Why some articles attract more traffic than others

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When you are using article marketing to get traffic to your site, the first step is one that is often overlooked. I am talking about keyword research. The more competitive your niche, the more important it is that you target the right keyword phrase. I am deliberately talking about keyword phrase, rather than keyword. In any, even remotely, competitive niche it is extremely hard to rank high for a single relevant keyword. That is why we choose to go for “long tail keywords”. Let me illustrate this with an example.

Let’s look at an extremely competitive niche, that has a high demand for the products and/or services in its niche. A good example is “weight loss”. Your goal should be to find keyword phrases in the “weight loss” niche, that pass the following criteria:

•    Less than 25,000 Google competitors
•    Less than 5000, when searching with the operator: intitle:”long tail keywords”
•    A minimum of 50 daily search results

Now you know what keyword phrases to look for. Right….  Relax. I am going to show you exactly how to find long tail keywords that meet the above criteria. The first tool we use is the keyword research tool within SEObook. This is a great source for many SEO tools. There keyword tool is just one of the many. Just type in “weight loss pills” and you will get a long list of keyword phrases. One of them is “best proven weight loss pills”. The daily search count is 386.

Next step is to type your keyword phrase in close quotes into Google’s search box. In this case that would be “weight loss through hypnosis”. You will find that there are 15,300 competitors using the same keyword phrase.

Next you will want to find out how many of those use your exact phrase in the title. You can find this out by typing intitle: “weight loss through hypnosis” in the google search box. When you do this you will find a result of about 206. This means that you only have 206 competitors that use the same keyword phrase in the title.

Based on your research you know that this keyword phrase is not very competitive and will easily rank high in the search engines. With 386 people searching for that specific term during the course of one day, this can be a very profitable phrase to rank high for. After all, you have very little competition.

Without your research you might have choosen “best weight loss pills” instead. This phrase has 1,111 daily searches on average. However when you look at the competition using the above technique you will find that for this slightly different phrase you would be competing with 186,000 others, of which 14,300 have the exact same phrase in the title of their content publication.

So, next time you wonder why one article has gotten you massive amounts of traffic, whereas an other one did not, you may want to check the competition for your choosen keyword(s).