How to Get Search Traffic Without Ranking for Anything

Getting to the apical of Google can beryllium rather slow. Especially truthful for small, caller websites. And the contention tin often beryllium excessively strong, which makes it rather improbable for you to outrank your rivals successful the first place.

Well… if you can’t win, alteration the rules.

There’s a precise elemental instrumentality for getting hunt postulation for the keywords that you privation to fertile for—without really ranking for them.

Enter…

One of the astir communal pieces of selling proposal is to “go food wherever the food are.” Whatever merchandise oregon work you privation to sell, you person to travel 3 elemental steps:

1. Figure retired who your perfect customers are.
2. Find the places wherever those radical are hanging retired online.
3. Go to those places and find ways to promote your product.

Quick example: if you privation to merchantability fittingness gear, it would beryllium bully to fig retired however to pat into the r/Fitness assemblage connected Reddit, which has implicit 12M members.

What does it person to bash with SEO though?

Well, immoderate hunt postulation you privation to thrust to your ain website… idiosyncratic is already getting it to theirs, right? And their website is not needfully your nonstop competitor.

If you ain a bagel associated successful Singapore, you decidedly privation your website to fertile successful Google for “best bagels successful Singapore.” But the pages that really fertile for this keyword are listicles, which springiness readers a clump of antithetic suggestions. So your occupation is to get featured successful arsenic galore of those top-ranking listicles arsenic possible.

Ranking for a keyword with your ain website isn’t the lone mode to get customers from Google. Getting featured connected other pages that fertile for this keyword is incredibly effectual too.

I telephone this maneuver “second-hand hunt traffic”.

The underlying thought is not caller though.

You mightiness person heard of the conception called “Barnacle SEO,” shared by Rand Fishkin backmost successful 2014. There’s besides a conception called “Surround Sound,” coined by Alex Birkett. And different 1 called “SERP Monopoly strategy” by Nick Eubanks. There’s besides a reverse concept, called “Rank & Rent.”

The thought down each of these tactics is practically the same: if a leafage gets a batch of applicable hunt postulation from Google—you person to effort and get your concern mentioned there.

Source

But that’s easier said than done, right?

Why would anyone fuss to diagnostic your concern connected their website?

Well, 1 elemental reply is money.

If a website proprietor tin marque wealth from mentioning your concern connected their page, there’s a bully accidental they’ll bash it. This wealth could travel successful the signifier of an affiliate committee oregon a level interest for an yearly oregon imperishable placement. Sometimes these things tin besides hap arsenic portion of a broader concern deal.

Getting listed for escaped is very, precise hard. Especially truthful if you’re not already a large and respected concern that radical people privation to diagnostic connected their website.

And yet—it’s not completely intolerable to get listed for free.

Case successful point, we conscionable published our ain “best SEO conferences” post, successful bid to fertile for applicable hunt queries and beforehand our upcoming event, Ahrefs Evolve Singapore.

And past we went up and reached retired to each websites that fertile for the “best SEO conferences” keyword and asked them to adhd Ahrefs Evolve to their listicles. So acold 10 retired of 17 featured america connected their pages, without asking for immoderate outgo whatsoever.

The astir straightforward mode to execute this strategy is to compile a database of highly applicable keywords (with precocious business imaginable scores), propulsion each the top-ranking pages for each of them into a spreadsheet, and commencement your outreach.

But there’s 1 different fruitful root of pages to get second-hand hunt postulation from. These are pages that are linking to your competitors, portion getting a decent magnitude of hunt postulation themselves.

Here’s however to find these pages successful 3 elemental steps:

1. Put the website of your rival successful Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
2. Navigate to the Backlinks report.
3. Apply the “Referring leafage > Traffic” filter.

Here’s an illustration of a leafage I recovered portion trying this retired for the ConvertKit website:

As you tin see, this leafage is not astir “email marketing” (the superior taxable you’d spell for, if you wanted to beforehand an email selling tool). And yet, this leafage is receiving 2.6k visitors per period from Google (as estimated by Ahrefs), and it recommends a clump of email selling tools to its readers.

So if you ain an email selling tool—like ConvertKit—you decidedly privation to get mentioned connected that leafage alongside your competitors.

The motivation of this communicative is that you should look outside of the topics that are instantly applicable to your business. Any leafage that gets postulation and mentions a rival of yours should go your target.

And Ahrefs makes it ace casual to find such pages.

That’s it.

I anticipation you recovered this maneuver useful. Don’t slumber connected it, due to the fact that there’s a bully accidental that your competitors won’t.