3 Ways to Build Organic Traffic Without Backlinks

Google’s stricter and stricter search engine algorithm updates have got us all scared out of our minds to practice any kind of back linking that goes beyond the occasional reference in a guest post author bio.

It’s no wonder: countless sites who were performing well in SEO and raking in the big bucks as a result literally lost their traffic over night (along with their incomes) and haven’t gotten it back.

And no one wants that to happen to them again.

But for newbie online marketers, seeing the surge in traffic after a quality guest post with a backlink makes chasing a backlink-building strategy all the more tempting—especially if they feel they can get away with it for a while.

While some backlinking is okay and won’t get your site punished, it seems the moment you start to focus on it as a strategy for traffic is the moment your site rankings start to plummet and you lose all that valuable rankings you worked so hard to earn.

So now we avoid backlinks like the plague.

Fortunately, there are three solid ways you can build your organic traffic numbers and your search ranking results without risking any consequences that come with the black hat SEO practices search engines frown on.

 

(P.S. If you'd like to download a free checklist of 31 blog traffic secrets click here or the image below)

 

1. Add Schema Markup to Your Website

To put it simply, schema markup is code you place on your landing pages so when they show up in search results, the search engine displays the information that’s most relevant, increasing your click through rate.

Here’s how it can help your web pages stand out.

 

Be honest, the ones with schema markup are the ones more likely to get your clicks, right?

Right.

And they’d be more likely to actually show up in search results too.

According to Searchmetrics, more than one-third of the sites that show up in Google rankings use some sort of schema markup, but of all the websites on the internet, only 0.3% use Google-approved schema markup.

This is how it works: when you add schema markup around a word or a phrase, it tells the search engine what those words or phrases mean.

Otherwise, when a search engine parses through your article, it just acknowledges the existence of those words, not their meaning.

Schema markup can help you define your location, your pricing, user reviews, and the main topic of your website: all factors that would help a user know what you’re all about before they click through to your site.

For an article, you can markup things like title, author, publication date, main image, url, and a featured section.

Google has an easy-to-follow Structured Data Markup Helper that leads you step-by-step through the schema markup process based on the type of items you want to boost your search engine rankings on.

 

 

 

2. Write a Reconsideration Request to Google

If you’ve got a niche site you’ve been running for a while that saw some negative fall out from one or a few of Google’s search algorithm updates, all hope is not lost—even if you were involved in black hat backlink building.

The people working at Google understand that you might have accidentally hired a shady agency to take care of your site marketing, or that you might have just been building links in happy ignorance only to be shocked to find out that what you were doing was wrong.

For these kinds of cases, they’ve created a reconsideration process that gives you a chance to prove yourself and show that your website offers quality content without spamming the internet.

However, getting your website reconsidered and the punishment action removed isn’t nearly as simple as writing a note that says, “Please forgive me Google. I promise to behave better in the future.”

First, you need to figure out which manual actions Google has taken against your site in relation to your accidentally excessive back links by checking it out in your webmaster tools.

Once you’ve got that down, remove as many of your excessive, non-quality backlinks as you possibly can.

If you can’t remove them, you need to at least disavow them.

(Just know that simply disavowing all your links because it’s easier than going through the work of removing them will not get your request approved: you need to prove you’ve made a good-faith effort to manually remove as many backlinks as possible. Search Engine Watch put together a nice guide to help you get started on removing backlinks.)

Once that’s done, put together some examples of how you’ve removed all the rogue links and stopped black hat SEO activity.

If you hired a shady agency by mistake, tell Google the full story and let them know that you’ve hired a better agency or how you’re taking care of it yourself.

If you were the one to blame, own up to it, but tell them the techniques you’re sticking to now to promote your site.

If you put in the required elbow grease to undo your past SEO mistakes and are honest in your reconsideration note, there’s no reason Google wouldn’t grant your request and take away your manual actions, giving you back the boost of traffic you need to make your site more successful.

 

ATTENTION: DISCOVER 31 SECRET HACKS TO GET MORE WEBSITE TRAFFIC

 

3. Get Serious About Content Distribution

If content is king, then distribution is queen: it might be an over-stated mantra, but it’s true.

As a marketing consultant, I see far too many content producers broadcast their content over a handful of social media channels with false hopes that that’s all it takes to draw in new, quality audience members.

The need for quality, engaging content is a given.

But unfortunately, all too many niche marketers ignore or skim over the need for in-depth, strategic distribution of their current and past content as a key strategy for building quality, information-hungry traffic to their sites.

After all, what good does it do to put in hours creating killer content if you only get traffic from it for a week after it publishes?

It does some good, to be certain, but the potential is nearly limitless.

But to reach those limitless possibilities of exponential shares and free, incoming traffic, you’ve got to have a planned, strategic content distribution plan that tells you what to post: where and when.

But distribution includes far more than social media.

It includes guest blogging, inter-linking your own website, your email list, and even events.

A good way to keep yourself on track with content distribution is by using a spreadsheet tracker so you can plan which pieces of content you’ll share where, and when.

Tracking this on a weekly or monthly basis keeps you accountable to yourself and lets you plan in advance what the best pieces of content to share will be in correlation to your marketing strategies and product launches.

 

ATTENTION: DISCOVER 31 SECRET HACKS TO GET MORE WEBSITE TRAFFIC

 

Finding New Ways to Build Traffic as Niche Marketers

As a niche marketer, boosting your quality organic traffic without backlinks is all about planning and strategy.

What are some of the best ways you’ve found to boost your organic traffic without working on backlinks?

Buyer Keywords List: 220 Red Hot Keywords With Buyer Intent

Estimated Reading Time: 1:00 minute

When carrying out niche research it's also important to do keyword research in order to see what your target audience are searching for online.

It's not enough just to target broad keywords with vague relevance to what you are offering you need to look to target specific keywords that will actually convert into sales.

One of the best ways to do this is to target "buyer keywords" or keywords that show buyer intent, i.e. that someone is in the phase of being ready to buy and aren't just browsing or vaguely interested.

The most obvious ones are search phrases that include "buy", "review", "discount", "cheap" and so on but actually there are hundreds more search terms that show buyer intent that most people just never think of.

Below I share a buyer keyword list of 220 red hot keywords with buyers intent.

 

(P.S. If you'd like to download a free list of 220 profitable buyer keywords click here or the image below)

 

 

What You'll Learn:

• 220 keywords that people use when they are close to making a buying decision - use these in your content to increase conversions and make more sales.

• The keyword phrases you should use on your site to convert visitors into buyers.

• How to avoid using vague keywords with no buyer intent that people use when just browsing for information.

 

 

Hopefully this has given you some good buyer keyword ideas that you can use on your sites.

Most of these are not actively targeted by 90% of internet marketers because they focus on the obvious buyer intent search terms like "buy", "review" and "cheap".

Go hunting and you'll find some golden nugget keywords you can dominate.

OTHER POPULAR NICHE HACKS CONTENT:

• 1000+ Profitable Niches 'Hacked'
• Collection of Ultimate Guides
• 81 Weird Niches

23 Places to Find the Best Keywords In Your Niche (& 29 Screenshots Showing You How to Get Them)

I don't know about you, but every time I have to come up with a list of keywords for a content campaign using only my brain, the results are pretty lame.

For example, if I had to create an ad campaign for a game development company, I'd come up with some real gems like 'get a game developed' or 'turn my game idea into an Android app.'Genius work there, Chelsea. (Hopefully you're a little better at thisthan I am.)

Needless to say, it usually doesn't take long for me to realize that I've got to start looking elsewhere to see what keywords other competitors are having success with or to see what words and phrases the target audiences actually uses when they talk online.

To top it off, I usually don't work with companies or projects that are ready to buy into Google's AdWords tool right away, preferring to beef up their organic SEO to see what truly works before dropping their hard-earned bucks on advertising.

And as a solopreneur niche site owner myself, this is the approach I take in my own keyword-building strategies.

I want my new site to be a huge success and all, but the fact that it isn't yielding five figures per month yet means I've got to watch where I spend my money... which is not going to be on keyword research.

Fortunately, there's loads of places online where you can uncover the truly valuable keywords you'll want to integrate into your content strategy so you can beef up your organic traffic.

Some sources are great for potential customers doing research-based searches, and others will provide you with those golden keywords that belong to searchers who are ready to buy and already have their credit cards out of their wallets.

That being said, you might not want to thoroughly investigate every single one of these 23 resources...

It'll take you all week and the point is to create a keyword strategy that's actionable, not one that freezes you in your tracks.

Read through the list and pick 2-3 sources that resonate with you and get going. (And if you don't mind, come back and let us know how it worked for you.)

 

HEY: GET YOUR PRINTABLE COPY OF 220 BUYERS KEYWORDS LIST HERE

 

Here's what you'll learn:

• Where to uncover keywords from Google, even if they don't hand them over in Google Analytics anymore
• How to find purchase-ready keywords from leading eCommerce sites
• A Chrome hack that'll show you the exact keywords your competitors are highlighting
• Where to find high-emotion key phrases
• How to use electronic versions of old-school tools (MetaGlossary and a thesaurus) to your advantage

 

 

1. Google Auto-Complete

When you go to Google’s home page, or even from a browser’s search bar, Google starts to automatically fill in what it thinks you want to know almost instantly after you start typing.

The idea is to help users search faster and get to the information they need quicker.

But Google tells you two things as a niche marketer: what phrases your target audience most commonly searches, and what Google perceives to be some of the most profitable keywords from an AdWords perspective. (Hey, they're in it for the business too.)

By starting with a single keyword that’s central to your site’s mission, you can get an entire list of long-tail keyword phrases that have a higher purchase intent than phrases you could have guessed on your own.

Here's what you get when you start typing in affiliate marketing:

 

 

(You can check out Yahoo's and Bing's autocomplete too, but the results are mostly the same.)

 

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Google tells you two things as a niche marketer: what phrases your target audience most commonly searches, and what Google perceives to be some of the most profitable keywords (Click here to tweet this)

 

 

2. Google Related Searches

While you’re checking out what kind of gold nuggets Google’s auto-complete feature has to offer, scroll down to the bottom of the page to see what other long-tail keywords people are using in conjunction to the one you’ve just typed in to find the information you’re looking for.

These will help you expand your thinking, but they may also serve as an important red flag so you can know when you’re beating down the wrong path.

If none of the related searches relate to the topic or goals of your niche site, you might want to consider another direction in your long-tail keyword strategy.

 

 

 

 

3. Using Chrome's Sneaky Shortcut for Competitor Keywords

The key to success is always staying one step ahead of the competition, but sometimes in order to get ahead, you need to understand what your competition is doing that’s beating you to the ground.

In terms of keywords, you won’t be able to uncover their keyword strategy 100%, but you will be able to figure out the trends and long-tail terms they’re going after.

Open Chrome and type in a keyword phrase that you’d love to rank for and click on one of the first results.

When the page opens, hold down “command + option + u” simultaneously (“control + alt + u” on a PC), and you’ll see the page's data pop up on the bottom of the screen or in a new tap. 

Hit “command + f” and search for different tags like <title>, <H1>, <H2>, or <keyword> to see what’s put between these tags.

Once you’ve got an idea of keywords they're trying to highlight, skim through the content to look for long-tail variations.

 

 

 

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Find out how to use Chrome's sneaky shortcut to find competitor #keywords for #SEO(Click here to Tweet This)

 

 

 

 

4. Amazon Product Listings

Hands-down, Amazon is the king of organic search for keywords that drive the purchase of physical goods.

If you’re using your niche site to sell things people can use for themselves, give as gifts, or need for any other purpose, you’d be a fool not to troll around Amazon for a while to see what kind of SEO keyword work they’ve got going on.

When you search for a specific product (you can pick anything related to your site), look for keyword patterns in the results menu in the left column, the main header and supporting text, the list of results, breadcrumbs, and items listed.

 

 

When you click on a specific product, look at the product description, what other customers bought, product ads from other sites, the top-rated reviews, and customer Q&A.

 

 

 

 

HEY: GET YOUR PRINTABLE COPY OF 220 BUYERS KEYWORDS LIST HERE

 

5. eBay Keywords

eBay is not a bad runner-up to Amazon in terms of dominating online retail or creating an easily searchable online marketplace.

By following the same steps you did with Amazon’s product listings, you’ll be able to find even more keyword patterns and long-tail keyword options to fill out your product descriptions and advertising strategies to get the traffic with the highest buyer intent.

And the benefit of eBay in particular is that it’s a little bit less regulated than Amazon in terms of what product sellers write in their descriptions, so you’ll often come across something a little more candid than you’d expect on Amazon.

 

 

 

6. Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world, and it is #4 on Google with absolutely no paid advertising.

Wikipedia has one of the best organic SEO backends on the planet, so taking an effort to mimic them with relevant, internal keyword linking is huge.

If you’re in a rut and getting stuck with the same basic keyword phrases over and over again, check out Wikipedia for some relevant, linked terms in the intro paragraphs on your given subject. You’ll also get some hints from the table of contents and any other side menus on how to delve deeper into the topic at hand with linkable, effective keywords.

 

 

 

7. Yahoo Answers

Normally, people go to Yahoo Answers in desperation to find answers to their question that they weren’t able to find with a quick look around the web via a search engine.

If the question and answers are relatively recent, this can be a gold mine for showing you what your target audience wants to know but isn’t finding answers for (tweet this)—and you can create the content to fix that problem.

Further, when people go through the effort of creating and/or signing into an account online just to ask a question, you can bet that there’s some high emotional value attached to it, which means they’re desperate to know something, and are probably willing to spend some money for a quality solution.

 

 

HEY: GET YOUR PRINTABLE COPY OF 220 BUYERS KEYWORDS LIST HERE

 

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Find out what your niche audiences wants to know but can't find answers to with @YahooAnswers (Click here to Tweet this)

 

 

8. Product Reviews

Whether you offer products or business services for sale on your website, you can search the web for hot review sites on either.

If you’re selling products, Amazon and eBay are gold mines.

If you offer services, you might have to dig a little deeper, but reviews of different companies and service providers are still relatively easy to find. 

The best things to look out for are common themes in dissatisfaction and satisfaction.

Why are all the five-star reviewers so thrilled and what do they keep talking about? And why are all the two-star and one-star reviewers so disappointed? What do they keep mentioning that they wish wasn’t lacking or would have made their experience with the product or service better?

Borrowing this kind of sticky copy for your own on-page content will not only increase readability and conversions, but it will also help in your SEO rankings for prospective customers who like to do serious research before they make a purchase.

 

 

 

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When mining product reviews, look out for common themes in dissatisfaction and satisfaction. (Click here to Tweet this)

 

 

9. Customer Service & Sales Reps

If you’re a small niche site, you are the customer service, sales rep, content producer, and site owner all rolled into one.

But whatever your niche business setup is, there’s some real data to be uncovered in what your customer service has to deal with once someone is sold on a service, or questions sales have to answer before someone becomes convinced to buy.

Look through your strings of email conversations with current and potential customers to uncover common trends in your audience’s top concerns about your product or service. If you have a sales rep or two (or even an entire team), send out a free-form questionnaire asking them to write in the most common problems and questions they deal with.

The recurring phrases you see are the ones you want to latch on to.

 

 

10. Your Site’s Internal Search

Google might have stopped handing over all the juicy data on the keyword phrases people search for to actually get to your site, but your site’s internal search bar is fair game.

By looking at the list of search terms of items people want to find immediately after they get to one of your landing pages, it’s a golden ticket to improving your on-site SEO and giving your prospective customers what they want right away.

To activate data from your site's internal search bar in your Google Analytics reporting, go to your Admin panel and click on 'View Settings' in the 'View' menu all the way to the right. Scroll down until you see 'Site Search Settings' and click to turn it on. Enter the query parameter used by your search bar and click on 'Save.'

You'll be able to access the search terms people use within your site under the 'Behavior' menu option in your main dashboard.

 

 

 

11. Google Correlate

While it doesn’t show you exactly what your particular audience is searching, Google Correlategoes after phrases that are the most highly correlated with whatever you type in.

Some are home runs and can give you great ideas for expanding your keyword strategy, and others are just there because Correlate reads numbers rather than context.

 

 

 

12. Free Book Previews

If your niche is in a hotly-published topic, check out some of the best-selling books that have already been written and are selling well.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to look up a niche rockstar on Amazon and check out the ‘Look Inside’ Kindle preview.

Make sure you devour the table of contents—it’ll give you insight into what the successful niche masterminds in your space are successfully writing on, and you can use their topic and keyword strategies as inspiration for your own content marketing.

 

 

 

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Amazon Kindle book previews are great places to uncover niche keywords (Click here to Tweet this)

 

 

 

 

13. Google Search for ‘[your keyword]’ + ‘most popular……’

If you do a Google search for your main keyword followed by “most popular posts/sites/articles”, you’ll uncover a treasure cove of content ideas and long-tail keywords to utilize.

This tip is particularly effective if you combine it with tip number three and you use Chrome to uncover the long-tail keywords embedded into titles, headlines, and sub headings—not just for your direct competitors, but for niche-related websites that share a similar audience.

 

 

 

14. Wordle

This tool makes a word map of the most recurring phrases in a piece of content.

If there's a piece of content (whether on your site or somewhere else) that you know gets a lot of traffic from organic search, you can copy and paste the content of the post into Wordle’s ‘Create” screen.

What it leaves you with is a word map showing the most commonly used words within the blogfeed as a whole or that piece of content in particular. Figuring out ways to put these top-ranking words together will help you come up with some long-tail keywords that will generate more organic traffic for you.

Tip: sometimes it's a little slow to work, but the results are usually worth the wait.

 

 

HEY: GET YOUR PRINTABLE COPY OF 220 BUYERS KEYWORDS LIST HERE

 

15. Press Release Sites

Go to any popular press release site and search for a phrase that’s popular among your niche audience.

The results of this search are two-fold: you’ll be able to uncover what’s new that’s going on in your niche industry, and you’ll be able to see what web PR experts in your niche deem asrankable keywords for the search engines to pick up on.

Because no one regularly goes to these PR sites for the simple joy of it, smart PR reps posting articles there know they have to optimize their text for keyword ranking (tweet this) to get the news in front of the eyes of their target audience.

 

 

 

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16. MetaGlossary.com

MetaGlossary’s tagline above their search bar is “find meaning, not just links.” The only catch is, it works as more of a dictionary for one-word queries, rather than a long-tail keyword phrase.

When you do a search, it renders a list of similar single-word keywords and a list of related terms that can really help you expand your current list of long-tail keywords by adding those related terms to your original word or brainstorm searches around them that you can produce content for.

 

 

 

17. Thesaurus

Yes, cracking open a book (or, you know, an electronic version of one) can provide a new perspective on alternative thought patterns people might have when they’re searching online for a solution you offer.

For example, not everyone calls a coffee maker a coffee maker. To some people, it’s a coffee pot, a Keurig, or a Mr. Coffee. This is a simplistic example, but you get the idea.

 

 

 

18. Amazon Auto-Fill

A lot like Google’s Auto-Complete function, Amazon’s Auto-Fill guesses what you want to look for and buy based on what you’ve searched for before and the words you’re typing into a box.

If you want a totally fresh look at it, log out of your Amazon account and use the search bar as if you were a totally new visitor.

Even if you don’t sell physical products, you can still get ideas for longer-tail, purchase-ready keywords people use when they’re looking for information—one of the great things about Amazon is that it’s a major book seller that deals out loads of information on a daily basis in every niche market you can think of.

 

 

 

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19. Blog Comments & Industry Forums

If you’re wanting to establish yourself as a leader in your niche market, you should already be participating in discussions on leading blogs, forums, or the more modernized version of it all: Twitter chats.

Even though the recurring themes and long-tail keywords here might not be buy-based, they are good for creating lead-in, researched-based conversational content, and give you a clue on some topics that are hot at the moment.

 

 

 

20. Ubersuggest

Rather than doing all the mind-numbing work of figuring out all the different search possibilities someone could search for and writing down the results by playing with Google Auto-Complete, you can type one term into Ubersuggest and instantly get a long list of the top online searches related to your keyword.

For example, I typed in ‘personal finance’ and Ubersuggest gave back to me a list of 10 of the top phrases with “personal finance” in them, 10 of the top phrases with ‘personal finance’ plus another word… and then it goes through the entire alphabet.

It gives you ten of the most popular long tail keywords with ‘personal finance’ with a word starting with the letter A, then B, then C, and so on. And then it does numbers 0-9… pretty comprehensive.

And for any of the terms you want to know more you, you can click for four more related terms.

 

 

 

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Type one term into Ubersuggest and instantly get a long list of the top online searches related to your keyword (Click here to Tweet this)

 

 

 

21. Soolve

Soolve is an interesting tool in that it shows you the top searches related to the words you enter across Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, Answers, YouTube, Bing and Yahoo simultaneously.

Landing on Soolve, you get a blank page, but the instant you type a letter in, you start getting results. This can be a good way to make sure you haven’t left any keywords out, or figuring out how to allocate your advertising budget across different search channels.

 

 

 

 

22. SEM Rush

If you’ve got a full-fledged niche website that gathers traffic from paid ads, SEM Rush can be a great way to make sure you’re not letting your competitors get away with ranking for keywords you’ve accidentally left out.

Especially if you’re just breaking into ad strategies, you can enter one of your competitor’s urls and see what kind of organic and ad-based traffic they’re getting, and for which keywords.

 

 

HEY: GET YOUR PRINTABLE COPY OF 220 BUYERS KEYWORDS LIST HERE

 

23. Keyword Tool Dominator

This site gives you three free searches to do research on per day. It uses the auto-complete features of Google, Amazon and YouTube to to figure out the long-tail keywords most commonly used in search that are related to the terms you type in.