Normally I don’t advocate going after top-of-funnel keywords (why).
In the case of this article, I made an exception.
For the most part, the articles on my website are for visitors and not search engines.
I get a good amount of traffic to these articles from social media, so I like to have useful content to build my brand.
I also reuse my newsletters by turning them into articles.
And sometimes I just put up articles that aren’t right for the newsletter, but are still good info.
The article below is one of them:
I combined a bunch of hooks I saw on TikTok to make that article on March 27, 2024. It’s 25 exact hooks to use for short-form video.
The original was 456 words, so it really did not take me long to write.
To my surprise, checking Google Search Console this morning, I saw this article is ranking #4 on Google for “hooks for YouTube Shorts.”
“Hooks for YouTube Shorts” isn’t actually used on the page, but given the meta tags and subject matter, Google ranked this lazy article of mine anyway.
Here's the trick
This is one of my favorite tricks for quickly getting some extra traffic from search.
If you see you’re ranking well for a keyword, and it’s either not used on the page – or if it is used but doesn’t have detail around it – use it and add detail.
That’s it.
I added a section with the keyword as the heading. Then a few words of text under the heading.
I also added an image.
I saw that one of the pages ranking above me for the keyword gives general advice on hooks, whereas my page gives exact hooks. So this new text I wrote is more just advice on ideating new hooks.
All in all everything took me five minutes to put together.
But I didn’t stop there
I then had the thought, “I could probably rank well for equivalent keywords for TikTok and Instagram Reels.”
So I wrote 178 more words.
Again, did not take much time on this.
Finally, I said, “Well if this page is going to get all this extra traffic from search, I should try a bit harder to get people into my ecosystem.”
So I added this – 48 words:
You can see the updated page here.
Then I…
Then I updated the article publishing date to today, submitted the changes to Google Search Console – this prompts Google to crawl the updated page – and now we wait.
This is a trick I’ve used countless times to quickly get extra traffic from Google. You may already do this. But if ya haven’t tried, or haven’t done it in a while, I hope you’ll give it a shot.
See what you’re already ranking well for… and add it to your page.
