Long Tail Keyword Traffic – An Experiment

You might remember in this post where I talked about the power of long tail keywords.

In that post I mentioned that I was going to start an experiment. The experiment would go something like this…

I’d take an existing blog, and do some keyword research to find a group of keywords that had only REALLY low search volume according to Google.

I’m talking, keywords with less than 1000 searches per month. The ones you’d normally look at and not bother creating content for because they wouldn’t bring enough traffic.

I’d then get a piece of content written on each of those keywords and set it to publish to my blog one per day and see the resulting traffic within a month and longer.

My conjecture was that the sheer act of publishing this content in a specific way, would lead to an increase in traffic with no further promotion or link building, as a result of those pages getting ranked for extremely lowly competitive keywords (some of which I DIDN’T create content for) in the search engines.

So that’s what I’ve done.

I did some specific things when posting this content.

First, I followed all the SEO steps detailed in the WP SEO Video Series – those are a given.

I made sure that one long tail keyword was:

a) in the post title

b) in the content at least once.

c) in the meta title (using all in one seo)

d) in the meta description (ditto)

e) in the meta keywords.

Then I did one final thing.

In every post, I made sure there was an internal link, linking back to the post I did on the previous day, with the anchor text of the keyword that post was targetting.

So for example, the day 1 post is on the keyword “how to win at poker”, in my day 2 post, I’ll leave a link that looks like

how to win at poker

that links to myblog.com/how-to-win-at-poker

Make sense?

This way each post gets at least one link to it, that will help in it’s SE ranking.

Other information about the experiment is…

1. The site I used is already indexed, which will make a difference to how fast the new content gets picked up by Google.

2. All the 20 articles that will be coming to the blog are unique and about 300 words each.

3. The blog is still new and the traffic very low. Here’s a screenshot:

(update: there was a little increase the day after I posted these but I doubt it has to do with our first post on the site)

So it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Obviously if I was really trying to make money with the site I wouldn’t be using this strategy in isolation. I’d be submitting ezinearticles and doing directory submissions, and looking for link partners and a whole lot of things.

This is just for the sake of experiment.

Anyway keep checking back to see what happens with this blog!