In this post I’m going to walk through a real life case study to illustrate the power of splintering for SEO.
If you’re not familiar with splintering, then you’re going to love the results you’ll see when you implement this tactic on your website. If you are familiar, then this is a reminder to see if there’s an opportunity to get even more traffic from your splintered content.
What Is Splintering?
First, let’s get on the same page with splintering. When I hear the word splinters, then I think of small pieces of wood. I actually grew up chopping wood for my dad so I imagine myself chopping a big log into smaller, unique pieces of wood. I emphasize unique because that’s a key takeaway.
When you chop wood, you don’t create nearly identical copies of the big log. No, each piece is unique and would never be mistaken for the original log. Sure, it’s still the same type of wood, but each splinter has it’s own shape and size.
With that analogy in mind, it’s time to apply this concept to your webpages. Let’s say you offer services in all 50 states and right now you have just one page that explains your services. One way to splinter this page is to create unique pages specifically for each of the 50 states you target.
Again, these pages must not be copies of the original page. If they are copies, then this tactic will not work because Google is not going to index duplicate content on your website.
Of course, splintering by state is just one of the many ways to splinter. You can also splinter by the different industries or types of businesses you target. Exactly how you splinter for SEO depends on what your prospects are searching. That brings us to the case study I want to highlight for you…
Keyword Research Determines How to Splinter
Like the example above, one of our clients targets customers in all 50 states. When we started working together we were pleasantly surprised to see individual pages for each state. Our client did this because she noticed there was a lot of search for her services along with the state names.
In other words, keyword research showed our client how to splinter her webpages. If you see there is a lot of search for your products or services along with states, cities, countries, industries, types of businesses, or another keyword modifier, then you have an opportunity to splinter your webpages.
But simply creating the pages is only the first step…
Edit Page Titles To Maximize Your Reach
Let’s take a look at our client’s traffic to the unique, splintered state pages:
As you can see there was very little traffic, only 30-50 visits per month, to these pages before December 2016. Then you see the graph shoots up and has been climbing steadily ever since. In December 2017, there were 1,218 visitors to these state pages from Organic Search (SEO Traffic).
The graph shot up because in December 2016, we edited the page Titles to target two different keyword variations that we saw prospects searching. Rather than just ranking for one variation, these pages started to rank for both keyword variations, which significantly expanded our reach.
I repeat, all we did was edit the page Titles to all 50 state pages and we saw this big spike in SEO traffic.
If you’re already splintering on your website then this is a reminder to take another look at your keyword research. Are there different variations of your target keyword that you could target? A simple edit to your Title tag across 50 pages can have a huge impact on your traffic and subsequent leads and sales.
In this case study, we saw traffic jump from just 30 visits per month up to 1,218. That’s a 40x increase from a simple Title tag edit!
Next Steps to Get Started
The first step is keyword research to determine if you have a splintering opportunity. For example, if prospective customers search for your services along with specific locations (ex. “fence company in hartford ct” or “manhasset paving company”), then consider creating unique service area pages.
The second step is to create each page. Remember, this only works if your pages are unique and not duplicates of the original page.
Finally, the third step is to edit your Title tag to ensure your page is optimized for the most searched keyword variations.
If you complete those 3 steps, then you’ll be well on your way to driving more prospective customers to your website month after month.
