Internet Marketing Question:

People are showing up at my lens/website for keywords I haven’t targeted ~ how does that happen and what do I do now?

If you are working on One Week Marketing campaigns or niche sites you have probably decided on a keyword you are targeting for each page of your site or each lens. Once you have your pages published and you check your stats you may find you’re getting traffic for plenty of other keywords you haven’t targeted.

When you find you’re getting keyword traffic be happy! This is a good thing.  It means the search engines have found your site and are telling searchers it is a good site to find content about this topic.

Why is my site showing up for all these other words?

This is called the “long tail traffic”. When people search for keywords that may be words or a combination of words you used in your content Google is giving your site as a place to find that information.  The longer your content is the more likely this is to happen for a wide variety of long tail keywords. Generally the long tailed traffic you get from Google will be multiple words and longer phrases.

This happens because the competition for these long tail keywords is so low that you easily grab the traffic with your well written content relevant to this search.

What do I do with these keywords now?

This answer depends on a few things. Let’s take a look at them now.

What kind of site are you building? If you are building a squidoo campaign you could add a little content to the lens the word came up for. You could also create a whole new lens around this keyword and then link it to the rest of the campaign.

If you are doing a small niche site you can do something similar. You can add a little content to post that was linked to the keyword. Adding the keyword in the content once more, even creating a keyword anchor text link to the main page of your site using the new keyword as your anchor text. You could also create a whole new post using this new keyword as the keyword you target in the post.

How do I know what I should do with these keywords?

The big thing about long tail keywords is there probably is not a ton of search volume for them.  It’s a good idea to take a look at the search volume and see what you’re looking at. If there is next to none you may want to just add a little content related to the new longtail in your current content. You can also create a few backlinks to that lens or post using the new long tail as the anchor text of the links. This will help you cement your ranking for that long tail phrase.

If you find the long tail has some good or even some search volume it might be worth creating more content targeting that keyword. If you do this remember to go back and do all the promotional stuff you’ve done for the rest of your content so you can start to rank for that keyword with the new lens or post.

It should be quite easy to rank for that keyword after doing a little bit of promotion, since you’ve ranked for it without doing any specific targeting at all already.  Your statistics area can be a great place to find new ideas for content and ways to widen your net so to speak in any given niche. Keep an eye on your stats and let your readers tell you what to write about next.

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