Tipping Point Optimizations: Targeted Tactics to 10x Your Traffic

Need organic traffic fast, but struggling to find the time to invest in content marketing? 

Let’s face it, creating new content is an investment. It takes time, team resources, creativity and writing skill. And for many busy entrepreneurs and small business owners, it’s just one more task to add to the to-do list. While adding new content to your site – at a reasonable, manageable cadence – is important, you’ve likely already got site content that is thisclose to ranking on Page 1. 

For CanIRank Full Service clients, we use a process we’ve developed to grab ‘quick win’ opportunities that deliver relevant Page 1 rankings and traffic – without taking up the time required to develop new content. 

If you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to improving your site content – but want to drive organic traffic quickly, this is the process for you.

Tipping Point Optimizations

Finding opportunities and making strategic changes are the key concepts behind ‘Tipping Point Optimizations’. There’s an old joke among SEOs, the best place to hide a body is on Page 2 of the search results. Meaning, the vast majority of searchers never go beyond the Page 1 results – unless they’re incredibly motivated or looking for a specific site or piece of information. 

If your content isn’t already ranking for keywords between positions 1 and 10 – you’re not driving organic traffic to your site through search engines. Luckily, you can bump up those Page 2 or Page 3 rankings without creating new content. By optimizing your existing content, you’re making smart use of content you’ve already created. And when you do get a Page 1 position, you’ll see an increase in organic traffic by about 10x.  This tactic is one of the fastest ways to gain sustainable new traffic – with content you already have. 

Need a refresh on the finer points of content optimization? Read this post on optimizations strategies with a step-by-step how-to.

Tipping Point Optimizations Step by Step

1. Identify your ‘tipping point’ rankings positions – any keywords that are currently ranking between positions 11 – 29. CanIRank’s ‘Improve My Rankings’ tool refreshes weekly with your most recent rankings positions changes – just click on ‘Rank’ in the table below the tool to sort the keywords.
   
2. Filter by URL to make sure you’re not cannibalizing other potentially valuable rankings positions with your optimization. I.e. if the page already has a Page 1 position for a keyword with 200 searches a month, and a $3.23 value, you don’t want to optimize it for a keyword with fewer searches, or less value.
   
3. Choose a keyword that is relevant to the page content, and has a good balance of search volume and CPC, or cost per click.
   It’s also important to consider the likely ‘user intent’ behind the query – will the keyword you’re optimizing for drive relevant, motivated traffic to your website? In the image above, there are several ‘tipping point’ keyword positions that seem more likely to drive higher organic traffic volume.
   Consider these two options: ‘Liberally lean’ is searched 1,600 times a month, and ‘is there a conservative search engine’, is searched 170 times a month. Both keywords are more valuable in terms of traffic potential – but in both of these cases, the intent behind the keyword isn’t the right fit for this content.
4. Click the keyword to open up the detailed report. You’ll find data-driven insights into exactly what ranking pages are doing – from the related terms that are being used (and whether or not they’re already included in your content) to which page elements they’ve included the primary keyword in.
   Each keyword report shares a high-level summary of what changes you’ll need to make to your existing content to have a higher probability of ranking on Page 1.
   The heatmap included in the report shows how your relevancy and strength scores compared to rankings URLs. The more green that appears in the Ranking URLs section, the harder it will likely be to rank higher for this term.
5. The keyword report lists related terms to work into your content, and how often you should use your target keyword compared to usage of ranking URLs.
   
   Related terms that are already in your content will have a red checkmark, while those with grey x’s are not yet included.
   
   You’ll also find suggestions for frequently asked questions that are related to the keyword. Addressing these questions will further help establish your content as ‘comprehensive’ and semantically-relevant. You’ll find additional questions to answer by doing a Google search for your target keyword, and looking for the ‘People Also Ask’ box on Page 1. (And in answering these questions, you might even snag a valuable ‘People Also Ask’ position for your own content.)
6. After implementing your content changes, use the ‘Promote My Content’ tool to find relevant promotional opportunities like roundups, forums, or industry outlets. Promoting your content helps kick-start initial traffic, and ensures that Google caches your changes – so your rankings increase more quickly.
   

Tipping Point Optimizations, the Fast Track to Organic Traffic 

Tipping Point Optimizations aren’t a substitute for adding new content to your site, but they will help you get better use out of work you’ve already done. And as you add new content to your site, you’ll have new Tipping Point opportunities to pursue. 

This tactic can be used for any page on your website that has a tipping point ranking, but if you’re looking to optimize pages that are important to your sales funnel, view these other optimizations processes that are specifically designed to help you turn site visitors into customers. 

• Page Optimizations 101
• High Potential Page Optimizations 
• Trilogy Optimizations

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