Low hanging fruit consists of keywords that you are already ranking for, but that aren’t necessarily your primary keywords. Essentially, these are keywords that are easy pickings in regards to SERPS, meaning they can be obtained easily with little effort.
In order to find low hanging fruit for your site, first login to your Google Webmaster Tools and navigate to your site’s Search Analytics. Make sure you have Clicks, Impressions and Position checked. Then click on the position tab twice (on the right hand side above all your queries). This will order your queries by highest SERP ranking.
Now start going through your queries. What you are looking for are keywords with a high ranking that are gathering impressions and are not topics you have already written about, but relate to the content of your site.
Let’s say you have a website that deals with mobile phone reviews. You have checked in Webmaster Tools and looked over the queries and noticed that the query “Best cell phone camera” comes up. You had 39 impressions over the last 30 days and the query had an average position of 138.3. Now if your website did not have any posts in regards to “Cell Phone Cameras” this would be a prime example of low hanging fruit.
Now that we’ve identified “Best cell phone camera” as a low hanging fruit keyword, how can we exploit it for content ideas? Very easily. Start by brainstorming every idea you can think of that relates to “Best cell phone camera” and your niche.
Ideas could include topics like:
The content possibilities are endless. Based on your niche and your knowledge of your visitors/customers, you will be able to come up with some great content ideas easily and efficiently.
Not only can it give you some great topics to write about, but it gives you topics that you can potentially easily rank for. If you use our Cell Phone Camera example, you are already ranking for a subject that you don’t have content for. Imagine how well you’ll do with that keyword once you actually have content that relates to your topic and that keyword. Even if you are not using it for gaining traffic, it’s still a great tool/exercise for coming up with new content ideas when things become stale or you’ve run out of content ideas.
As well, low hanging fruit can help you identify gaps in your content relating to your niche. It gives you an idea of what customers are searching for that your website isn’t offering them.
Use this technique only to write content based on keywords that relate to your site or niche. If you are running a site on “Mobile Phone Reviews” and you are ranking for a query like “Summer Dresses”, don’t start writing off topic content about Summer Dresses in order to rank for it. That kind of non targeted web traffic won’t do you any good and may end up harming your site’s rankings in the long run.