SEO Case: From 0 to 100,000 visitors in 12 months

Today, we want to share with you a process that we developed at Hella Good Marketing to earn links and visibility and boost organic traffic for our clients. I’m going to talk you the case about SEO Strategy which boost traffic from zero to 100 000 visitors and share key ideas and points which were implemented.

Image 1. Screenshot from Google Analytics which shows increasing of organic traffic

The general points of our SEO Strategy:

• Start slow and take advantage of “easy wins”;
• Focus on securing a handful of strategic links to important pages(via outreach, crowd marketing, broken external links, etc);
• Be intentional about content creation and technical SEO and its impact on search.

1. Starting slow with a new site with on-page or technical SEO

No website can stand without a strong backbone. And that backbone is technical SEO.

At the beginning, we focused on opportunities with low competition and decent traffic value. We used Ahrefs to determine traffic value and manual research to gauge competition.

According to this we create SEO analyze with key technical points which need to be fixed and right site structure for great organic results.

The key points from out Technical Part are next:

• Use SEO-Friendly URLs – 3-5 words in a URL;
• Start Title With Keyword;
• Wrap Your Blog Post Title in an H1 Tag;
• Wrap Subheadings in H2 Tags;
• Content of page – Drop Keyword in First 100 Words;
• Text with listing;
• Use LSI(Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords;
• Use internal linking;
• Right canonicals;
• Correct structure;
• Correct mirror(www,/);
• hrefLangs;
• Robots.txt;
• Sitemap.xml;
• Structure data;
• Image optimization;
• Site speed;
• Responsive and Good UX design;

In case when this all recommendation were implemented we already achieve some great results with our organic traffic.

Image 2. Screenshot from Google Analytics which shows increasing of organic traffic after On-page SEO implementation

We boosted SEO traffic from zero to 50,000+ users per month in 4 months.

2. Link building process or establish passive and active link acquisition channels

Link building process is really hard.

Link acquisition is a manual process that is ongoing, forever. My favorite description of link building came from former Googler Matt Cutts, who defined it as “sweat, plus creativity.”

We created our own approach for link acquisition channels which helps our clients to be at the TOP of search engines.

The main tactics, which help us to increase link profile of our clients website and boost organic visibility are next:

• Outreach – contact website owners and find the possibility to publish a link. Two ways:
  • Paid – discuss the price and options;
  • Free – guest posts and opinion maker

• PBN sites – create own public blogs network. The process is next: find drop relevant domains with history and build sites with same content;
• Crowd Marketing:
  • Forums, comments,
  • Questions/Answers sites
• Check competitor’s backlinks
• Check relevant broken external links on different media sites, wikipedia etc… Write relevant content for this broken links and then contact the owner’s.

But remember: Make your anchor texts natural in each link you build

As a result we achieve next results:

Image 3. Referring Domains by Ahrefs

At the end of the year we achieved next results, which looks very attractive and inspiring us to new challenges.

Image 4. Main SEO Off Page Factors

3. Strategic content creation

Content drives SEO success.

Creating useful content for your audience is always a sound strategy, but you can take it a step further by being intentional and strategic about the content you publish. We maintained a relentless focus on SEO — creating every page with search, and the opportunities available to us, in mind.

That is why we created useful guidelines for our content strategy – “How to Create Content that is Useful for a Reader and Gains TONS of Featured Snippets from Google (as well as ranks high)?”

1. While starting your topic, ask yourself – what do you want to see to see in the similar article? What if you would’ve been the reader?
2. TITLE. Use high-CTR Titles:

Image 5. Titles with High CTR

Details:

• Use PRIMARY keyword;
• Try to embed long-tail keyword (that includes primary keyword);
• Mix your long-tail with “Clingy Phrases/Words” (Ex. Amazing, Outstanding, Works like a Charm, to blew out your Mind, To Become a Pro, To Rock at, TO make smt Perfect, etc…there are lots of them, it’s only confined by your imagination);
• Add numbers (People Love numbers!!!). Of course, not each and any Title should contain those numbers, be still you shouldn’t avoid them at all 🙂

REMEMBER: Title should have 100% Answer on User’s query and be in accordance with User’s intent!

3. “Back up” keywords. These essential words are very important and help Google to determine whether your page should be used for a featured snippet or not. Here are some of them:

Questions:

• What
• Who
• When
• Why
• Are
• Was
• Which
• Will
• How
• Have
• Does
• Do
• Can
• Is
• Should

Prepositions:

• For
• Like
• To
• With
• Without

Comparisons:

• Compare
• Comparison
• Compared
• Pricing
• Price
• Priced
• VS
• Versus

THE HIGHEST probability that these words help you to get a featured snippets, if you put them:

• In a paragraph
• Before a list
• In a table (lesser chances)

4) Content. The content itself should be consistent and easy to read.

Tips for content structuring:

• Use small paragraphs;
• Divide text on logical parts;
• Emphasize with bold important info inside a paragraph. This actually helps to get the featured snippet from Google (important parts are in bold);
• Use anchor links to other articles from blog;
• Use links to high-authority websites, if you are writing about specific information that needs proof;
• H-Headings should be clear and easy for understanding (Using secondary keywords in H2-H6 headings and the PRIMARY keyword (mixing with long-tail) in H1);
• H-Headings should explain to readers what can they expect in a paragraph below

5) Images. Always use ALT and TITLE tags for Images. These tags should contain long-tail and secondary keywords.
6) Bulleted lists. If possible, try to combine information into the bulleted list. It is easier for reader and search engine to understand the content this way. And it also brings us more featured snippets.

As we started targeting more competitive terms with useful content which gains featured snippets and earning more visibility, we began seeing significant gains in traffic, eclipsing 100,000 visitors by the end of month 12.

Image 6. How to attract 100,000 visitors by the end of month 12

Conclusion

We didn’t use any secret tricks or hacks to grow traffic. Rather, we invested in building quality content, and we implemented various link acquisition strategies to match each stage of the project. As the site grew, so did our expectations and goals.