Google bait
This promotional tip is dedicated to Andrew Wee for popping my MBL cherry.
If you’d like to pull in some Google traffic, this tip is for you. Google bait is a post that a blogger intentionally writes to pull in Google traffic. The basic idea is that certain topics have a high volume of interest and a low volume of competition. The only real trick to this promotional technique is determining what to write about. You could go through the tedious task of looking up search terms in the Overture inventory and then searching the various engines to guage competition (my former business offered a tool called Scout to do just that). Personally, I prefer to look through my traffic logs for keyphrase trends and then pick a few concepts that I suspect might be of mass interest. I prefer this technique because I’ve learned that people type hundreds of variations of similar keyphrases and the volume of one iteration doesn’t reveal the true volume of interest. Also, if a keyphrase is appearing to be popular in my blog’s stats, it means Google already values my site for this phrase and is likely to push related traffic my way.
I’ll walk through an example of Google bait I created for this blog. I was looking through my web stats one day and I noticed that my #1 keyword occurance across all of my keyphrases was MySpace. It wasn’t much of a surprise given that MySpace is one of the largest sites in the world. I decided to write an article about how to hack a MySpace account. I chose this angle for capturing traffic around the MySpace keyword because I knew it was something people would be searching for and I had just recently read an article about phishing MySpace login info that I knew I could link to. I wrote the article on December 6th, which is more than 2 months ago. It is by far my #1 volume post receiving 6 times the page views as my #2 volume post, and 18 times more volume than my #4 post. All of my top ten most popular keyphrases are variations on “how to hack a myspace account”.
This was a great experiment for me because I am now going to start offering MySpace nuggets more regularly that are not my main posts. I don’t want my blog to become known as a MySpace resource blog, but I do want draw in potential readers by baiting Google. If the readers like me, they’ll come back or better yet subscribe to my feed.
It’s a similar concept to why blogger would cover the release of Vista or the iPhone, which is that many people will be searching for this info so the subject is bait for Google.
Have you ever written a post to bait Google for traffic? What do you think about the manipulative implications of the technique?
Comments
I really like this post. I am really into adwords, since i manage all of my company’s client’s accounts. I find it to be kinda fun; sometimes stressful when you fuck up…but oh well. ANyways, just to comment on this statement “You could go through the tedious task of looking up search terms in the Overture inventory………”, overture fucking sucks. Its pretty much down 1/2 the time, and i dont really find it to come up with any extraordinary search terms for you to add. WHat do you think?
Great post Justin!
I recall experiencing a similar situation around the time when buzz was circulating around Google’s click-fraud settlement.
I posted an article that focused on MS launching AdCenter and the spike in traffic activity that week was akin to a sensational CNN story pointing all its mid-afternoon viewers to my site.
In my case, it really was unintentional, but after reading your post, I guess mentioning a number of key players and being linky on some popular topics all in the same post really helped!
Hey Justin,
Great post.
Reading it fired off inspiration to do a related post.
I’ll xref yours.
cheers!
Jessy, I think Overture is horribly inaccurate, but it’s the only database of its kind that is publicly available (at least that I know of).
Joseph, I hope you are successful at trying to write articles that intentionally draw traffic.
Andrew, I look forward to your post! Your blog is a great resource for marketing ideas, so I take inspiring you as a compliment.