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Shaping query traffic for new keywords

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 20, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

20-25% of all queries every month have supposedly never been seen by the major search engines before. In a search world that counts in excess of 7,000,000,000 queries per month, where do these 1.4 to 1.75 billion new queries come from? It certainly doesn’t come from bogus link anchor text tests.

Traditional advertisers could tell you in a heartbeat how so many new queries are generated, but I suspect that most SEOs would be hard put to say anything for a minute. We as a community don’t really talk about building query traffic. Telling people what to search for is a growing trend in traditional advertising and public relations but the SEO industry has failed to grasp the value in the concept.

There are three major sources of new search traffic:

1. News events
2. Advertising and promotions
3. Grass roots movements

You can actually help shape query spaces by mobilizing resources for all three sources.

For example, you can create news or react to news and in doing so create interest in a specific expression or term. A few people do this effectively, most people don’t even try. I’m not talking about publishing press releases on PR Web or 24-7. I’m talking about putting your voice in front of the public.

As with all methods of promotion there are potentials for abuse in this approach (in fact, I suspect certain black hats will figure this out very quickly). Nonetheless, speaking up in a public forum empowers you to create interest in a query, provided you shape your message in a compelling fashion.

We have dozens of advertising and promotional resources to work with but one area where I see little to no message shaping is in pay-per-click advertising. PPC opportunists chase keywords and click-throughs without really optimizing for the organic queries that they can dominate. Just because you don’t rank well for “tropical rain forest vacation packages” doesn’t mean you cannot tell people (subtly or directly) to search for “great deals in tropical vacation arrangements” if you dominate that query.

Can you do something like that in PPC? Yes and no. You have to be crafty about crafting your messages. It also helps to dominate short expressions in the long tail (of which there are plenty). There may be, after all, people like me who — for one reason or another — will search on domains that appear in PPC ads rather than click through the ads. Maybe that’s just me, but I don’t think so.

Other Web advertising media still exist and provide opportunities for building query traffic: banner advertising is very popular but you can always buy a blog post that doesn’t actually include a link….

The point is that you can be creative with your online marketing and promotion, rather than agonizing over whether two links to the same site on one page will both pass anchor text (yes, they can, but you have to know how to do these kinds of tests right to see where, when, and why that happens).

But don’t discount the grass roots effect. Those quilting circles where hard-core quilters share ideas and resources produce a lot of interesting suggestions for searches. People who share passions, interests, hobbies, professions, or anything in common — such that there are enough of them to come together to talk and help each other grow in their avocations — spread new query expressions like viruses. Tapping into grass roots promotion is true viral marketing. It’s viral because someone takes your message, reshapes it, and passes it on.

But you don’t have to rely upon the viral method to get your message into the hands of the unnamed masses. You can speak to them directly by advertising in their little program booklets, by circulating flyers, by buying ads in the menus they read at lunch time, by putting your message, “Want to know more about Michael Martinez? Search for Michael Martinez on Yahoo!” in front of people.

You can do this both online and offline. Online, you can offer gadgets, widgets, and whatchamacallits to anyone who wants to put them on their Web sites. Instead of placing spammy links in those things, display your domain name with your tag line (”Worlds of imagination on the Web - Xenite.Org”). Tell people to search for you, not to search for whatever keywords are so competitive you cannot rank in them.

Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be difficult and time-consuming. Just because no one is searching for a query today doesn’t mean the query is not worth optimizing for. The deciding factor is whether you can create value in the query. Other people create value in new queries every month to the tune of more than 1 billion new queries.

This is an idea I’ve shared with people through the years and I rarely see it implemented. If nothing else, that means that the few of you who take this advice will be far, far ahead of the rest of the field.