88% Monthly Traffic Growth & Outranking Amazon (SEO Case Study)
Going up against big competitors in your industry, like Outlook India for Affiliate sites, Amazon for eCommerce sites or Wikipedia for informational queries, isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either. With careful content optimization, following the right UX best practices and building authority with quality backlinks, there’s nothing stopping you from doing what we did with our client’s rankings. In this case study, you’ll learn exactly how my team at The Search Initiative increased our client’s organic traffic from 72.4k to 136.4k sessions in under a year – and outranking the likes of Amazon for important keywords. In this article, you’ll learn how to: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. Before that, here’s some more information about the website’s goals and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. The Challenge The client is an online adult store primarily targeting the United States. The main objective for this campaign was to grow visibility for commercial intent keywords so as to drive organic traffic to important category pages, with the ultimate aim of generating more online sales through eCommerce. One of the first things we did to build the site’s domain authority and ranking power so that it could compete against the likes of Amazon – one of their main competitors for adult toys – was to leverage the power of AI to execute a blogger outreach strategy. Didn’t think Amazon rank for these kinds of keywords? Think again… At the same time, with the client operating in such a lucrative market, we needed to build topical authority and present them as a credible source of information. To address a lack of topical authority, we implemented a content strategy that focused on creating informative blog articles that are related to the adult toys that the client sells, and the niche in general. For any website looking to improve conversions, you need to ensure that you’re providing users with a great experience; and that everything works as expected. The client’s website lacked basic UX best practices that were costing them both money and traffic. Finally, to improve the positions of the client’s “money” keywords (i.e. the ones that have a commercial intent and bring in the most conversions), we focused our attention on optimizing existing and creating new category pages (more on this later). Learn how to tackle these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Building Backlinks With Blogger Outreach (& AI) When it comes to boosting the rankability of a web page, few SEO tactics come close to being as powerful as link building. One such link building tactic that we employ (and have continued to get great success from) at TSI, is blogger outreach. Blogger outreach involves finding topically relevant websites who you can then reach out to for a link back to content that their audience will find useful. Let’s break down the main steps on how to do blogger outreach – with the help of generative AI tool ChatGPT. Link Prospecting There are a number of ways you can find link prospects, but in this case study, I’ll show you the cool new way of how to do it – using ChatGPT. Link prospecting is about finding niche relevant websites that can link back to your website. I recommend using GPT4 in conjunction with the WebPilot plugin enabled. To do this, go to Settings and enable plugins. Go back to the chat and open the Plugin dropdown and select WebPilot – this is a plugin that enables GPT to scan live websites as opposed to relying on its training data from 2021. So here’s a prompt that you can use to find these prospects: Using the WebPilot plugin for ChatGPT, please give me a list of 20 popular websites within the [enter your niche]. Here’s an example of a response from GPT providing websites from the audio tech niche. It was able to find an article that lists 30 popular audio tech sites, and it asked if that’s what I wanted. I said yes, and it listed the sites along with their links. Now, AI tools like ChatGPT aren’t perfect (yet), so It’s important to manually check each of these sites to ensure they’re relevant to your website. You can also apply a similar approach to identify online communities within your niche. Here’s a prompt: Using the WebPilot plugin for ChatGPT, please give me a list of 10 popular online forums/communities within the [enter your niche]. Here’s the response from ChatGPT: By the end of this process, you should have a considerable list of potential websites to get a backlink from. Getting Contact Details Once you’ve prepared your list of websites that you want to reach out to, the next step is to find the contact information for them i.e. an email address of a writer at the site, or via their general contact form. You can usually find email addresses on the contact us page of the website (see why having one is important?), but if you’re unable to find one, you can use a tool like Hunter.io. Hunter.io is a tool that you can use to do this – they have a Chrome extension that allows up to 25 searches per month for free. If you’re using their website, enter the domain into Domain Search and hit enter. You can see that the tool has found 21 email addresses for the example site. Pitch Creation The most important step in this process is the pitch – this is what will be the deciding factor on whether or not you’ll get a backlink from your prospective site. The key to crafting a great outreach pitch is ensuring that you’re adding personally relevant information about the website that you’re pitching to. This doesn’t mean that you can template the process, but that you still need to personalize the pitch based on who you’re pitching to. In general, you need to explain: To create a pitch worthy of securing backlinks, why not use the help of ChatGPT? Here’s an example of a prompt that you can use to do this: Using the WebPilot plugin for GPT, please write a blogger outreach pitch to [enter prospective website URL] (might want to include their about page) with the goal of writing a guest post for their site. Please include a subject line. My website is [enter your URL], and it’s on the topic of [insert your niche]. Guidelines: Here’s what ChatGPT came up with: GPT even provides a compelling subject line that you can use. Monitoring Progress Once the emails have been sent out, all is not done. You should monitor your progress to identify which pitches (and subject lines) worked the best. Blogger outreach is something that constantly evolves over time, especially as not every website will get back to you on the first go. You can also ask GPT to provide a template for follow up emails… Learn more about how to carry out blogger outreach in detail here. Here’s a look at the kind of results we’ve got from this link building campaign: Building Topical Authority with Engaging Blog Content Apart from optimizing and creating new content for your website’s core landing pages (i.e. the pages that drive your business), it’s important to grow your topical authority – which is a concept that’s been thrown around a lot in recent years. Read on to find out what it is, why it’s important and how you can build it for your own site. What is Topical Authority? Topical authority refers to a website’s perceived expertise and credibility on a specific topic or subject area. Search engines like Google aim to deliver the most relevant and high-quality content to searchers’ queries and use signals like topical authority to determine the ranking of web pages in search results. Websites that consistently produce high-quality, informative, and relevant content on a specific topic are more likely to be seen as having topical authority. Here’s an example… Imagine you’re venturing into the realm of sustainable fashion. Crafting a single article that revolves solely around ‘sustainable clothing’ might not be sufficient to thrive in this niche. Why? Because sustainable fashion is a broad subject, and attempting to encapsulate its entirety within a single article would be an overwhelming task. To establish yourself as an authority in this field, your content needs to cover a wide range of topics within sustainable fashion, including: Why is Topical Authority Important? Google associates a website with a topic in order to rank it as a relevant resource for search terms about the particular topic. By having a lot of content about a specific topic on your website, you create opportunities to add internal links between the pages so that Google and users are more likely to find your content more easily. Doing so also helps increase your topical authority in the eyes of Google and helps show that your website is the go-to Read More Read More
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