How to Grow Traffic by 368% (Market Disruption Case Study)
Whether you’re starting out from scratch or growing your existing brand’s organic search presence, there’s nothing stopping you from disrupting the search results pages of your industry one step at a time. The key to doing this is keyword selection. Combine this with killer, shareable content and a solid link building strategy, and you’re well on your way to boosting your organic traffic. In this case study, you’ll learn exactly how my team at The Search Initiative increased our client’s organic traffic by 368% and monthly revenue by 445% despite their industry being dominated by a big competitor. If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. In this article, you’ll learn how to: 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 produces and sells nicotine alternatives that use natural ingredients instead of tobacco. The brand and product had close-to zero online presence when joining the agency and their main competitor had already monopolized the market – so the main objective for the campaign was to build organic traffic from the ground up and generate online sales through eCommerce. One of the main challenges was the fact that keywords that had any substantial search volume were extremely competitive and dominated by their main competitor. As a start-up, the client’s site lacked the topical and domain authority required to be able to compete for such terms. Instead, we focused on building visibility by targeting informational search queries about quitting smoking such as smoking alternatives. By focusing on producing more content on the blog, we needed to make sure that the client’s products were showcased in the articles so that users were enticed to click through and place an order. This was achieved by implementing a related posts section (designed to keep users longer on the site), a sidebar (so that we could add calls to actions) and adding internal links (to drive users towards relevant product pages). To build the brand’s online presence, we focused our link building efforts through digital PR, so that people would start to know that the brand and product range existed. Check this video below to learn more about digital PR. Finally, we rounded off the strategy by making sure that any technical issues holding back the site’s performance were addressed. The two main issues that we tackled was to implement a more user-friendly URL structure (so that they were easy to read, remember and share for users) and to improve the page performance (by compressing and minifying files that were large). Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Informational Keyword Targeting With the commercial keywords out of bounds due to high competition and lack of topical authority, we focused on building the site’s keyword visibility for informational search terms instead by producing content around question-based keywords related to smoking. How to Find Question Based Keywords to Target I’ll show you two ways to find question-based keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer The first is using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool. You can now go ahead and write an article about the lifespan of cats. People Also Ask If you don’t have Ahrefs, you can still find informational keywords from the People Also Ask section in Google’s search results. In the above example, Google added the two following questions “What is the friendliest cat to own?” and “What is the kindest type of cat?” when expanding the original question “What is the best cat for first time owner?”. Writing Content for Informational Search Terms Once you’ve found the informational keywords that you want to target, the next step is to start writing the content. Here are some tips on how you should do this: Here’s what you need to look for: Use your competitors as a baseline for what you need to include within your page. You should also look at how they have optimized other on-page elements such as the title tag, H1 heading, meta description and their URL for the target keyword. For example, here’s the featured snippet for the keyword “how long do cats live”. And here’s where the answer is taken from within the ranking page. As you can see, the page provides a clear and concise answer to the question right at the beginning of the article. Then it goes into much more detail about the lifespan of cats later on in the article by covering more specific topics like which type of cats live the longest etc. The short answer caters to users who just want an instant answer to their search query whereas the rest of the article is for users who want to learn more. This is especially important if you’re writing about a topic that can impact a user’s physical, mental or financial well being. But even websites that don’t fall into this category need to demonstrate their expertise in order to build trust. Here are a few ways you can achieve this: Following the above steps will help grow your keyword visibility for informational search terms. Redesigning The Blog for SEO Apart from optimizing and expanding the content on your blog, it’s also important to ensure you’re following best practices in making it as functional as possible for users. Below are things that you should include within your blog to improve navigation and overall usability. Add Related Posts A Related Posts section provides readers with additional relevant content that they might be interested in. It helps users discover more of your blog’s content, increasing their engagement and time spent on your website. In addition to this, related posts help: How Should I Choose Related Posts? When selecting the related articles, make sure that they are indeed relevant to the current post so that readers are naturally encouraged to continue reading. Where Should the Related Posts Be Added? The most common place to put your related posts section is towards the bottom of the page. How Many Related Posts Should I Include? When it comes to how many related posts to include, I recommend aiming for 3 to 5. Adding too many will confuse readers as to what to read next and dilute the importance of each related article. How Can I Add Related Posts? One of the most popular WordPress plugins for related posts is the Contextual Related Posts plugin. It’s a free plugin that automatically generates a list of related posts based on contextual cues from your blog post’s title and content. All you have to do is install and activate the plugin. If you’re looking for something that allows for more customization, check out the Custom Related Posts plugin which allows you to pick your related posts manually. Add A Sidebar The purpose of most blog posts is to provide information, not to sell. However, that doesn’t mean that you can convert users looking for information to customers. One way to do this is to leverage the space in your sidebar by adding calls to action (CTAs) and other enticing content. Here are some examples of what you can add to boost engagement and conversions: Building out your sidebar by adding these elements can transform the engagement levels on your website. Add Internal Links You’ve already learned about internal links in the form of Related Posts, but let’s focus on internal linking in its most traditional form. The idea of internal linking is to add a hyperlink on one page on your website to another page. These links help establish connections between different pages, improve website navigation, and assist search engines in understanding the structure and hierarchy of your website’s content. Here are some tips on how to implement internal linking on your blog: Use Relevant Anchors: use descriptive anchor text (the clickable part of the link) that accurately reflects the linked page’s content. If possible, try to use anchor texts that include the main keyword that you’re trying to rank on the linked page. Strategic Placement: incorporate internal links so that they fit naturally within the body of your content. Link to Relevant Pages: distribute your internal links across relevant pages to ensure a well-connected website structure. Don’t Overdo It: avoid excessive internal linking on a single page, which can confuse users and dilute SEO value. Link Back to Your Blog Post: don’t forget to also add internal links back to your blog post too so that it too can benefit from other pages’ authority. Building Brand Awareness With Digital PR Considering that the client’s brand had no online presence and the product range itself had zero search volume, the site needed a boost in domain authority. The best way to do this is with backlinks. Instead of general blogger outreach, we showcased the client’s product range with content that highlights smoking alternatives, targeted towards people looking to quit smoking and built awareness of their Read More Read More
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