Find Out What People Are Asking Search Engines
I discovered this great tool that analyzes search traffic and gives you a list of 100 questions that were asked in the search engines. Its currently free over at Wordtracker Labs. Thanks to Richard Cotton and SEO Moz for the tip. Richard discusses the benefits of using such a tool to find negative keywords to save money on a PPC campaign. But being an organic man myself, I thought we could take a look at how to use this tool to increase traffic to our sites organically.
The purpose of using this tool organically would be to find out what people are asking related to your website subject and answer it for them. If you answer the question in a way that is fun, informative and helpful you will find that your blog article attracts traffic and links.
One other obvious benefit will be that you will have a page that matches the long tail search perfectly, increasing your chances of jumping some sites in the SERPS that have more ranking authority than yours. Personally, I would use the question just as it appears in the tool as the title. Lets do a quick example.
Lets say that we have a website that is focused on technology including digital cameras. We have just signed up for a killer digital camera affiliate profit sharing campaign and can not wait to start earning some profits. So, we jump on over to the SE Question Machine and enter our keyword phrase “digital cameras”.
The Results:
So now we see that according to wordtracker this question has been asked 153 times in search engines they have access to, which does not include the three big boys: Google, Yahoo and MSN. So we can assume the searches for this phrase is much higher.
Lets check out our competition and see what we are up against. Obviously digital cameras are a very competitive market. A search in Google for “when was the first digital camera made” returns no exact matches. To dig a little deeper, I searched for “intitle:when was the first digital camera made” and found out that the only result with an exact match is a dogpile search result that got indexed by Google. The “intitle” result gives you pages with that keyword phrase in the sites title.
Wiki.answers does have some closely matching posts but substitutes “made” for “invented”. All though, wiki.answers carries some link authority, this should be a long tail keyword phrase that is obtainable quickly.
Write The Article
Writing the article should be very easy. Simply research the question and give very helpful, informative information to your reader. For a post like this, find a picture of the first digital camera and post it. Give your readers a reason to link to your site.
Build Some Links
Call in a favor with a buddy who has a blog, or do whatever you do to get links. But link to this page with the anchor text: “when was the first digital camera made”. Or at least a part of that phrase. You will be suprised at how quickly you show up in the search engines. Especially if you read my posts on the title tag and header tags.
I would love to hear ways that you are using this tool. Cheers!
This looks like a pretty slick tool. Thanks, I will have to try it out.
This sounds like a great tool for anyone who is interested in seo. I will be trying it out and I will let you know how it goes. Thanks for the heads up!
Wow, that is a very useful tool for any blogger. I can imagine that that could really help to dominate any niche. I opened up the site and entered in a few keywords. It worked pretty well. Impressive!
@Shawn, Brian and Lia,
I have found it to very useful already…many people are not targeting questions in their SEO strategy. I recently used this technique for one of my client’s site and it was very effective.
I have to agree with the others here, thanks for sharing. I will put this to use!