How to Get EVEN MORE Google Traffic to Your Published Articles

byParthaB

4.2K followers

3 years ago

Allow me to set the scene.

It was an overcast Tuesday afternoon.

My work for the day was done.

There I was, loitering with intent.

About to jump into Live Chat.

I do love a bit of Live Chat at WA.

I don’t actually do a lot there - you know, it’s just for fun (well, for me anyway).

In fact, I typically turn up, get picked on and bullied by the Live Chat regulars, and then leave with my tail between my legs.

Poor Me!!

But, apparently I bring it on myself (who knew?)

Anyway, for once in my Live Chat life I decided to be a little bit helpful.

I happened to be explaining a fairly well-known “trick” that involves using Google Search Console as a way to increase rankings for certain keywords within an article.

And then low and behold in swept Kyle, and took over.

How Rude!!!

Acting like he owned the place.

Oops..

Hold on..

Wait a Minute...

Oh yeah, he does own the place!!

As you were people..

All is forgiven Kyle.

So, back to the point.

I thought I’d also share this little Google Search Console “trick” with you all.

It’s certainly nothing new, but it can definitely increase your exposure in the search engines.

Let’s Grab an Article

Okay, let’s have a look at an article on one of my sites (this is the website that is free for all to see, you know where to find it).

I’m going to check an article that I consider is underperforming.

So, I go to Google Search Console and do a search for the last 28 days.

I then go to “Pages” and find the article I want and then click on that.

Then I click on “Average CTR” and “Average Position” at the top of the page.

This is what it looks like:

So, the article in question, “Why Do I Feel Hamstring Curls in My Calves?” has only received 292 visitors in the last 28 days.

As I mentioned in my WA blog post, “Here’s How to Rank No.1 on Google (Everything Revealed" I would consider an article to be working out well if it receives 600-700 visitors a month.

Basically, I want my traffic to average out to around 600-700 visitors PER ARTICLE published.

However, as I always say, with a very new site (less than a year old) you typically have to allow an article around 8-9 months to “mature”.

So, before this 8-9 month target a lot of changes can happen to an article in terms of rankings and traffic.

The article in question, “Why Do I Feel Hamstrings Curls in My Calves?” was only published on April 6th 2021.

So, just at about 4 months, but I still feel it could do better now.

I’m sure it will, as in another 4 months it could literally double or treble in traffic, and then I wouldn’t feel it’s underperforming.

Let’s Check Out The Article’s Stats

Okay, if I scroll to the bottom of the page I see that this article appears in the search results for 45 “queries”.

This basically means that the article is appearing in search results for 45 different keywords.

Remember how I always say that although we write an article around one specific keyword, you can in fact rank for many, many, many different keywords.

So, this article currently has 45 different keywords circulating in the search results.

Having checked, in the last 28 days 14 of these 45 keywords received a “click”.

In other words, my 292 visitors searched 14 different keywords between them, found my article, clicked in the search result and visited my website.

So, let’s have a look at the top performing keywords which led to people visiting my article.

Here they are:

So, the top performing “keyword” happens to be the main keyword the article is based around - “Why Do I Feel Hamstring Curls in My Calves”.

The results tell me that 26 people clicked on my article after searching this keyword.

This actual keyword appeared in the search results 68 times (impressions) over the past 28 days.

Therefore, 26 out 68 gives us a click thru rate of 38.2%.

That’s actually pretty decent.

To give you an idea:

• Rank number 1 typically gets approximately 31% of clicks from search results
• Rank number 2 typically gets approximately25% of clicks from search results
• Rank number 3 typically gets approximately15% of clicks from search results

So, I’m ahead of the game… Yaaay!!

And finally the position shows as 1.9.

This means over the past 28 days I have “averaged” a ranking of 1.9 in Google for the keyword “Why Do I Feel Hamstring Curls in My Calves”

That tells me that I’ve probably fluctuated between position 1,2, and 3 over the last 28 days.

Remember, I mentioned that an article doesn’t really “settle” until 8-9 months after it’s been published.

So, you may see fluctuations in ranking.

You can see that I had slightly less traffic for the keywords “Why Do I Feel Leg Curls in My Calves” and “Feeling Hamstring Curls in Calves”.

19 visitors and 18 visitors respectively.

However, my click thru rate is actually slightly better even though “average ranking” over the last 28 days is 2.8 and 3 respectively for these two phrases.

This tells me that my title or meta description may potentially be more enticing than the articles ranking number one and two for these keywords (Ha, in your face No.1 and No. 2)

What About the Keywords That Aren’t Performing So Well?

I’ve mentioned that in the last 28 days this article has received 292 visits from 14 different keywords.

However, the article is appearing in the search results for 45 different keywords, so this means that 31 of those keywords have produced NO TRAFFIC.

So, let’s look at the main ones:

The first one is “Seated Hamstring Curls”.

No-one has clicked on my article for that keyword.

And yet my article has appeared in the search results 47 times in the last 28 days for the keyword “Seated Hamstring Curls”.

However, my average position reveals why I have no clicks.

My article has an average position 78 in Google for the keyword “Seated Hamstring Curls” over the last 28 days.

Basically, no-one is ever going to visit page 8 of Google to read my article.

NEXT

The next keyword is “Do Leg Curls Work Calves”.

Once again, no clicks, and this time my article has appeared in the search results 22 times for this keyword in the last 28 days.

The average position is a bit more hopeful.

An average position of 9.7 means I’m probably hovering around position 9,10, and 11.

So, even though I’m ranking on page one of Google (most of the time) for the keyword “Do Leg Curls Work Calves” I’m not actually getting any traffic from it.

This is why my aim is ALWAYS to rank 1,2, or 3 for an article, and preferably NUMBER ONE.

Now, going back to my “good” performing keywords I was averaging approximately a 40% click thru rate.

So, between “Seated Hamstring Curls” and “Do Leg Curls Work Calves” I have appeared in the search results 69 times (47 + 22).

Therefore, if I had a better average ranking position for these two keywords (currently 78 and 9.7) I could get more visitors to my article.

In fact, if I could get these two keywords to a 40% click thru rate (like my better performing keywords) that would mean an extra 27 visitors to my article.

So, rather than 292 visits to my article over 28 days I could have had 319 visitors.

It may not sound a lot, but let’s say you get an additional 27 visitors to 100 articles, that's an additional 2,700 visitors in 28 days.

How to Rank For “Poor Performing Keywords”

Okay, now I go to my article, “Why Do I Feel Hamstring Curls in My Calves?”

Here it is:

I then press “CTRL and F” on my keyboard (this stands for “find”)

And this little white box appears on the top right-hand side of my screen.

I then input my first “poor performing keyword” - “Seated Hamstring Curls” into the white box and press ENTER on my keyboard.

The results show 0/0.

This means that this phrase does not appear anywhere in my article.

I then read through my article and I found this:

The entire sentence reads, “Unfortunately, in my gym I only have access to a seated hamstring curl machine”

I will now change this sentence to read, “Unfortunately, in my gym I can only do SEATED HAMSTRING CURLS”.

Voila!!

I now have this “poor performing keyword” in my article.

In theory, by having this keyword appear in my article I should rank higher than position 78 in the search results.

I can look to see if there is somewhere else I can include the keyword “Seated Hamstring Curls” in my article.

However, I don’t want to overdo it (keyword stuffing).

If I can add it once or twice there’s a good chance I can start ranking higher for that phrase, thus receiving more traffic to my article.

It would be even better if I can place this phrase as a sub-heading somewhere, so an H2, H3, or H4 tag would be perfect.

These H tags are even more likely to get picked up by Google and thus improve my rankings for that keyword.

But, remember not to overdo it.

Once or Twice is fine.

I then move onto the next keyword, “Do Leg Curls Work Calves”

Once again this shows 0/0, so the phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in my article.

Therefore, I will look and find somewhere that I can potentially place this phrase in my article.

Final Thoughts

Updating your articles is a good thing.

It keeps your content fresh and Google likes this.

However, I typically try not to update for at least the first 10 months of the life of an article (remember to allow an article 8-9 months to “mature”).

That being said, this typically applies to sweeping and wholesale changes.

By this I mean, either completely rewriting an article or changing large chunks of text.

But, there is nothing wrong with giving an article 2-3 months of search engine life and then making small changes like I have pointed out here.

The aim is to start ranking higher in the results for these “poor performing keywords” and therefore producing more traffic to that article.

27 more visitors in 28 days is approximately one additional visitor a day.

And this is for just ONE ARTICLE.

So, imagine the difference this could make if you have 50, 100, 200, 500, or 1000 articles on your site.

Obviously, don’t go around changing every single article in one hit.

Plus, you should only really do this if you’re receiving a fairly decent number of impressions for particular keywords, but no clicks.

This is especially great to do with keywords that are ranking in positions 4-10 on page one of Google.

A quick change here, and a quick change there, could see you push that article up to positions 1-3 for a particular keyword.

And suddenly you’re getting more traffic.

That's Me Done.

Thank You For Reading

Partha