“Think less about using SEO-driven content to grow traffic to your site, and more about making content worth searching for.”- Amanda Natividad.
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Table of Contents
🎯 Actionable Insights
How did ExplodingTopics Grew Their Traffic By 10x in Just 5 Months
ExplodingTopics grew their SEO monthly traffic 10x in just five months.
Let’s have a look at the organic traffic growth of the last two months:
So the question is HOW.
In a recent post, Brian Dean (Founder of ExplodingTopics) shared two key things that helped grow the site.
1/ Building the authority first
From the beginning, Brian focused on building a lot of quality links.
The reason?
- The ExplodingTopics blog is relatively new.
- Competitive niche
For the first 3 months of the SEO campaign, the team focused on building quality backlinks via:
- Broken link building
- Digital PR
- Cold outreach
The result?
The blog acquired 200+ links, including Entrepreneur, Buffer, etc.
How ExplodinTopics get high-quality backlinks without having quality content pieces?
The answer is their freemium tool. ExplodingTopics itself is a link-worthy asset that helped them acquire links and mentions.
2/ Publishing quality content at scale
After getting around 200+ links, the team started publishing quality content.
“Like with Backlinko, I went with a quality over quantity approach.
Which meant that we could only publish a few posts per month.
But each post was SUPER good.”- Brian Dean.
👉 Read The Full Case Study Here
💡 2. How to Grow the DR of a new site from 0 to 10?
I did an AskMeAnything session (via Twitter) on growing new websites from scratch where Daniel asked: What’s the process of growing a DR from 0 to 10?
Here’s what I’d do:
1/ Fixing technical issues:
The first thing I will ensure is that the website has a few technical issues as possible because having serious technical issues won’t perform well in the search even if you have a good link profile.
It includes orphan pages, broken links, alt text, title and meta description, sitemap, thin content, EAT information, flat site structure, duplicate content, etc.
2/ Content that attracts links
From the beginning, focus on building a link-building flywheel. That means, create link-worthy content that organically attracts backlinks, mentions over time.
A few things to do to find link-worthy content opportunities:
- Study your competitors’ top pages (using Ahrefs) by the number of referring domains and analyze what type of content tends to generate the most links over a long time.
- Generally, statistical or research-based content performs well to acquire natural links.
- Have access to unique data or community members to run a survey? Turn those statistics into data-driven content assets.
3/ Common yet proven link building activity
A few ways that worked well→
- Guest posting
- HARO
- Outreaching for contributor quotes
- local citations (NAP)
- Claiming social profiles
- Creating content clusters
- If possible, participating in podcasts, YT shows
- Creating linkable assets (mostly research articles)
Note: Domain authority shouldn’t be treated as a primary KPI of SEO success. However, you can understand the progress by looking at the backlink profile (as DR is highly correlated with the quality and quantity of backlinks).
👉 Have content marketing questions? Ask me on Twitter
💡 3. Don’t Make These Mistakes While Writing Cold Email/Message
A few days back, I received a cold message on LinkedIn. And, I found the common mistakes that people often make during cold outreaching.
Let’s look at the breakdown of the cold message:
Here are three mistakes to avoid:
1/ Lack of audience research
The cold outreach starts with mentioning the ‘brand lift study.’ But what if the user doesn’t even know what it means?
Or, Why is it relevant to the user?
It doesn’t make the connection or seems like an irrelevant message.
What to do instead →
Talk about things that matter to the audience or that make them understand. No personalization, no relevancy doesn’t hook your readers.
2/ Using complex words
The term ‘gauge the effectiveness…’ isn’t something people often use in normal situations. Using complex or technical words makes your message sound like a robot.
3/ No clear benefit/result for the user
Before hitting the send button, ensure that the message has a clear benefits/results-driven call-to-action.
Examples of benefit-driven call-to-actions:
- Watch this video to launch a side hustle this weekend.
- Contact our experts and learn how we can grow your site traffic by 10x.
👉 From Content Marketing VIP
🗓️ Free Resources & Upcoming Events
💡1. Free Buyer Personal Template Builder
Semrush launched a buyer persona builder with no limits.
It also includes B2B buyer persona template that will help you in
- Building an empathy-driven content marketing strategy
- Finding the right content channels
- Delivering the relevant content at the right buyer’s stage
👉 Create Your Free Buyer Persona & Boost Content Marketing Strategy
💡 2. Role of Content Course with Eric Enge [From Semrush]
Learn how to create content or build a strategy that feeds users’ needs.
After completing this free course, you’ll learn about:
- Basics of SEO content
- Role of EAT
- Understanding content depth
- Evolution of ranking factors
- Content hubs vs. blogs, and a lot more.
From: Semrush
💡 3. Copywriting Formulas and Principles to Engage Any Audience [Webinar]
No matter how much traffic you bring to the landing page. In the end, it is about conversion.
And, copywriting is one of those drivers for conversion and sales.
Join this copywriting webinar and:
- Find out how your brand can write better copy more quickly.
- Learn tried-and-true copywriting principles used by the greatest writers in the world.
- See real-life examples of copywriting that moves people to take action.
From: OrbitMedia
Date of the webinar: October 27, 2021
👉 Register For The Copywriting Webinar
🆕 What’s New
💡1. The State Of Technical SEO report 2021 [Key Takeaways]
This year over 870 SEO professionals participated in this technical SEO survey.
The result?
Insights about what’s working well and what isn’t for technical SEO professionals.
Here’s one of the answers:
Question: In your experience, how influential are the following navigation and Schema signals in improving organic search traffic?
👉 Read The Full Technical SEO report [No Signup required]
💡2. Google Updated The Quality Raters Guideline [See What’s Changed]
This week, Google updated the quality raters guidelines with major changes and guidelines that will be helpful for SEOs.
In case you’re unfamiliar with QRG, here’s an overview:
QRG is 170 pages long PDF that provides guidelines to evaluate the quality of a website. It also includes →
- Role of YMYL pages
- Characteristics of high quality and low-quality pages
- Concept of EAT and guidelines for high-quality website
- Reputation research of websites and content creators, and a lot more.
👉 Download The Updated Quality Raters Guidelines
👉 Learn What’s Changed From The Last Update
💬 SEO & Content Marketing Wisdom
💡 1. Never Tag Internal Links With UTM
“Apart from GA tracking issues, it can confuse Google for indexing purposes.
Internal links are a strong signal for Google to consider what URLs are important to crawl and index.
Even if your UTM tagged URLs have rel canonical pointing to URLs without UTM, Google might index URLs with UTM tags.
A canonical tag is a strong signal/hint, but internal links are equally strong to highlight important links.
It’s better to avoid UTM for internal links.”
– Praveen Sharma (SEO Strategist & Consultant)
💡 2. Copywriting Best Practices
Two quick ways to improve your copywriting skill are:
- Use simple language
- Use as few words as possible to share the message
Here’s quick list of words to ban:
- just
- that
- very
- really
- literally
- actually
- certainly
- probably
- basically
And, other words to replace:
- utilizes → uses
- in order to → to
- facilitates → helps
- whether or not → whether
- due to the fact that → because
– Dickie Bush (Learn actionable copywriting tips from Dickie)
😄 Have Some Fun
Source: Kennedy Woods