How We Helped One of Our Clients Generate 200k+ Per Month Search Traffic To His Website

Tell me, who doesn’t want free and organic traffic?

And if you’re a business owner trying to sell courses online using your website. Then ranking on Google is one of the best ways to generate traffic and grow your revenue simultaneously.

Last year, we helped one of our clients, who offers online courses for the most in-demand business software, grow his website traffic to 100k+ users per month. Today that website is generating over 200k+ visits per month just by relying on search engines.

An Overview of The Project

If you’re reading this piece, then we don’t need to convince you about SEO is and how powerful SEO can be.

However, the intention with this article is to share some of the crucial SEO implementations we did for this project to get such results.

Almost a year ago, when this client came to me with his course-selling website. He had almost everything from a well-designed website to content promoting his courses.

Well, at least he thought he had everything!

It was evident for him to reach out to guys like me because despite putting effort into the website and content, the site needed to be ranked better, as it barely crossed 10k+ visits per month after working on it for 16+ months.

What We Did To Reach 100k+ Traffic Per Month For The Website

Growing a site to 100k+ users per month is a significant feat for any website, considering that our client was selling courses on his site. Which also meant that consistent traffic would mean more leads and more sales later on.

Hence when we hit 100k+ per month in 2022, the website was converting at 0.2%, which means the site alone was generating 50k+ per month recurring revenue just by ranking on search traffic alone.

However, every website need is different regarding SEO since, as I mentioned above, our client had already worked on the site. From our end, all we needed to do was use our expertise to make the most of what was already done.

Hence this is what we did….

1) A Thorough Content Audit & Optimizations

Usually, this is the first thing we do whenever we come across websites that have worked on their content extensively but are not seeing any better results.

To run a thorough content audit, we took the help of multiple tools, but to mention the best tools that helped me, SuferSEO, RankMath, and Ahrefs were the ones.

However, there are four key SEO implementations which we think made a difference:-

a) Identifying weak blog posts and optimizing them here

Here, we took the help of SurferSEO to individually asses weakly optimized blog posts that are already published on the blog. If you’re planning to use SurferSEO to asses your on-page SEO, we suggest that most of your blog post scores should be above 70 to be considered as well-optimized.

And also, an adequately optimized piece of content sets the base for ranking on page 1 on Google.

Hence in the first few weeks, more than one month of the project was dedicated to optimizing the existing content, which included:-

• Having the right keywords with the proper density
• Keywords to be included in the Title, URL, and meta description
• Internal linking among the articles

b) Adding FAQ schema, GIFs, and Videos in the blog posts

Today, most of the top-ranking articles on this website have a FAQ section at the Bottom. Initially, once we finished with the basic on-page optimizations for the blog posts.

We filtered dozens of blog posts that had the potential to beat the existing content on page 1 for their respective keywords.

Hence, for these blog posts, we did further optimizations, including adding a FAQ section in the content using the RankMath plugin.

Later on, this step helped blog posts rank for secondary keywords as well, because those were included in the FAQ section.

However, along with adding FAQ sections, we went above and beyond to make sure and include engaging media in the content, like GIFs, tables, and videos, further helping us bring more clicks to the blog posts, which will be explained in the next section.

c) Getting ‘Featured Snippet’ Spots For The Blog Posts

If you have yet to hear about featured snippets. Then you should know that these are the special boxes that you see on your search results page as a descriptive answer to your query.

Usually, featured snippets are seen as paragraphs, photos, tables, or any combination of such.

However, you would be amazed to know that almost 20% of the SERPs have featured snippets. Thus helping users solve their queries without them having to scroll through dozens of blocks of text, till they find their answer on a webpage.

If your article wants to acquire the spot at the top as a featured snippet. Then the first thing you need to do is be on Page 1 of Google.

As we mentioned, with the initial optimizations and a few weeks of link building, some articles got on to the Page 1 on Google.

Later on, due to the courtesy of doing further optimizations, as mentioned, we were able to land featured snippet spots for dozens of our articles.

d) Shifting the content model

Initially, when we stumbled upon our client’s site, the first thing we noticed in terms of the blog post content was that most of the content was written and published, keeping his courses in mind.

Those blog posts were more course-centric, and therefore the intention was to sell software courses through content rather than providing information about software.

This was the first thing we wanted to work on when we got access to our client’s website. But still, since our client has already published 50+ blog posts, initially our sole focus was to optimize the existing content and craft a content plan to reach potential traffic.

Here’s what we focused on in terms of creating content around topics that fall into the:-

• Middle of the funnel category (MOF):- Where your content is relevant to the users, but they might not know about your brand, yet they can be your future potential buyers.
  

• Top of the funnel (TOF):- The type of content that caters to a wide range of audiences. Hence most of them might not be your potential customers, but at the end of the day more traffic can lead to more leads, and more leads can lead to more sales.
  

Since the website already had content about the courses (aka Bottom of the Funnel content). We only focused on keywords that could bring us more traffic and are relevantly easier to rank. To do extensive keyword research, we used Ahrefs for this.

2) Building 100+ Solid Backlinks Which Mattered

If you know me (Rahul Thakur), you would know that I love building backlinks, and today, most websites need backlinks to rank and outrank their competitors. Similarly, it was the case with our client’s website too.

Read this also:- 7 Less Spoken, ‘Truth About Backlinks’

Before us, our client worked on link building before. To his credit, he did built dozens of backlinks, which were good. But he needed to scale up the link building process to get more quality backlinks, and for that, he needed proven strategies to rely on.

Hence this is where we used our link-building expertise to build quality backlinks like guest posts and link insertions. But apart from relying on only those two strategies, we had to implement several other link building strategies to generate dozens of backlinks at scale.

Those strategies were:-

a) Using the listicle blog posts technique

If you don’t know about the skyscraper technique by Brain Dean. It’s a strategy where you are meant to create blog posts that are 10x better than existing ones on given keywords and later pitch to the sites that are already linking your competitor articles and request them for an link insertion.

Besides Brain Dean’s skyscraper technique, we like to use one of our strategies where we publish statistical blog posts to build backlinks at scale.

However, for this client, we published 4–5 listicle blog posts talking about the tips, hacks, and tricks to use in the most popular and in-demand business software.

Since while writing the articles, we knew what content was needed to be around those keywords. We enhanced the content by providing extensive value, adding media, and optimizing it accordingly.

Later once the articles got crawled on Google, we launched a few cold email campaigns to generate quality link insertions.

b) Using Images and Media to get backlinks

As mentioned above, we used everything from Gifs to videos to optimize the existing content on the website as we noticed that other competitors weren’t using such media more sparingly.

Later on, we pitched potential websites and requested them for a link from their existing content. Instead of just asking for backlinks, we asked website owners and editors to use our images and GIFs within their content pieces.

As soon as a few backlinks started coming in, some of the images ranked on Google image search. Later on, we got a bunch of free backlinks just by staying at the top of Google Image Search.

In the end, these images improved website domain authority and helped us push our rankings.

c) Using HARO for authoritative backlinks

HARO is probably one of our favorite link-building strategies out there, and the quality of backlinks that you get from this platform/strategy is absolutely worth it.

However, for this exact client, I did HARO for 4+ months. This platform yielded us more than 25+ backlinks from prominent sites like Entrepreneur, HuffPost, etc.

Hence that’s the reason why HARO backlinks are worth their weight in gold.

Wrap UP

During the last quarter of the year, our client was generating 1k+ leads for free each month to his email lists and funnels. Because we focused on targeting the right kind of audience through articles, he was making $50k per month by selling digital courses passively.

If you’re stuck in the same situation as our client was before. Then our best advice for you is to optimize your site’s content first.

Later validate your content marketing strategy and once you craft the right strategy, publish quality content and build quality backlinks at pace.

This post was originally published on Better Marketing Publication, written by Rahul Thakur 🙂