How to Get Search Traffic Without Ranking for Anything

Nicely… should you can’t win, change the guidelines.

There’s a quite simple trick for getting search site visitors for the key phrases that you simply wish to rank for—with out truly rating for them.

Enter…

One of the widespread items of promoting recommendation is to “go fish the place the fish are.” No matter services or products you wish to promote, you must observe three easy steps:

1. Work out who your ultimate clients are.
2. Discover the locations the place these persons are hanging out on-line.
3. Go to these locations and discover methods to promote your product.

Fast instance: if you wish to promote health gear, it might be good to determine the way to faucet into the r/Fitness neighborhood on Reddit, which has over 12M members.

What does it must do with search engine optimization although?

Nicely, no matter search site visitors you wish to drive to your personal web site… somebody is already getting it to theirs, proper? And their web site will not be essentially your direct competitor.

Should you personal a bagel joint in Singapore, you positively need your web site to rank in Google for “greatest bagels in Singapore.” However the pages that truly rank for this key phrase are listicles, which give readers a bunch of various ideas. So your job is to get featured in as a lot of these top-ranking listicles as attainable.

Rating for a key phrase with your personal web site isn’t the one approach to get clients from Google. Getting featured on different pages that rank for this key phrase is extremely efficient too.

I name this tactic “second-hand search site visitors”.

The underlying thought will not be new although.

You may need heard of the idea known as “Barnacle SEO,” shared by Rand Fishkin again in 2014. There’s additionally an idea known as “Surround Sound,” coined by Alex Birkett. And one other one known as “SERP Monopoly strategy” by Nick Eubanks. There’s additionally a reverse idea, known as “Rank & Rent.”

The thought behind all of those techniques is virtually the identical: if a web page will get numerous related search site visitors from Google—you must try to get your online business talked about there.

However that’s simpler stated than performed, proper?

Why would anybody hassle to function your online business on their web site?

Nicely, one easy reply is cash.

If a web site proprietor can earn a living from mentioning your online business on their web page, there’s a superb probability they’ll do it. This cash may come within the type of an affiliate fee or a flat charge for an annual or everlasting placement. Typically these items can even occur as a part of a broader partnership deal.

Getting listed without cost could be very, very arduous. Particularly so should you’re not already a giant and revered enterprise that folks naturally wish to function on their web site.

And but—it’s not utterly inconceivable to get listed for free.

Working example, we simply printed our personal “best SEO conferences” publish, so as to rank for related search queries and promote our upcoming occasion, Ahrefs Evolve Singapore.

After which we went forward and reached out to all web sites that rank for the “greatest search engine optimization conferences” key phrase and requested them so as to add Ahrefs Evolve to their listicles. Up to now 10 out of 17 featured us on their pages, with out asking for any fee in any way.

Essentially the most simple approach to execute this technique is to compile an inventory of extremely related key phrases (with excessive business potential scores), pull all of the top-ranking pages for every of them right into a spreadsheet, and begin your outreach.

However there’s one different fruitful supply of pages to get second-hand search site visitors from. These are pages which can be linking to your opponents, whereas getting an honest quantity of search site visitors themselves.

Right here’s the way to discover these pages in 3 easy steps:

1. Put the web site of your competitor in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
2. Navigate to the Backlinks report.
3. Apply the “Referring web page > Site visitors” filter.

Right here’s an instance of a web page I discovered whereas making an attempt this out for the ConvertKit web site:

As you’ll be able to see, this web page will not be about “e mail advertising” (the first matter you’d go for, should you wished to advertise an e mail advertising device). And but, this web page is receiving 2.6k guests monthly from Google (as estimated by Ahrefs), and it recommends a bunch of e mail advertising instruments to its readers.

So should you personal an e mail advertising device—like ConvertKit—you positively wish to get talked about on that web page alongside your opponents.

The ethical of this story is that you must look exterior of the matters which can be instantly related to your online business. Any web page that will get site visitors and mentions a competitor of yours ought to change into your goal.

And Ahrefs makes it tremendous straightforward to search out such pages.

That’s it.

I hope you discovered this tactic helpful. Don’t sleep on it, as a result of there’s a superb probability that your opponents received’t.