How to Get Search Engine Traffic Without Ranking

Well… if you can’t win, change the rules.

There’s a very uncomplicated trick to driving search engine traffic for keywords you want to rank for — without actually ranking for them.

Enter…

One of the most common marketing tips is: “go fishing where the fish are.” No matter what product or service you want to sell, you need to follow three uncomplicated steps:

1. Guess who are your ideal customers If.
2. Find the places where these people are spending time online.
3. Go to these places and find ways to promote your product.

A quick example: If you want to sell fitness equipment, it would be good to learn how to exploit this potential r/Fitness a community on Reddit that has over 12 million members.

But what does this have to do with SEO?

Well, whatever search traffic you want to drive to your website…someone is already driving it to theirs, right? And their website isn’t necessarily your direct competitor.

If you own a bagel shop in Singapore, you certainly want your website to rank high in Google search results. “the best bagels in Singapore.” But the pages that actually rank for that keyword are lists that give readers a ton of different suggestions. So your job is to get on as many of those top-ranking lists as possible.

Positioning for a keyword with your own website is not the only way to get customers from Google. Getting featured on other pages that the position for this keyword is also extremely effective.

I call this tactic “second hand movement”.

Although the idea itself is not recent.

You may have heard of a concept called “SEO Barnacle” shared by Rand Fishkin in 2014. There is also a concept called “Surround sound,” coined by Alex Birkett. And another one called “SERP Monopoly Strategy” By Nick EubanksThere is also an opposite concept, called “Ranking and Rent.”

The idea behind all of these tactics is pretty much the same: if your site is generating a lot of relevant traffic in Google search results, you need to work to get your business listed there.

But it’s easier said than done, right?

Why should anyone bother featuring your business on their website?

Well, the answer is uncomplicated: money.

If the site owner can make money by mentioning your business on their site, there’s a good chance they will. That money could come in the form of an affiliate commission or a flat fee for annual or ongoing placement. Sometimes, these things can also happen as part of a broader affiliate agreement.

Getting listed for free is very, very hard. Especially if you are not yet a huge and respected business that people naturally want to list on their website.

And yet – this is not entirely You can’t be listed for free.

Case in point, we just published our own post on “best SEO conferences” to rank higher in search results and promote our upcoming event, Ahrefs Evolve Singapore.

We then went ahead and contacted all the websites that rank for the keyword “best SEO conferences” and asked them to add Ahrefs Evolve to their lists. So far 10 of 17 they posted us on their sites, without requesting any payment.

The easiest way to implement this strategy is to compile a list of highly relevant keywords (high business potential results), transfer all your top-rated pages to a spreadsheet and start promoting them.

But there is another fruitful source of sites to get second-hand search traffic from. These are sites that link to your competitors while also getting a decent amount of search traffic themselves.

Here’s how to find these sites in 3 effortless steps:

1. List your competitor’s website on Ahrefs Site Explorer.
2. go to Backlinks report.
3. Apply “Referrer > Movement“filter.

Here’s an example page I found while testing this feature on the ConvertKit website:

As you can see, this page is not about “email marketing” (the main topic you would choose if you wanted to promote an email marketing tool). And yet this page receives 2.6k visitors per month from Google (according to Ahrefs estimates) and recommends a number of email marketing tools to its readers.

So if you have an email marketing tool like ConvertKit, you definitely want to be mentioned on that page alongside your competitors.

The moral of the story is that you should look apart from topics that are directly relevant to your business. Any page that generates traffic and mentions your competitor should be your target.

Ahrefs makes finding such sites incredibly effortless.

That’s it.

I hope you found this tactic useful. Don’t sleep on it because chances are your competitors won’t.