We recently hit 29,000 monthly organic traffic! 🚀📈
Unfortunately, this is no quick win story as content marketing does and will take some time. But the results we are now seeing for our client are exponential and we're seeing hockey stick curvature for organic growth.
I wanted to share some of the processes and thinking on how we approach our organic growth with the IndieHacker community.
THIS TAKES TIME. we started our content marketing strategy 8 months ago. We saw some growth, even managing to double Organic traffic from 3k to 6k in 3 months.
We were obviously ecstatic with this because this alone is amazing growth. However, we're now seeing SUPER growth thanks to all that work we have consistently produced over the last 8 months.
I recently posted this in a Twitter thread but wanted to also share the story here
1/7. Keyword Research
Research keywords relevant to your business in tools like ahrefs & semrush. Aim for low-difficulty ones if you’re just starting out. Also, check out ZERO VOLUME keywords. Tools get the volumes wrong and because they report low numbers other people ignore them.
2/7 User Intent
Understand user intent. The top SERP results give you a good idea of this. Are people expecting to see a listicle, a how-to, or even a looking to buy or download something? Create your content accordingly.
3/7 Deeper Research
Do more research. Create SEO-focused page outlines and structures based on deeper research on the keyword. People Also Ask and Related Searches in Google are a great way for making these outlines.
4/7 Research Tools
Use tools like marketmuse or surferSEO to understand your competition and what you need to produce to beat them. they help you with things like images, word counts, keyword distribution, internal linking & backlink opportunities.
5/7 Consistency
Produce content regularly & consistently. We have a monthly content calendar where we schedule content to be published 4x a week. You don’t have to publish as much but consistency is key.
6/7 Content Promotion
Promote your content and do it from day 1. You can easily share on free platforms like Reddit, Quora, and Hackernews. Email your content to your email distribution and if you have some $ spend a small amount on ads on Facebook or Google.
7/7 Expectations vs Reality
Not everything turns out as expected. Sometimes content can be surprising and yield bigger results or sometimes smaller than you expected. Make sure you add content that’s not performing into a content audit queue for you to look at and review.
If you have any questions about anything I've said, don't hesitate to reach out!
Thanks, everyone! keep up the hard work!
Super impressive and insightful advice! Curious what your "starting point" was when you began this content marketing strategy 8 months ago.
Maybe it was covered here, but it's a bit unclear to me. Was it that you went from 3K monthly to 29K monthly during that time frame? Or did you start even lower than that?
A powerful content strategy will be so core to my team's ability to scale Outdone. I'd love to pick your brain a bit!
Yah so the client here already had around 3k traffic, but had become stagnant and even began declining when we started. So there was a bit of a starting point for us as in it wasn't complete 0 but we had to do a lot of work around site speed / architecture as that was a big reason for their performance dipping and not being able to index pages
Ahh okay thanks for the additional context. Do you think going from 0 to 3K would be feasible in similar timeframe? Meaning, what’s more difficult in your opinion — the first 5K or the next 15K.
Oh yeah more than feasable! It obviously depends on how much you put into your strategy but you can get traffic fairly quickly with the right content/topics/strategy. traffic compounds over time which is why you get this hockey stick effect.
I managed to get a small side project to 1.6k in a couple of months by producing consistently
That's super reassuring. Thanks @_pear — here's to hoping I can replicate that success!
Love the tip about ZERO VOLUME keywords. Such a gold mine if you find one that is searched alot!
Absolutely! Our main strategy with those is to create a tonne of them. You can tend to reduce quality on those pages (a little) as they're less competitive so you can churn those ones out at a faster rate
Congrats mate! Looks like tactical content marketing and SEO is still alive, well and healthy. Thanks for sharing.
Congrats and thanks for sharing!
Two quick questions.
Thoughts on targeting lower but unique keywords to help you stand out (for instance an app name)?
What was the 80/20 for you? (Parento's law - roughly 80% of results come from 20% of effort)
so for your first question I think this is user intent. there are 4 main types, informational, transactional, investigational and navigational. For something like "APP_NAME pricing" i.e. canva pricing this is a navigational intent phrase. the user expects to be taken to the pricing page for canva
yeah interesting point. we found informational intent content was easier to rank for but this does have the effect of lower conversions (if that's your goal) so you need to have a killer content upgrade strategy to capture leads and nuture. we do this alongside transactional intent which have high conversion rates but lower volumes (we just rinse repeat loads of pages)
Thanks for the reply @_pear
Great detail for #2. Thank you. 📝📝📝
Great growth mate! One thing that I want to understand is where do you post the content? Do you post it on your site then share the link to places like Reddit, Quora etc or do you write it on a platform like Medium and from there you refer back to your website?
I am pretty confused in these two as I've tried both and haven't got much growth lately. Maybe my keyword targeting is way off or something isn't clicking as expected.
So you want the original content to always be on your website. That doesn't mean it technically has to be the FIRST place you post it though. We have built our agency website by republishing old content on Medium that we wrote, onto our new website and then updating the canonical link on medium to point to ours to tell Google we are the OG.
Content promotion is still super important. so we have a team searching places like Reddit, Quora etc to find questions or comments that we can HELPFULY answer and provide a link to a new content piece
What’s the average size in words of your articles?
it varies depending on the piece! we study our competitors in depth to see how much content they're producing i.e. take a distribution of the top 20 by position and decide from there! long form does tend to perform better but it's not always required. BUT the important thing is delivering value to your reader! so if you can do that in less words but with more quality that's ok too
Great!
Thanks for the information, my strategy is to drive organic traffic too. Paid advertising is just too expensive in my niche and inconsistent.
100%! SEO alllllll the way. however the content production and then ranking can take time. I would consider maybe doing some paid ads initially with the content you are hoping to rank. like I say in the post we are seeing this exponential growth 8 months after starting.
Super impressive growth, Perry!! Thank you for the tips as well, insightful yet concise!! I've recently started to build a social presence so I'll definitely be implementing these tips into my content marketing!!!
Awesome! would love to hear how its going for you and what you end up doing
Nice one Perry, and thanks for the very actionable tips :).
We've started producing more articles for EnVsion, but it looks like it's only half of the battle. The other battle is increasing the number of backlinks. Do you have specific examples on how you managed to grow backlinks to your domain?
Backlinks are definitely important, especially if you are trying to create content in a competitive area. The first thing you should always think about with backlinks is making content people want to link to. This means your content needs to be the highest of quality, and better than everyone else's.
It's really that simple!
The catch is this takes time so you need to take steps to promote your link-worthy content i.e. some paid ads, cold outreach to people who link to your competitors, your email lists, etc.
This one isn't so simple as it's very time-consuming. I ended up automating a lot of the outreach which has helped and we also have a team of backlinkers to help
Some little extras we do is Reddit, Quora, etc for each content piece.
Very useful. Thank you!
A nice process to grow your business. I will follow this article's steps in my business and try to get results as you achieve.
Let me know how it going for you and if you ned any more help!
Thats awesome Perry! I m starting out for content marketing and just wanted to understand how to plan an overall content strategy for the company. Any steps in those? It would be great if you could guide me in this.
Yeah for sure i'd be happy to help. Is there a particular part of the strategy that you need help with?
Nothing particular in such! Overall the whole view and it would be great if you could enumerate the steps involved
Great work Perry!
thanks Stefan - You the man
Nice job. Will you update us as you progress? interested to see how much growth you get
I hadn't really thought about that tbh but I'm happy to share more stories as we go! you an also check my twitter out where I post on the regular.
Very impressive work! Thanks for breaking it down to this format.
I'm very interested in the SEO-focused page outlines. How do these work?
Yeah so page outlines are pretty important for our writing & editorial team. During research we spend a lot of time on Ahrefs, Google, People Also Ask, etc to find out specific search terms. we then use this to create page structures that our writers follow to create content that can rank for multiple keywords/terms!
This is impressive growth! Would love to know more about the niche you are working in and how you decide what content to produce (other than on low difficulty keywords)
Thanks! So we are working with a Marketing Platform that targets US-based SMBs of various industry verticals i.e. real estate, financial services, etc.
The platform is very much focused on marketing, automation & CRM integrations.
This gives us our horizontal and vertical topics that we hunt for content ideas in.
Th most important step in our content research is applying a business score to the topic idea. we simply follow Ahrefs example here and score content from 0-3.
3 being the most ideal! 0 being why are w looking at this. this helps ensure we produce content we can plug in the clients solution
Do. you have a link for the Ahrefs business score?
https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-choose-keywords-for-seo/#3-make-sure-keyword-has-business-potential