In this case study, I will show you how we grew a new site’s organic traffic to 70k+ unique monthly visitors in less than a year.
I will be showing you the strategies we have put in place to reach this goal.
The website was fresh off the press, with no authority and no trust from Google whatsoever. The first step was to create a content foundation on which we could build trust.
We had 30 visitors on a good day and 8 visitors on weekends. Most of these were probably bots.
We had to scope out a way to build our organic traffic consistently over time.
We can break down our strategy into:
Keywords with low competition are the best path of action for a new website. Here is what we did to discover keyword opportunities:
Along the way, we discovered that many brands and agencies were searching for “top [x] influencers in [y] city.”
We subsequently rolled out an SEO play to mass create pages using our SaaS data to power these internal pages. We spawned 3000+ unique pages through this SEO play.
We pulled “most popular hashtags” and “influencer biographies” for each profile to avoid creating pages with thin content.
We then structured these pages in a way that the top pages interlink with the bottom pages in a way to pass authority across all of these pages.
Here is an example of a URL:
https://www.inbeat.co/top-influencers/instagram/lifestyle/indonesia/bali/
The structure goes like this:
platform -> niche -> country -> city
You should always keep an eye for potential mass-page SEO opportunities.
Here are some potential playbooks that might be worth pondering:
These structural SEO opportunities allow you to scale your content production efficiently. If you happen to discover an opportunity like this one, I recommend you roll out a plan to make it happen. The long-term payout for a successful playbook like this one is enormous.
HARO is a service, which allows anyone to connect with journalists looking for quotable material for their article. It’s a great way to get do-follow links on trusted, relevant websites. We assigned resources to build a great link foundation through HARO.
Ranking for new keywords becomes much easier as the website’s authority grows.
One of our most successful SEO plays was to roll out two free engagement rate calculators for Instagram and TikTok. We interlinked to these tools while building backlinks to them from reputable sources.
We consistently built backlinks to our articles, our free tools, and our homepage.
We used guest posts and article brand mentions to power this part of the strategy. A brand mention (sometimes called niche edits or link inserts) is built by asking a blogger to add a link from their blog back to your website.
To be successful in this strategy, you must either:
Paying and exchanges are what some would consider grey hat, in the sense that they are against Google’s guidelines. Having said that, many SEOs will account for the fact that it works. You be the judge of how you want to do your SEO.
Successful SEO is about creating a systematic approach to building your organic footprint. You need:
SEO has a tipping point at which point momentum carries you forward. Your output to input ratio increases significantly at that stage.
The goal of any new site should be to build towards that tipping point. The efforts you put upfront won’t generate the results you might expect.
We’ve built-out a content calendar for the year 2021, and we have identified flywheels, which we can leverage to gain more organic traffic.
Here is an overview of our roadmap: