Recently a site I was working on experienced a huge spike in search traffic from branded keywords. The site was fairly new and no major link building had taken place, and we hadn't worked on approaching any bloggers or media outlets for editorial links. Yet when reviewing our web analytics, we noticed that the spike in traffic were from keywords related to our company name.

Although pleasantly surprised, I drove myself nuts trying to look for the source of all this traffic so I can see if I could somehow replicate it in the future. They weren't showing up in my direct referrer traffic in analytics and I couldn't find them using the typical vanity searches in Google. If there was a website that mentioned us, but didn't link to us, I was already planning on how to capitalize on it from a link building perspective.

Since link building is one of the more challenging aspects of SEO, I thought I'd share a couple of quick ways to capitalize on this anonymous spike in traffic from branded keywords (NOTE: This is a bit of a headsmacking tip as Rand would call it. But might be useful for some of you out there):

1) Find the Source

If you find yourself getting a bump up in type-in traffic or an increase in traffic from branded keywords, it indicates that there could be a website out there that mentioned you but hasn't linked to you. First, find the source of the free publicity (using some advanced search operators). Hopefully the free publicity is from a website. If you still aren't able to find the source, try querying for misspelled terms or variations (this is how I found the source of the free publicity, it was a variation of our company name).

2) Ensure any Web Publicity Links Back To You

Once you find the website that's generating this traffic for you, kindly email them saying thank you for the free publicity and ask if they could link back to you. Most webmasters are kind enough to do this b/c it benefits their readers and just makes sense. If you're having trouble coming up with a nicely worded & effective email, Aaron Wall has some nice tips on how to draft an email request for links.

3) Evaluate the Anchor Text Link You're About to Request

You could easily stop at step two and settle for a backlink using branded keywords as the anchor text. But since unsolicited editorial backlinks are tough to come by, you could take advantage of the opportunity and request the anchor text to be one of your target keywords. They could easily turn you down and just use your company name as the anchor text for your backlink, but on the upside you could potentially get a nice juicy editorial link with some tough to come by keywords in the anchor text.

So there it is. If done right, you just got yourself a nice, juicy, keyword-rich backlink from a likely valuable, trustworthy editorial source. Enjoy!