How Nomad List dominates longer tail keywords
Nomad List is a crowdsourced database of cities for Digital Nomads. You can filter the cities by hundreds of categories: air quality, cost of living, etc.
As you apply filters the database is queried and the home page dynamically updates to display the best matching city:
Crucially, the results of each filter query are also unique URLs. Autogenerated pages kitted out with meta and h1 tags, etc …
And this is important because these pages make for some valuable long tail keyword phrases:
Take the keyword, “least racist states” for example. A reasonably easy keyword to rank well pulling in 1,200 organic searches per month. Type it into Google and see who’s number 1:
An autogenerated page created by combining two Nomad List filters: “Low in Racism” + “United States”.
And this page is not just picking up traffic from that solitary keyword. It ranks for well over a hundred similar keywords such as “top ten racist states”, “least racist city” etc…
Aggregating all combinations of filters together, you're looking at several thousand indexed pages, hoovering up organic traffic from long tail keyword phrases:
Interestingly, the majority of Nomad List's organic traffic comes from filtering by region. And then targeting the keyword phrase “best cities to live in [region]“ with meta and h1 tags:
In summary
The genius of Nomad Lists approach is in recognising that they already have the valuable data at their fingertips to dominate hundreds of longer tail keywords and all that’s left to do auto generate the page based off the same PHP template.
Contrast this with a 99% of other companies who have no option but to research and write blog posts one by one to compete with Nomad List for the same longer tail keywords.
How would I replicate this?
Essentially, all that's going on is your just bundling useful content under unqiue url's. With this very website for instance, every single filter (as well as being used to query the home page) is also its own unique page as well. For example:
marketingexamples.com/coldemail
are both pages in their own right. This means:
1. More pages to be indexed by google
2. More longer tail keywords to rank for
3. More organic traffic
