How can I generate traffic for my blog?

Generating traffic to a blog or website is a topic that often raises a lot of questions. There are different kinds of traffic that you can get to your website, and depending on your niche market, how your target audience is, among other factors, you will have to decide which are the best sources of traffic from which you can attract people interested in The contents you offer.

I like to classify the different sources of traffic into three classes: free traffic (requires no economic investment to get traffic), paid traffic (requires an economic investment to get traffic), leveraged traffic (requires agreement with another person or Company to get the traffic, since we are going to leverage the traffic she receives).

FREE TRAFFIC

They are all those sources of traffic that give us visits that do not require any type of economic investment, but we must take into account that in many cases, to get this traffic we will have to make a personal investment of effort and time to get visits to our website .

Among the methods of generating free traffic we could count on:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The SEO or positioning in search engines will provide you with totally organic visits of search engines like Google, Bing, etc. To achieve this, you have to optimize your website both technically and content so that Google can understand and have the ability to upload positions in the search engine.

When you want to work SEO, your goal has to be to appear on the first page of Google results, and to really get visitors if you reach the first page, you should be at least in the top 5 results. SEO is something that takes a lot of work and a lot of time, so you would have to create a long term strategy. Although try not to focus solely on SEO to generate traffic.

SEO is rather unstable because Google's algorithm often changes frequently. Nowadays, it is difficult to try to position you for two or three main keywords, so your goal should be to position your website through hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords.

Organic Facebook:

In Facebook you can generate traffic in an organic way in two ways

1. Through your Facebook page: you have to create a Facebook page (not profile) in which you publish articles and content related to your blog and at the same time you will have to create a audience that reads your posts.

2. Through Facebook groups: try to find Facebook groups that are related to your niche market. Share information on them such as articles always trying not to spam. You can also answer questions from other people and participate in publications.

Organic Twitter

To generate traffic through Twitter in an organic way, you will have to be followed by people who are interested in the type of content you offer. Do not obsess with followers because it counts much more quality than quantity. You have to be very active in posting on Twitter.

If you have little time, you can use automation tools like Hootsuite or TweetDeck to program some tweets. Try creating tweets that encourage your followers to click on the link you post, for example, if you promote an article.

Organic YouTube

YouTube is the second most important search engine after Google. So you should keep that in mind. If someone wants to know something will go to Google first in most cases, and then go to look for YouTube.

To generate traffic through YouTube, you have to have a YouTube channel in which you frequently publish videos related to the theme of your blog, so that over time you get a hearing. You can record many types of videos, for this you will have to consider what is most appropriate depending on which is your niche market.

Organic Instagram

Instagram is a very visual social network, so if you want to generate traffic from Instagram your approach will have to be different. People can click on the bio link in your Instagram profile, but they will not be able to click on other links besides the username.

You can publish different content, more visual, get followers, publish frequently, people interact with your publications and increase in some way the recognition of your brand.

LinkedIn

To generate traffic through LinkedIn in an organic way you can use your personal profile, you can create a company page that you could use in a similar way to the Facebook page and you can participate in LinkedIn groups related to your niche by publishing articles and responding To questions.

Google Plus

In Google Plus you can generate traffic in four different ways:

1. Through your Google + profile posting your content.

2. Through a Google+ page where you publish your content.

3. Through Google + communities sharing your content, interacting with other people, always being careful about spam.

4. Creating Google+ collections to create collections to publish information related to a specific topic.

Pinterest

Pinterest, just like Instagram is a very visual social network. You can upload images and link them to your website. You have to go pinning images inside the boards that you create. When people click on the images they will be able to go to your web if you insert the url of your web in the image.

Questions and Answers Communities

You can participate in questions and answers communities such as Yahoo! Answers, Quora, TodoExpertos and many more that exist and maybe it is leaving me in the ink. They change a lot from each other, especially by the profile of people who participate in them. So you'll have to consider which ones are most suited to your niche market.

Simply answer the questions related to your niche and if you see that you can complement the information you have shared in your answer, you can include the link an article in which you explain something related to the question that the user has asked.

View Forum Posts

You can participate in forums related to your niche market in which you can answer questions and in your profile you can include a link in your signature. For this, ideally, these forums have many active members, that the members belong to your target audience, that the moderators allow you to place links and allow you to configure a signature with links. You can also share links to your articles if they answer a question from users, but beware of spam.

Podcast

You could create a podcast that would come to be like an Internet radio program where you could publish episodes surrounding a theme and in them include calls to action that direct the listeners to your website. People would find you through podcast distribution platforms such as iTunes, iVoox, Stitcher, Spreaker, etc.

Email marketing

In order to do email marketing you will have to create a list of subscribers to which the people are going to be giving you generally giving data like their name and their email, and that they are interested in receiving information that you can bring them. This source of traffic will totally depend on you unlike other sources of traffic, since you can directly address people by writing an email.

TRAFFIC PAYED

They are all those sources of traffic that give us visits and that require an economic investment. Usually they will be faster as opposed to sources of free traffic, but we will have to monitor them frequently and they are working correctly.

Among the methods of generating paid traffic we could count on:

Google AdWords

With Google AdWords you can get traffic in two ways:

1. Through the search network: These are the ads that appear at the top of Google results when you search for some keyword or phrase.

2. Through the display network: These are all websites with Google AdSense advertising where you might appear. Content creators show ads on your website and generate revenue for each click that people make on them. That advertising could generate traffic to you if you appear in this network.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are Facebook ads. With these ads you can promote texts, images, videos and galleries. Advertising will have to be configured in an ad center that has Facebook, and then, once you have set up the ad, people will start to see it on your Facebook wall for example, although there are other locations.

Some of the goals of Facebook ads you could use are for example: promoting your posts, attracting people to your website, increasing the reproductions of your video, generating leads for your business, etc.

Twitter Ads

With Twitter you can also create ads with Twitter Ads that can be seen as a tweet promoted and reach the type of people you want. Some goals that you can find in Twitter Ads can be for example: tweet interactions, video reproductions, visits to the website, followers or generation of potential clients.

You can segment the audience just like Facebook Ads and you can target the audience according to their interests and even indicating the Twitter accounts that follow at the moment.

YouTube Ads

On YouTube you can promote the videos through YouTube Ads. These ads are configured through Google AdWords and is a very inexpensive way to generate visits, in the vast majority of cases you can pay less than € 0.05 for each person who sees your videos.

With YouTube Ads, you can show your videos to the beginning of other YouTube videos through InStream videos, which are the ones that usually appear to you when you want to watch a video on YouTube. There is also another type of ad that you can place in the sidebar next to the recommended videos. It is less invasive but you will achieve much less exposure and take longer to produce results.

Instagram Ads

Instagram Ads called Instagram Ads are configured from Facebook Ads. You can create ads with images, videos and "carrousel". The ads will have to be generally much more visual given the characteristics of this social network, which is mainly visual.

As opposed to the publications made in an organic way in Instagram, with the ads of Instagram is that they can click on the ad and go directly to an external link.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIin Ads is LinkedIn advertising. The advertising on this platform is quite expensive as each click could cost you € 2. Generally, you can take advantage of those businesses that have a high profitability for each customer or that have a high lifetime value.

LinkedIn, being a social network focused on professionals, has a very large tendency towards the work aspect. So companies often use ads on this platform to offer corporate products / services.

Yahoo / Bing Ads

Yahoo / Bing Ads is the union of Yahoo and Microsoft, which allied to somehow counter the power that Google has. With this advertising you can get traffic from the Yahoo search engine, the Bing search engine and all the websites associated with these companies like MSN, Hotmail, etc.

HEALTHY TRAFFIC

Are all sources of traffic that give us visits and that require that we somehow have reached an agreement with another professional or company that has a website with more traffic than we, with which we could generally leverage the traffic they Receive.

Among the methods of generation of leveraged traffic we could count on:

Author invited in blogs

You can generate traffic by leveraging the audience that other blogs in your niche have. You can contribute with them with articles made by you. People would know you and could click on the links that lead to your website that is usually included in the author of the article or in a fragment of the text of the article in which you can mention an article in your blog, for example.

For this you will have to contact other blogs in your niche and ask them if they let you write an article for your blog. When you publish it you can leverage the traffic they receive.

Affiliates

You could leverage the audience of other companies or professionals by creating strategic alliances or affiliation agreements to promote your products or services in exchange for a commission.

The difference between an ally and an affiliate is that the ally is like a partner who will work with you in a closer way. Affiliates on the other hand, will promote your products or services in exchange for a commission and will work in a more independent way as if it were a commercial or independent seller.

Podcasts

You could create a relationship with people who have a podcast about your theme that can give rise to some time that they can invite you to the podcast to do an interview about the topic you try on your blog. The podcasts in which you participate would have to be related in some way to what people will see in your blog.

Appearing in other podcasts you could leverage the audience that other people already have to let you know and that people who are interested in what you share in the podcast, can go to visit your website.

Comments on blogs and social networks

From time to time, you could leave comments on blogs and Facebook pages for example, be read by your target audience so that people can click on your name and even occasionally you can include a link to an article of yours by Example, if the topic of the article you are talking about is related and can help or bring some value to the readers of that blog.

You have to be careful with spam. Do not leave comments that do not contribute anything. Try to read the content and provide a comment in which you express your point of view on the subject of the article and that somehow you may like the author of the blog.

ON QUALIFIED TRAFFIC

You've probably heard of qualified traffic on occasion. When we refer to qualified traffic, what we mean is that the traffic we receive is of quality, meaning that people who come to our website through the source of traffic from which they come, are interested in what we offer.

The characteristics that have to have the traffic that arrives to your web so that it is of quality, is that this one has a correct segmentation, you have to know to which public you go. Afterwards, you have to have the right proposal, you have to offer something that interests the audience that you address. And lastly, you have to sell at the stage of the correct buying cycle.

I hope that my contribution can serve you. Now depending on your niche market, you will have to decide which are the most appropriate traffic sources to derive visitors to your website.

A greeting!

What are the best online or software ranking tools for an SEO/Web agency?

Serpstat is already a leading cloud rank tracker. But we added great updates recendtly, so you now you can take full advantage from our:

Complete research of SERP with advanced analytics

Get all the top results for keywords you’ve selected. Serpstat has developed the ultimate algorithm that analyzes SERPs and saves data about top-100 domains for every keyword.

Global city-based tracking

Find out exactly how your keywords are ranking in Google and Yandex (Yahoo! and Bing will be soon) in any city, country or language you specify.

Daily results

Track an unlimited number of keywords on a daily basis. Get the freshest data and keep an eye on your competitors’ web performance.

If you start monitoring a keyword like "buy a cellphone" you will see positions of all 100 domains for this keywords, regardless of what domain you monitor. Of course you can chose to highlight your own domain and domains of your closest competitors, but you'll still get complete data for each keyword.

Monitor How The Positions Of Your Competitors Are Changing

Serpstat shows how the positions of your competitors are changing and let's you know when a new competitor appears or someone gets pushed out of the top-100 positions.

Monitoring positions of your competitors is an important part of using rank tracking. With traditional rank trackers you have to add each competitor to your project if you want to know how their positions are changing:

Serpstat constantly shows all of the ranking changes of your competitors. You can see which domains improved or tanked their positions, see and track the arrival of new competitors as well those who are no longer rank for your target keywords.

Independent statistics for groups of search queries

Track competition dynamics for groups of phrases, instead of for individual keywords. Only explore competitors in a specific, narrow niche.

For example, here's a list of domains that Ebay competes with for all of the keywords that I added to the tracking project.

And this is a list of competitors within a keyword group. I created a keyword group named "Style" where only the keywords that refer to clothes, accessories, shoes are present.

Market Share Analysis

Serpstat is the only tool that allows you to analyze the size of your and your competitor's market shares.

Market share distribution analysis is a very useful feature for both, marketers and SEO specialists. You can use it for monitoring your own progress within a niche and compare it to the progress of your competitors, to see if your optimization really brings more clients to your website.

Another awesome use for this feature is market analysis. If you're thinking of joining a new market, it's best to start with analysis, so you know what websites are in the lead and how big of a market share you'll be able to grab.

To use this feature you need to create keyword groups based on the type of products, for example "cell phones" and "laptops" and analyze these groups separately. For each group of phrases you will have the list of top-100 domains along with the size of a market share for these domain. Your domain may be the biggest in cell phones but lack in laptops:

By monitoring the size of a market share, SEO and Marketing specialists can see how website is improving, regardless of the ranking. Market share analysis accounts for search volume and CTR, which is more useful than just looking at website's position for a certain keyword. Improving visibility for 100 low-volume keywords may result in expanding your market share more than ranking for a few keywords with high search volume.

Historical Rank Tracking Data From All Existing Projects

If someone was tracking a keyword that you've added to your project in the same region as you, we will show you the historical data from their project, for free!

Regular rank tracking services show the data from your project only. While Serpstat provides previously saved positions data for all keywords that were previously monitored.

If the keyword you add to your project was monitored previously in the same region, Serpstat will show you the data we have on that keyword.

For example, a user has been tracking his position for the keyword "laptops" in Florida for the previous 10 day, and you want to start tracking your position for this same keyword in Florida today, you'll get the top 100 search results history for "laptops" over the last 10 days as a bonus.

SERP by phrase, Storm, and Snippets

Storm — this graph shows how the rankings for the tracked keyword changed in the Google top-100 organic results regarding the previous date. Thus you can see how active the Google SERP was changing from the moment you started tracking this keyword.

SERP by phrase chart shows how Google's top-10 was changing for the tracked keyword.

Use this graph for competitive analysis. You can even delete the competitors you are not interested in and leave the necessary ones. Just tick the box.

SERP Snippets — here you can check how your SERP snippets looked like at the different days (according to the schedule of rank tracking).

Read more about our new features in rank tracker: Get Even More Data on Your Rankings with Our Upgraded Rank Tracker Tool — Serpstat Blog

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How can I do keyword research for SEO?

Congratulations for asking the right question! Keyword Research should be your first step when it comes to running a successful SEO campaign.

You can’t win a battle if you don’t know your enemy ..

Begin with brainstorming, then research those terms with some great tools. There are techniques that you can utilize to narrow down the long list of terms that you will need to reach your target audience. A few are listed below:

Tip 1. List all the Important Topics Related to Your Business

You know your business better than anyone. Write down your elevator pitch: what is your business about and who is your target audience?

Begin by listing topics that are related to your business: If you are just starting out, try to think about what your site is and what it might grow to be. If you are a tech-savvy blogger, make sure that your list will include topics related to technologies you often blog about.

If you need inspiration, put yourself in the shoes of your audience. A good trick is to pretend that you are selling your business to your best friend. What’s going to catch their interest? Think about the things that they would want to read.

Tip 2. Think of all Possible Keywords That you can put Into Your Topic Lists.

Think of your topic lists as empty buckets that you need to fill with keywords. This part requires careful thinking and brainstorming. There are a lot of keywords that you can use for a certain topic. However, you need to choose the keywords or keyword phrases carefully to help your rank in search engine results pages, or SERP.

For example, your topic is “online English tutorial.” Think about the different keywords or phrases that people might use to search for that subject. It might include:

• English tutorial online
• Where to enroll for online English tutorial
• Best online English tutors
• English tutorial tools

These are just some of the possible things that people may search online. Keep in mind that you do not have to list all the keywords and keyword phrases. You are simply compiling many options from which to filter the best one.

Tip 3. Use Keyword Research Tool if Possible

If you want to make your work easier, invest in an effective keyword research tool. Of course, you can always do it manually. But, using a keyword research tool will save you tons of time and effort. It will make the process easier, faster, and more effective because it can produce results in just a few clicks.

Just login, type in your topic and it will do the rest for you. Some keyword research tools will even give you the option to widen your search option by including related searches, Google suggestions, and other synonyms coming from Google Adwords.

Below is an example of a keyword research results for the topic “online English tutorial” using one of my favorite Keyword research and analysis tools.

This is one of my favorite tools. If the keyword is “green” for difficulty, then there’s a good chance that you can rank for it easily. In my experience, it takes about 3 months to rank for such keywords.

Tip 4. Refine Your List

Once you already have an extensive list of keywords and keyword phrases, refine it. Make sure that you include suggested keywords. If you are using Google Keyword Planner, you need to know that the tool gives high priority to Google ads. Therefore, it will load keywords from Ad group first.

If you want to look for suggested or related keywords, click on the Keyword ideas. Suggested keywords are important as they will give you a clearer insight into what exact terms your target audience are using. Refining your list means looking after the relevance of the keywords and keyword phrases to your topic.

Make sure that your keywords powerfully describe the topic or are relevant to your landing page. If the keywords are related to your topic but are not directly linked to the subject of your landing page, just create a new landing page and write new content that includes the keyword.

After following all these simple tips, voila! You now have your list of keywords or keyword phrases and now on your way to gaining short and long-term traffic from focused keyword usage. These keywords will be your guide to creating content that will be beneficial to your business or website.

Also, keep in mind to review your keywords as often as you can. Once you have gained more authority in SERP, you will find that you may add more keywords to your lists. Adding new keywords to your list will give you more opportunity to grow in other areas while you maintain your present rank from other successful content.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): How can I see visitor statistics of other websites or domains?

1. Search Engine Share of Referring Visits

Every month, keep track of the contribution of each traffic source for your site, including:

• Direct Navigation: Typed in traffic, bookmarks, email links without tracking codes, etc.
• Referral Traffic: From links across the web or in trackable email, promotional, and branding campaign links
• Search Traffic: Queries that sent traffic from any major or minor web search engine

Knowing both the percentage and exact numbers will help you identify weaknesses and give you a basis for comparison over time. For example, if you see that traffic has spiked dramatically but it comes from referral links with low relevance, it's not time to get excited. On the other hand, if search engine traffic falls dramatically, you may be in trouble. You should use this data to track your marketing efforts and plan your traffic acquisition efforts.

2. Search Engine Referrals

Three major engines make up 95%+ of all search traffic in the US: Google and the Yahoo!-Bing alliance. For most countries outside the US, 80%+ of search traffic comes solely from Google (with a few notable exceptions including Russia and China). Measuring the contribution of your search traffic from each engine is useful for several reasons:

Compare Performance vs. Market Share

Compare the volume contribution of each engine with its estimated market share.

Get Visibility Into Potential Drops

If your search traffic should drop significantly at any point, knowing the relative and exact contributions from each engine will be essential to diagnosing the issue. If all the engines drop off equally, the problem is almost certainly one of accessibility. If Google drops while the others remain at previous levels, it's more likely to be a penalty or devaluation of your SEO efforts by that singular engine.

Uncover Strategic Value

It's very likely that some efforts you undertake in SEO will have greater positive results on some engines than on others. For example, we've observed that on-page optimization tactics like better keyword inclusion and targeting reap greater benefits with Bing and Yahoo! than with Google. On the other hand, gaining specific anchor text links from a large number of domains has a more positive impact on Google than the others. If you can identify the tactics that are having success with one engine, you'll better know how to focus your efforts.

3. Visits Referred by Specific Search Engine Terms and Phrases

The keywords that send traffic are another important piece of your analytics pie. You'll want to keep track of these on a regular basis to help identify new trends in keyword demand, gauge your performance on key terms, and find terms that are bringing significant traffic that you're potentially under-optimized for.

You may also find value in tracking search referral counts for terms outside the top terms and phrases—those that are most valuable to your business. If the trend lines are pointing in the wrong direction, you know efforts need to be undertaken to course-correct. Search traffic worldwide has consistently risen over the past 15 years, so a decline in the quantity of referrals is troubling. Check for seasonality issues (keywords that are only in demand certain times of the week/month/year) and rankings (have you dropped, or has search volume ebbed?).

4. Conversion Rate by Search Query Term/Phrase

When it comes to the bottom line for your organization, few metrics matter as much as conversion. For example, in the graphic to the right, 5.80% of visitors who reached Moz with the query "SEO Tools" signed up to become members during that visit. This is a much higher conversion rate than most of the thousands of keywords used to find our site. With this information, we can now do two things:

1. Checking our rankings, we see that we only rank #4 for "SEO Tools." Working to improve this position will undoubtedly lead to more conversion.
2. Because our analytics will also tell us what page these visitors landed on (mostly https://moz.com/tools), we can focus our efforts on improving the visitor experience on that page.

The real value from this simplistic tracking comes from the low-hanging fruit: finding keywords that continually send visitors who convert to paying customers, and increasing focus on rankings and on improving the landing pages that visitors reach. While conversion rate tracking from keyword phrase referrals is certainly important, it's never the whole story. Dig deeper and you can often uncover far more interesting and applicable data about how conversion starts and ends on your site.

5. Number of pages receiving at least one visit from search engines

Knowing the number of pages that receive search engine traffic is an essential metric for monitoring overall SEO performance. From this number, we can get a glimpse into indexation—the number of pages from our site the engines are keeping in their indexes. For most large websites (50,000+ pages), mere inclusion is essential to earning traffic, and this metric delivers a trackable number that's indicative of success or failure. As you work on issues like site architecture, link acquisition, XML sitemaps, and uniqueness of content and meta data, the trend line should rise, showing that more and more pages are earning their way into the engines' results. Pages receiving search traffic is, quite possibly, the best long tail metric around.

While other analytics data points are of great importance, those mentioned above should be universally applied to get the maximum value from your SEO campaigns.

Analytics Software

free

• Yahoo! Web Analytics
• Google Analytics
• Clicky Web Analytics
• Piwik Open Source Analysis
• Woopra Website Tracking
• AWStats

Everyone is talking about long-tail keywords. How do I find long-tail keywords?

There are many ways to get long tail keywords but I would recommend to use keyword research tools such as Keyword research and analysis tool

These tools provides a lot more data than long tail keywords and their search volumes. It’s crucial to know the keyword difficulty and the actual SERP so you are able to evaluate whether you are able to rank for them.

Besides research tools you’ll find useful:

• quora
• reddit
• customer feedbacks
• internal data

Another great source of inspiration is LSIGraph: LSI Keyword Generator but yet again, don’t forget to analyze all of them in keyword research tools.

You can also find keywords in Google Keyword Planner but you will get only search volumes and PPC competition in Adwords which isn’t too much for proper keyword research.

I wrote a very detailed blog post on this topic as a part of SEO Academy I’ve been working on since January, so feel free to learn more here: SEO Academy for beginners part 5: How to do keyword research - mangools blog

First, let's get a better definition of long-tail keywords:

Keywords you can easily rank for because few other websites are effectively targeting them

Because otherwise, what's the point?

You're not looking for long-tail keywords just so you can get less traffic.  You're  looking for long-tail keywords because you can't compete for fat-head keywords (or for that matter, fat tail).

Now, if you agree with me that this is the correct definition of long-tail keywords, you also need to agree with me that nearly every other answer to this question is wrong.

Why?

Because every tool on this list pulls keyword suggestions from the same source: Google AdWords or Google Suggest.

So, basically, everyone is looking for long-tail keywords in the same places.

How well is that going to work out if we're trying to find keywords that few other websites are targeting?

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Second, you need to understand that since Hummingbird, Google doesn't really give a *&%$# about exact keywords -- they're more interested in figuring out the meaning behind the words.

So if you're thinking "ooh, I can go long tail and rank even though my website has no links!" and start building pages for things like "best women's nike flyknit size 8 blue", then you're going to be in for a big surprise when you discover that

1. the results are basically the same Big Brands as the fat tail "women's Nike Flyknit"
2. basically none of the top ranking sites are targeting that long-tail keyword, and Google doesn't care because they're more interested in the big idea
3. competing for that keyword is almost as difficult as the fat tail version

---

I call these "red herring keywords", and any keyword research tool that makes long tail keyword recommendations based upon exact keyword usage will recommend tons of red herring keywords to you. They'll tell you that because nobody is using the phrase "iPhones 6s cases best" that it's going to be easy to rank for, even though the results are the same as "best iPhone 6s case".

Don't fall for red herring keywords.

So what do you do instead?

Don't look for long-tail keywords, look for information gaps. It's not enough to find some variation of popular phrase that isn't frequently used. You need to find a concept or idea or question or some other form of information that isn't covered elsewhere on the web (or at least not on high authority websites).

To do this, you can try New incredibly accurate Keyword Difficulty & Competitor Analysis SEO Tool (disclosure: Founder), which looks at meaning and topical relevancy to determine difficulty rather than just keyword usage.

I'm kind of surprised no one has said to reference Google and Bing Webmaster Tools (GWMT & BWMT).

You don't necessarily want to start out targeting long tail. Some situations may call for it, but often you want to build on what you're already ranking for.

If you verify the site with Google and Bing WMT then you'll see some of the queries that are already generating impressions for the website. It may happen that you're ranking in the 80th spot of search for a particular query, but at least you aren't starting from nothing.

Here's a simple example of the process, let's say it's for a doctor's office. 

1. I verify the site with GWMT
2. From the dashboard I click on the graph that's showing clicks and impressions.
3. I see that my doctors office ranks on the first page of Google for "fast doctors in my area".
4. I also see that my doctors office ranks on the 5th page for "flu and cold doctors and physicians".
5. Therefore, I go back to my website and create a webpage specifically devoted to a service we offer related to "cold and flu treatments".
6. Then, I write a blog post or article about "seasonal cold and flu remedies for adults".
7. Finally, I link the blog/article to the "cold and flu treatment" page from within the body using anchor text. Likewise, I link the cold & flu treatment page to another page on my site describing the doctors and physicians at our office.

The result is 2 new pages of content focused around "cold & flu", which are linked to related pages across the site.

Here's the thing about long tail keywords: They're not what they used to be.

After Google's Hummingbird update they're now able to understand the topic of a page much better than they previously could. So you can target long tail all day, but if the other signals aren't there - such as a linking a strategy, semantic language, and a strong topic hub - then the page is going to struggle to rank well.

Use webmaster tools to identify which topics search engines already associate with the website. Then focus on strengthening those topics across the site. Once the site ranks well for various topics, build on that foundation by expanding the information horizontally. This will help the entire site to rank and it will save an enormous amount of time trying to guess what long tail keywords you should focus on.

I just want to clarify, too, keywords do matter. They especially important in the url, titles, and headings. But they aren't what they used to be. It's more important that organic visitors find the information helpful and stay on the site (enter one function of the linking strategy).