It’s easy enough to write an article and throw it up on your website to let Google know that you still exist and have an active website. It’s quite a different task to actually drive organic traffic with that content.

I’m not talking about viral marketing. That works, but it isn’t very reliable, and often takes many failed attempts for every success. I’m talking about a more sensible, more reproducible approach.

The Solution

Write something that you know for sure people are searching for and want to read. This is where it’s good to have a little bit of SEO knowledge.

The tool you need to do this is SEMRush.

The Method

Go to Google, and think about your industry niche. What are the common questions? Google them and see what comes up. It can be anything at all that is relevant to your website. Most of the time, there are hundreds of pieces of content addressing any question you can think of. The big opening for you is that all of them are usually either completely mediocre or downright awful.

Find the top ranking article for that question, take the headline, and plug it into the Keyword Overview search in SEMRush to check the traffic for that phrase. The kind of question phrase you are looking for is something like this:

 

Note that the volume is extremely high for this long-tail search phrase.

What you do next is critical. Firstly, you need to read all of the top ranking articles for this phrase. Then you need to evaluate whether or not you have the capability, time, and knowledge to make a better answer to this search query than all of these articles.

If no, then keep looking. If yes, then title your new content with the exact search phrase that has a high volume in Google, and proceed to create the absolute best and most authoritative piece of content on this topic available on the internet. Make sure you adjust your title tag to include this phrase as well.

Promote this across social media, to other blogs, and build a few links to it by referencing it in guest posts.

The Result

If you were successful in making the piece of content the people like best to answer this question, certain metrics like your visitors’ time-on-page and bounce rates will be favorable, which will boost you in the results for that term, get you cited by other writers on the web, and eventually allow you to capture the majority of that traffic, unless someone else comes along ad does it better than you.

This will not only get you visitors, but help your reputation as an expert and an influencer in your chosen industry or niche.

If you are the top authority regarding a common problem, you stand to gain more attention and acclaim than through the mastery of the obscure technicalities that only other experts really know about.

To get the masses onto your website, give the masses what they are already looking for.