Why do we temporarily rank for highly competitive words after writing a related blog post?

[LilyRay]

I write for a blog that Google probably "likes" at this point because we update so frequently and get a decent amount of traffic.

Sometimes this happens and it has always been puzzling to me:

Let's use an example. Say I write a blog called "How to eat spaghetti." For the next few days, we will get a ton of traffic for people who type "spaghetti." But when I check us on rank trackers we are nowhere to be found for that term. What is happening here? Sometimes the traffic will all be international and located in some random city in Africa or something.

Any thoughts? Super confused by this. We have gotten lots of traffic for extremely competitive words because of this, but it only lasts a couple days.

[LilyRay]

I figured it out. Looks like the corresponding image in that blog entry got indexed on Google Images and ranks #3 because that one hot word is in the alt tag. Crazy

[LilyRay]

Hey James. Thanks for the input.

Maybe I didn't explain myself correctly. In my example, I'm not trying to rank for the word "Spaghetti." But because I published one article with the word "Spaghetti" in the title, we get a ton of Google hits that week for that word, and then that traffic disappears shortly after. I honestly don't think it has much to do with social media because our blog gets very few shares....

[DWJames]

I'd imagine it is more to do with subscribers, social media posts containing links, referrals and fans who have bookmarked your page etc rather than anything to do with SEO. If your rankings are not improving yet your traffic is, I'd suggest looking at your analytics to see where the traffic is actually coming from - referrals, direct traffic etc.