Do you know the 80/20 Pareto rule? Shopify is a strong example of how a seemingly smart part of your business (one landing page) can actually turn into one of its biggest drivers. SEOs who focus on organic / Google traffic know the phenomenon.
Shopify’s blog ranks for 400,000 keywords that “only” drives 765,000 sessions per month.
Out of those 765,000 sessions per month, 400,000 are generated by a single landing page, that ranks for only 18,000 keywords.
It’s Shopify’s Business Name Generator tool page.
Here’s how they did it:
The starting point of their strategy is diversification
Shopify wants to dominate the name generator space, not only for e-commerce but for any industry searchers are in.
Expanding the business name generator tool in every niche meant they were able to target a huge batch of long-tail keywords.
How did they do it?
They expanded the subdirectory structure. And this came with many advantages:
- It made it easier to target long-tail keywords: a massive subdirectory structure allows Google to better categorize your content and landing pages. This ultimately leads to more traffic.
- With this structure, each page shares the same backlinks, page/domain authority, and other ranking factors of the original root domain. So, a backlink to the Bread Business Name Generator page sends “link juice” to the main Business Name Generator page, too.
- Creating specific pages for each niche communicates to Google their authority around business name generators. Plus, all these landing pages were the same. The only difference between a Gift Wrapping Business Names page and Bread Business Names pages is the keyword they target.
- They are able to target a lot of long-tail keywords with few searches per month (100 to be exact), but with $15 CPC: Low volume, but high intent (this is especially true with many software categories).
Why all this effort for a free tool?
Think about this: If a person is looking for a free business name generator tool, they probably don’t have the budget or the technical expertise to build a website.
So, Shopify can be a great solution for them. And their Business Name Generator is designed to make them sign up and turn those leads into new customers.
