visits to this article, as the long tail nature, you appear somewhere for some searches.

Until recently it kicked off and now it is #1 for the exact keyword. See,


If you want to see the result then here is the traffic from last month,


Over 2200+ hits a month! Sweet huh?

Now the beauty of this long term blog SEO is that this is not ranked for one single keyword. It is ranked for many, over 100 separate searches. These are the top keywords that it is ranked for,


As you can see most of these searches are increasing as this article is rapidly going up.

Now Why It Is Important To Get Higher Rankings?

Simply because higher rankings will bring you more traffic over time. And with this extra traffic, they can be your valuable blog readers, your customers or the people whom will become your friends.

Now the thing is, the clicks are not equally distributed among the search results. The #1 position gets around 30-40% of total click while #2 gets only 12% of it,


So it does means a lot from going just one position up or down.

If only the click through rate was equal towards all the positions, this wouldn’t matter much.

Read: [How to write a good blog description for better CTR](http://www.blogkori.com/how-to-write-an-effective-blog-description-and-keywords/ "Blog SEO Tip: How to Write Effective Blog Descriptions")

So How Do I Get Ranked For A Long Tail Keyword?

Target larger keywords and expand them: Open up google keyword tool and search for 1 or 2 main words that are related to your blog. I put “blog” in it and searched for “phrase” match.


Upon doing them I found many keywords, one of them was “Start a blog” & “How to start a blog”

I put down these keywords in my notepad. These words have lots of search traffic and huge competition.

Look at the trends to see if it is worth it: Go to google trends and search for the word/keyword or a topic you want to target. Now searching for “start a blog” shows a positive upwords trend,


So I can assume targeting for this keyword is good. Also there will be times when you will not see such number both in trends and keyword tool, but you have to follow your instinct to figure out which keywords will go up over the time.

Take your keywords and turn them long tail: Say I took “Start a blog” but doing SEO and ranking for this keyword is going to be like climbing a mountain. Instead I will make them into many long keywords, just by adding a few words like,

• [How to start a blog from scratch](http://www.blogkori.com/how-to-start-a-blog-from-scratch/ "How to start a blog from scratch")
• [How to start a blog for free](http://www.blogkori.com/start-a-blog-for-free-and-make-money/ "How to start a blog for free")
• [Start a blog that matters to your readers](http://www.blogkori.com/how-to-start-a-blog-that-matters-to-your-readers/ "Start a blog that matters to your readers")
• [How to start a blog and make money](http://www.blogkori.com/start-a-blog-for-free-and-make-money/ "How to start a blog and make money")
• [Why you should start a blog](http://www.blogkori.com/why-you-should-start-a-blog/ "Why you should start a blog")

As you can see I have already wrote articles for each of these keywords. Now they all rank somewhere for their long tail search pages. My ultimate goal is to rank my blog for that main bigger keyword, in this case it is: “Start a blog”. Interlink these posts and you will be good to go.

Quality and quantity both matters: Now don’t just go and fill up your blog with useless content. Don’t do this. Instead write a long and fresh articles that really helps people. The rule is if your page really deserves to be in #1, then it will be #1 today or tomorrow.

So put your readers first and ask yourself, “Will this post will really help out someone?” If the answer is yes then go ahead. Add quality posts and add them in quantity.

Social sharing does means a lot: All of my articles that got higher rankings had social sharing feature. And those did get lots of social shares, likes, tweets, pins, google plus etc.

To take advantage of it, I suggest you put social sharing button on all of the posts. Put at least facebook, twitter, google plus and linkedin share buttons in your blog.

That’s not enough you have to make sure influential individuals share about your posts. Google sees that you are creating content and then you are the one sharing them. Write MIND BLOWING & SHARE WORTHY content. Build relationship with other influential bloggers.

Send them a message, beg for a share, bribe them, message them again, whatever it takes to make them share your post is going to take your post one more extra mile further.

When you see few of the influential people share your post like this, thank them:


BUT BE AWARE! Don’t take this approach for every post you publish. Make it worth their time and effort or else these people will ignore you.

Look for long term goals: Things take time to move forward in blog SEO. To get the unlimited portion of traffic that is interested and targeted, you have to be patient. Look 1 or 2 years ahead of time and see how your blog will rank. Then you can focus what is right for today.

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