Using current events to win more traffic

One the biggest benefits of using a blog as a business platform is that the content is dynamic, which means it gets indexed quickly by search engines. Do you ever turn this to your advantage when it comes to current events?

Volcanic Ash

You'll have read about the problems in Europe with the volcanic ash from Iceland halting air travel earlier this month. As soon as the topic hit the news, we realised that it would be something people would be desperately searching for information about. It seemed logical to try to get our travel blog ranking well for likely terms - people would be looking for information about their upcoming vacations, or trying to find a way to get home, and locals would be wondering what to do about friends and relatives due here or stuck with them on the island.

Our strategy was simply to second guess what people would be searching on and then to try to get relevant posts ranking well. We started with the obvious airport ones like:

Lanzarote airport arrivals
Arrecife airport departures. Then we moved to specific ones like.
Ash Lanzarote
.and other similar ones

We were already ranking quite well on the airport terms, but we gave them a push anyway, and we also wrote a post about the Ash and the effect on travel to and from here. As a result we moved onto the front page of Google for all the airport terms, and got to number one (and remain there today) for the search term "Ash Lanzarote."

How did we do it?

There were three steps to the process:

1/ We wrote a relevant post - all about the ash and it's effect on the island. We made sure we used the keywords we were trying to rank for.

2/ We went back through plenty of older posts and added new links using the right anchor text as well as making sure any existing links used the right wording.

3/ We wrote guest posts for four other sites on the subject and instead of using a generic link to our site, we used one to our post on the subject.

Did it work?

Yes it did! We got a number of benefits from this. It's hard to quantify the search traffic for the airport terms as we get a lot of traffic on those anyway. But with the "Ash" term it was easy, and that alone has brought just over a thousand visitors to the site over the last 30 days. My instinct (and looking at previous months) suggests our visits from search engines on the airport terms were worth an additional 300, and I think that's being conservative. So overall, I would guess this exercise may have netted us an additional 1300 visits.

I can also tell you that our income from Adsense, car hire, accommodation sales and one other product were all higher than normal - not hugely, but from 5% to 10%. I honestly can't put that down to the additional traffic, and the full figures aren't in yet, but once again instinct tells me the two are directly related.

We had contact from two journalists from UK (so far it's resulted in one article with a link) who had searched on the "ash" term and wanted to know about the chaos we had here. These are two great contacts, and I we're now in their databases as Lanzarote experts, so the next time there's some news relating to the island, we may well get another contact.

Summary

There are both direct and indirect benefits to turning a piece of news or a breaking story into a post, as long as you invest the time in getting that post to rank well. All in all, I guess we put half a day's work into this, and I think the return of 1300 more visitors, a few hundred Euros worth of additional sales and a couple of good press contacts was worthwhile.

Stuff like this won't make you an overnight success or a fortune, but it will give your business one of those little boosts, and do it a few times a year and you'll see a significant move in the right direction.

Have you tried this in your niche? What are the breaking stories that you could use right now?