PureBlogging

There’s a problem that many bloggers run into when building their blog traffic. You’ve followed the suggestions on this an other blogging “how to” sites: you’ve written a lot of great content, you read and comment on other blogs that are on the same topic, and you’ve submitted your site to the directories and social bookmarking sites. Despite your efforts, Google doesn’t seem to know you exist. You’re listing, if you can find it at all, is buried under a mountain of other sites, some ofwhich don’t seem to be even remotely relevant to the search term. It can be very frustrating, but fortunately, there are solutions.

You need to define your niche with less competitive keyword phrases.

If you have been blogging about a subject, you probably can come up with a cart-load of phrases that describe your blog. (If not, David wrote a nice post about how to come up with phrases back in December.) The bigger problem is knowing where to position yourself to have the greatest chance of success.

The ideal keyword phrases will generate a decent amount of traffic, but they don’t have a large amount of competition. Your best success will come with keywords that will send more than 100 people to your site every day, but have less than 30,000 competitors. I know, 30,000 competitors sounds like a lot, but most of those competing sites are there because your keywords showed up one time on one page, and they’re buried so far down that a team of miners couldn’t find them. While 100 people a day may not sound like a great deal, it is a good starting place, and if you can get listed well with several keywords each sending 100 people a day…that’s not bad.

Finding the search traffic is relatively easy. If you go to Word Trackers free keyword tool and type in your keywords it will give you a list of your keywords and all of the variations using your keywords. Beside each keyword phrase it lists the number of times that phrase is searched for each day on Google. However, that doesn’t tell you how much traffic you can expect from that keyword. Because of all of the various ways people search, your traffic could be very different from the number of searches for any phrase.

For example, if you were writing about healthy eating and entered that phrase into the keyword tool, you would see that 1,523 people search for “healthy eating” each day. It has been shown that the #1 spot in Google gets the vast majority of traffic. So you would expect between 1,000 and 1,500 visitors from Google (if you were #1). That doesn’t take into account the variations. If you look at all of the different ways “healthy eating” is used in searches, you see that there is a lot of potential traffic there. You have to dig a little deeper to find out how much traffic you could expect.

There are two tools that will give you the information you need. The first is the GTrends Tool from Wordtracker. This one incorporates Google Trends, and it estimates the actual number a visitors that the #1 listed site will get daily. Google Trends is good for seeing the trends in the search traffic, but it doesn’t tell you how much volume is really there. TheGTrends tool compares the volume of your phrase with phrases where the volume is known, then makes an estimate of how much traffic you could expect.

The GTrends tool also tells you how many competitive sites are listed in Google. That will save you a lot of time from looking up each individual phrase in Google.

When you enter your keyword into the GTrends tool it gives you list of phrases and search traffic (just like the normal keyword tool), but beside each phrase is a bar graph icon. When you click the icon it shows you the number of competitors, and the estimated number of visitors that the #1 site will get each day. In our example, “healthy eating” has 1,523 searches each day, but because of all of the variations the #1 listed site gets an estimated 7,143 visitors each day. (It also has over 8 million competitors.)

There is another tool that can help automate the process for you. GTrends Made Easy is an application based on the GTrends tool. For each keyword you enter it gives you the number of estimated visitors and the number of competitive sites. The free version will allow you to search up to 150 keyword phrases at a time, so you can cut and paste your phrases into the program. It lists all of the phrases so it is easy to look down the list to find phrases that will give you enough traffic, but with less competition.

For instance, “healthy eating” has a lot of traffic with a huge amount of competition. Look further down the list and you start seeing smaller niches that are not nearly as competitive. “Healthy eating recipes” will send 140 visitors a day, and it only has 35,000 competitors. “Healthy eating for children” send just under 100 visitors per day and only has 21,000 competitors.

If you target these smaller niches you can start generating more traffic to your sites quickly. Over time, with continued work and posting, your site will climb the Google ladder and your traffic will continue to grow.

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