How to Bring in New Business Through Your Blog’s Hidden Back Door

(Before It's News)

Have you hit the SEO wall?

It happens when you feel like you can’t write one more blog incorporating the topics and keywords that are critical for boosting your search engine visibility.

If this is you – and even if you haven’t hit the wall yet – I suggest you start looking for your blog’s back door, and you probably have more than one back door.

The fastest way to explain this concept is to give you an example. I have a musician friend whose duo does wedding music. He has a blog where he posts short articles about music and uploads photos. Eventually, creating his content around all the keywords associated with “wedding music” became very tiresome.

Finding the back door

However, he discovered that he can get visitors to his website through various “back doors.” His back doors revolve around topics such as local:

• Wedding venues,
• Caterers, and
• Wedding planners.

Here’s what happened. When he started writing about specific venues, caterers, planners and other services related to the wedding industry, he found that his website would come up in searches for these other services. Further, his site is often the only wedding music provider site that gets onto these back-door search results pages, unlike what happens with a simple “wedding music” search, where every musician in the state pops up.

Let me push this one step further. It’s very important that you open these back doors by using specific, long-tail keywords. Since we’ve used an example from the wedding industry, this means mentioning the names of individual wedding venues, caterers and wedding planners, not just using the most generic terms.

Put on your thinking cap

The basic process for this is to brainstorm all of the other products or services that your customer or client needs. If you need help casting a wider net to find related businesses, turn to industry publications and other directories that will provide you with some clues.

When you have a comprehensive list of these related products and services, capture all the keywords that those providers would be using. You probably know many of the businesses that provide these products and services already, so visit their sites and glean their keywords and use the Google keyword tool. Don’t forget to focus these keywords as narrowly as possible, e.g. use long-tail keywords with names of local communities, if that would be appropriate.

At this point, all that’s left to do is to come up with some blog topics centered around these back door keywords and get them slotted into your blog’s editorial calendar.

These tactics can be especially productive in the local search world. Let’s go through a quick exercise with a local print shop. The printer should take some time, review the kinds of print jobs received over the last year or so and rank them by how important they are to the business. A printer might do some jobs that go into bulk mailings or marketing brochures, for example.

Other opportunities open up

This would tell the printer that some of his potential clients might be looking for information on mailing rates, fulfillment services or marketing consultants. With that information the printer could start blogging on topics that relate to those other service providers.

Or maybe even better, the printer could approach those other businesses and ask them to do a guest blog. That favor might be returned and the printer would benefit even more. These are the kinds of authority-building strategies that will always help boost your SEO, no matter what kinds of tweaks Google makes.

Do you see the possibilities here? Honestly, they are almost unlimited, just be creative and look at your market niche within its bigger setting.

The post How to Bring in New Business Through Your Blog’s Hidden Back Door appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

Ramon Ray, Editor & Technology Evangelist, Smallbiztechnology.com
http://www.twitter.com/ramonray | http://www.facebook.com/smallbiztechnology
[email protected]

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