I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
SEO doesn’t have to be complicated.
One of the things I notice as a popular SEO blog owner is that people are always looking for the “secret ingredient”
But truth be told:
There isn’t any “super secret” to SEO.
If you want to increase your search traffic it is as simple as-
- Conducting an SEO audit
- Creating content
- Building links
That is the exact approach we used to
14x organic search traffic
in today’s case study!
We took traffic from 2,732 visitors per month to 38,420 in just 8x months-
How did we do it?
Well it was simple really…
A Closer Look At The Case Study Site
This is an affiliate focused website that reviews weight loss supplements targeting the USA & United Kingdom.
Our client’s website provides a platform for users to access trustworthy, specialist reviews and decide which diet supplement is best suited for them.
The main focuses of the campaign were to-
- Build the website’s authority
- Push rankings to the first page for high-volume terms
It sounds simple when you write it out like that, right?
That’s because it is!
Except one tiny detail…
The Biggest Challenge We Had To Overcome
The weight loss supplements niche is one of the most competitive niches in SEO (to say the least!)
Most search results are dominated by huge brands like Holland & Barrett-
Or massive content-based sites like HealthLine-
Those are some pretty terrifying metrics.
I mean:
Just take a look at some of the top results for one of our target keywords-
If you click on the image above you’ll also see that we are up against-
- Sponsored product results
- 4x Google Adwords results
- 1x Featured snippet
- 1x People Also Ask box
And those kind of results are common across this niche.
But if you pay close attention to the green boxes in the image above…
…you’ll see an opportunity!
Because many of the top 10 results are ranking purely out of domain authority rather than individual page level metrics.
That means we have a solid chance of competing with the big boys.
And I am sure you have seen results just like that in your niche right?
Remember: Any health-related content/website is part of the YMYL category, which means that they need to be treated as such and respect the YMYL guidelines.
Creating A Plan Of Attack
When forming your SEO strategy, there is one thing to keep in mind.
Keep It Simple!
People tend to over complicate SEO.
Our strategy was broken down into 3x stages-
- Technical SEO – Build a solid & healthy website structure
- Content – Create relevant content that helps people
- Link Building – Acquire links from relevant websites
But of all of that is easier said than done, right?
So let me show you how that translates into the real world…
What Did We Actually Do?
To help you understand our process:
I am going to step you through the core SEO strategy and precisely what we did.
The strategy was broken down into a number of pieces-
And it is the combination of these pieces that were responsible for
14x traffic in 8 months.
Often when clients come to us:
They are completely obsessed with link building.
They say things like-
“Yeah but how many links will you build per month?”
But link building is just 1x component of a complete SEO strategy.
Let me ask you this:
How many links do you think we built to 14x traffic to this site?
Just 76.
76x links to take this sites traffic from 2,732 visitors per month to 38,420–
How?
By addressing all of the moving parts of SEO rather than only focusing on the number of links we build.
(I’ll share the link-building strategy with you later)
But first:
You have to get the basics right-
Step #1 – Keyword Research
The first thing we do with any new client is conduct detailed keyword research.
First, we asked our client for a list of seed keywords that are important to them.
Then used the KeywordShitter tool to expand on them-
Once we pulled all the keywords from there…
…we expanded on them further with AnswerThePublic:
Once we had a large list of keywords we started to filter them down-
- First we removed duplicate/similar terms
- Then we mapped out topic clusters of keywords with similar topics
- And thought about the “type” of keywords to focus on
These were the types of keyword we were looking for-
- Money keywords that drive traffic to key affiliate pages: [brand] review(s)
- Generic keywords related to different forms of the products: best [product] / best [product] [supplement|brand|pills], most effective [XYZ], weight loss [XYZ]
- Questions: does [XYZ] work, how to use [XYZ]
- Strictly informational keywords: [XYZ] information, [XYZ] pros and cons, [XYZ] side effects.
We also paid close attention to search intent when selecting our final keywords.
It’s important to avoid keywords that return different user intent than the site can satisfy.
The final spreadsheet included additional data pulled from Google Keyword Planner and our rank tracker-
But:
There’s 1x part of keyword research people usually miss.
Whilst you’re doing keyword research, make sure to take a look at the SERPS for each one.
Pay attention to the sites that popup and make a list of common competitors.
We will be using that list to our advantage later in the case study!
Pro Tip: Quick & Easy Keyword Research
If your site has any level of existing search traffic…
…I have a great keyword research tip for you.
With this tip you’ll be able to find all of the low hanging easy to rank keywords in a couple of clicks with Ahrefs.
Just head over to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and paste in your domain and head to the Organic Keywords report-
Then use the filters to show the keywords currently ranking in positions 11-30-
This just returns a list of keywords that you already rank on page 2 & 3 for…
…which are super easy to bump to the top 10-
Targeting these keywords are a great starting point for any SEO strategy.
Step #2 – Competitor Analysis
I can not stress how important this stage is!
It is absolutely critical for your success.
At the moment we have a good list of keywords that are-
- Topically relevant
- Match the sites user intent
Now we need to take a closer look at who our SERP competitors are.
Do some searches and pay close attention to the first page of results.
You want to look at things like-
- Content length
- Page purpose and intent
- What types of pages are ranking (inner vs homepage or product vs category)
- How strong the domains are (is it Amazon or just an average Joe)
- Page layout (e.g. CTA and banner placements)
- Monetisation
Just by looking at the results, you can get a good idea of the type of SEO elements, structure, intent and content you need to create.
The power of observation is often under utilized in SEO.
Here’s an example of a competitor site’s review my agency sends to clients:
It’s not everything:
But you can see what kind of signals we’re looking at.
Why is this important?
Because Google have been using machine learning algorithms since 2015.
And by looking at the search results we can see what the machine learning algorithm is expecting to see.
You might not realize this:
But every time you search this is what is happening behind the scenes-
- You enter your query into Google
- Google chops the query into individual words
- Google applies natural language processing to figure out meaning
- Then it analyses the intent of the query (eg informational or commercial)
- This generates a list of relevant results
- Additional filters are applied (eg Pagespeed)
- The final search results are displayed
Here’s a shot from Rad Paluszak’s Chiang Mai 2018 presentation to help visualize that-
But what is most important here is the final step of the process…
Results Satisfaction Analysis.
Because this is the machine learning part that is automatically analyzing the efficiency of the results and tweaking the algorithm.
What’s that got to do with competitors?
Well:
The machine learning algorithm is telling us what types of things it expects to see.
We just have to look for those things…
Pro Tip: Spot Check Your Competitors
Do a search for your target keyword and look at the top 5 results.
First look for commonalities in the results such as-
- Content length
- Page intent
- Use of images/videos
- Page layout
- Ad placement
- Trust signals
Then make a note of what you like and don’t like about each result.
This will become the outline for each new piece of content.
Step #3 – Technical SEO & Content Audit
Now we know where we want to go with the SEO campaign…
..It’s time to figure out where we are starting from.
To do that we conducted a comprehensive onsite audit that typically spans about 30 pages.
The goal of this is to identify any issues that might hold it back from performing at its full potential.
It includes things like-
- Site Structure – Are we using the best site structure to maximize link juice?
- PageSpeed – Does your site load quickly for Google and visitors?
- Index Management – Do you have unnecessary index bloat?
- Duplicate Content – Caused by improper use of tags/categories
- Internal Redirects – Wasting crawl budget is bad for your site!
- Internal Linking – Very powerful but underused tool.
- Trust Signals – Are you sending the right signals to Google?
This site had a range of problems that we needed to address.
Here’s how we fixed some of them-
Issue #1 – Page Speed
One of the main problems with the site was that it had almost no page speed optimisation.
The site was loading very slowly in our tests.
We use 2 plugins to fix that-
This is the best way to setup WPRocket-
Step #1 – Caching
Step #2 – File Optimisation
Step #3 – Media
Step #4 – Preloading
Or you can checkout my full WP Rocket review which takes a deep dive into how to get the most out of it.
Issue #2 – Wordpress Taxonomies vs Duplicate Content
Wordpress is a great platform to build a website.
But:
It can also make Google index a lot of rubbish.
All this indexed bloat
decreases the overall SEO value of the site-
Not only do you risk duplicate content problems but you also waste valuable crawl budget…
To put it simply:
If you have 50 pages indexed, but only 5 that Google should pay attention to…
…you should consider pruning the site.
If the remaining 45 pages are not useful for your users, get rid of them.
Below are Yoast SEO settings I always use for taxonomies in a few simple steps.
Step #1 – Yoast SEO -> Search Appearance
Step #2 – Yoast SEO -> Search Appearance -> Content Types
Be careful if you’re using custom post types in your WP, as you will have more than just the ones listed below!
Posts
Pages
Custom Post Types (Portfolio)
Step #3 – Yoast SEO -> Search Appearance -> Media
This feature had a few issues last year.
Step #4 – Yoast SEO -> Search Appearance -> Taxonomies
Categories (category)
You might want to choose “No” if you don’t use Post categories at all.
Tags (post_tag)
Format (post_format)
Custom Categories (portfolio-category)
Step #5 – Yoast SEO -> Search Appearance -> Archives
Author archives settings
Date archives settings
Issue #3 – Internal Redirects
When we conducted the technical SEO audit, we spotted a few problems with internal redirects.
This was caused by a variety of things-
- The site had recently migrated from HTTP to HTTPS (poorly)
- A lot of the internal links were pointing to old HTTP urls
- Some pages were renamed or deleted and redirected
- The theme had some hardcoded redirect loops
All of this was wasting significant crawl budget.
But luckily:
It’s all pretty simple to fix!
With HTTP -> HTTPS URLs, we just tracked all of them down and changed all http:// to https:// manually.
And to fix the redirect problems we just fired up Screaming Frog SEO Spider–
- Crawl the site
- Go to Response Codes at the top
- Select “Redirection (3xx)” Filter
- Type your domain – this will ensure you are looking at your internal links only.
- Click on the URL you’d like to review
- This is what the URL is currently.
- This is what it should be.
In our case study site for example:
We could fix a lot of the errors by updating hardcoded links in the menus and sidebars.
But every site is different!
Issue #4 – Thin Content
Whilst conudcting the audit,
we found a BIG issue
with thin content.
Over 50% of the website pages had under 500 words.
Every niche is different!
But after looking at search results and competitor sites…
…It was clear this is a content heavy niche.
Don’t forget:
Google rewards fresh, long form content that addresses user intent. So we adjusted our content strategy to support the main campaign goal.
With that in mind:
We increased the length of the homepage from 1,500 words to 10,911 words by answering over 20 of the most popular questions around the main affiliate product.
That helped increase visibility of the homepage which now ranks for over 11,200 keywords-
Following the same strategy:
We increased the average word count per page from ~500 words to 2,216 words per page.
In addition to expanding the website’s copy, we also reviewed and optimised-
All of which worked in harmony with each other to pull the sites pages up the search rankings.
Step #4 – Building A Healthy Site Structure
It’s important to create a healthy website architecture.
Why?
Because-
- It helps user finds what they need
- It helps Google understand the site
- It helps to priortise the most important content
- It helps distribute link equity throughout the site
The website should follow a logical structure (flat structure or silo structure) with a clear with your core pages located within 3x clicks from the homepage.
We can check this easily in Screaming Frog using the Crawl Depth report.
Here is an example of bad crawl depth–
And here is what it should look like-
If you wanted to dig deeper…
…You can also use Screaming Frogs Visualization tools-
But what are we looking for here?
Well this is an example of a bad site structure–
And when you do things right…
…it looks like this-
So with the case study site in mind, we overhauled the site structure so everything was within 3x clicks of the homepage.
We did this by-
- Building out category pages
- Linking to those category pages from menus
- Internal linking between content (I’ll talk more about this later)
A lot of people don’t pay attention to site structure.
But trust me:
Building a healthy site structure from day #1 is critical to your growth.
Step #5 – Content Strategy
As soon as you have a keyword strategy and healthy site foundation to build on…
…It’s time to get your hands dirty with content!
You should start crafting the content as soon as possible because this is often a bottleneck for many businesses.
This is how we approached it-
- First we selected our primary target keywords
- Then we reviewed our competitors in Google for each keyword
- That allowed us to create a “content specification”
- Which was then sent to our writing team
Based on what we had learned about the thin content issues during the SEO audit…
…we made sure that all new pieces of content were at least 2,500 words.
We continued to produce 2x new pieces of content per month throughout the campaign.
Step #6 – Internal Linking
Once we developed our killer content and restructure strategy…
We needed to help Google navigate the website easier to discover all the pages we updated/created.
The goal of our internal link building strategy was to distribute link value throughout the site, from pages with authority to others with less authority.
We used a balanced combination of targeted, branded and generic anchors to help Google determine the relationship between them-
Along with links we placed manually, we also installed and tested a number of plugins to help place internal links-
The one we ended up using is Yuzo Related Posts:
We chose this because it helped us customise the display on the front end of the site-
This meant we could cross-link key pages across the site structure automatically.
Very handy!
Need help fixing your SEO issues? Check out my 45+ steps SEO checklist to get rid of your most important SEO issues.
Step #7 – Link Building
There is no doubt about it:
Backlinks are the most important ranking factor in Google.
But that is amplified 10x when you have built a good site structure backed with solid content.
With all of that in place we started to build the overall domain authority using links from relevant websites in the fitness, health and lifestyle niche.
We took the backlink profile from 27x referring domains to 374x referring domains–
How did we do that?
By keeping things simple!
First we scraped a huge list of relevant websites with SEO value, traffic & authority.
Then we published high quality content targeted at their audience to secure a backlink where possible.
We didn’t do anything beyond that.
This is the exact link building strategy and schedule we used to meet the clients budget-
Month 1
- 12x PBN Links
- 1x Outreach
Month 2
- 10x PBN Links
- 3x Outreach Links
- 15x Quora Links
Month 3
- 12x PBN Links
- 3x Outreach
Month 4
- 10x PBN Links
- 3x Outreach
Month 5
Month 6
The strategy was simple-
- First build authority and topical relevancy as quickly as possible with PBN links
- Once established (month 4), we switched to outreach only
- In month 5+ the site starts ranking & picking up links naturally to fuel growth
And that’s all we did.
In month 7+ we didn’t build any additional links to the site.
Once the site started to rank it was picking up links naturally and rankings have continued to improve.
Do You Struggle With Link Building?
Take a look at some of these free resources to help you build awesome links-
The Results Speak For Themselves
The site has had 8x months of amazing growth.
Traffic has grown from 2,732 visitors per month to 38,420.
Let me put that in different words…
14X. In. Eight. Months!
If we take a closer look at things…
…we managed to increase-
- DR from 45 to 59
- UR from 10 to 41
- Referring domains from 27 to 374
- Backlinks from 45 to 2,540
Metrics – Start of the Campaign
Metrics – End of the Campaign
That increased domain authority also increased keyword visibility.
At the start of the campaign there were-
- 68x top 3 rankings
- 345x top 10 rankings
But at the end of the campaign…
There are now
637x keywords in the top 3 positions!
And 2,221 keywords in the top 10-
Although throughout the campaign we were only monitoring 48x core keywords…
..they had a net increase of 894x positions in Google–
And a number of those keywords…
…had
high search volumes
and were dropping into the #1 positions-
With a number of other high volume search keywords breaking into the top 10.
All of which made for some really pretty Google Search Console data-
Not bad right?
Especially in such a competitive niche (more on that soon).
If you want help ranking your website…
…Click Here Now!
Wrapping It Up
So there you have it:
How to 14x search traffic in 8x months.
It really isn’t that difficult to do – you just need to follow the 3x stages of SEO-
- Technical SEO – Build a solid & healthy website structure
- Content – Create relevant content that helps people
- Link Building – Acquire links from relevant websites
And the best is that you can use free seo tools to help you out!
Or if you want to do it the easy way:
Click here to have my team do all the hard work for you.
If you have any questions about the case study, please ask below!
Keyword Shitter tool… What a great name. I’d never used it before. Basic as fuck but gets the job done. Awesome post mate, heaps of killer actionable content as always. Thanks.Rowan.
Haha yes Rowan, couldn’t agree more!
thanks for the blog post. very helpful information. we can always learn something new 🙂
That’s the good thing about SEO. It’s always changing so there is always new stuff to learn and keep us on our toes 🙂
thanks so much for this. only problem i have is that weight loss pills are fake, so not helping the world
Well you can supply the theory to any type of site, but I get the point 🙂
Great Article Mathew, Thanks for sharing immense knowledge.
No problem Anthony. Hope you can use the info to your advantage.
Awesome article.Thanks for sharing this great content
Thanks, glad I could help 🙂
Thanks for this great article. Tho this is my first time writing an article on my blog and got it index in three days then appears on page 6 on google now the website is now on page 4 on a particle keyword, still building links. I hope to get it to page one. Thanks once again for all of your great articles.
Great start Daniel!
ohh..my god… thats amazing.. thanks matthew.. i am a regular follower of your SEO strategies.. you have explained here in a great way.. hope this will help me for my new site..
Thank you very much, hope you got some actionable tips out of it!
Wow great content!
Thanks so much, always good to show tactics in action!
Great inside!
Cheers Mana!
This is so technical and useful information for everyone. Really thanks for this.
Glad I could help Nikhil!
Hi matthew, this is very qualitative content, thanks for sharing and keep .it’s a wonderful blog
Glad you think so Jay! Hope the SEO tactics prove useful to you!
Your new valuable key points imply much a person like me and extremely more to my office workers. With thanks; from everyone of us.
Hey Koby, glad I was able to help 🙂
This article is great. I agree with the information you provide in the article. Thanks for sharing this post.
No worries, hopefully you can recreate some of this case studies success!
Great Article for Bloggers. and very informative
Cheers!
nice blog.. thank you…
No problem, hope it’s helpful!
Explained very well. All points mentioned here are worth noticing. Thanks
They sure are, thanks Shins!
This article is an appealing wealth of informative data that is interesting and well-written. I commend your hard work on this and thank you for this information. You’ve got what it takes to get attention.
Wow, thanks a lot!
I want more traffic on my blog magazine site…http://blogsauthor.com/It's difficult to reach people worldwide…I’m trying to get more visitors…I’ve applied some seo strategy yet…but I could not get organic search…What should I do now? Please let me know your expert thoughts in terms of getting huge traffic…Thanks for your excellent article…
Read the article and you’ll get plenty of advice.
Hello,It really awesome article
Glad you think so!
Thank for good article write and published.
You are welcome Zomirul!
I really appreciate the work you have done, you explained everything in such an amazing and simple way.
No probs, happy I could help!
Thanks for sharing a information about search traffic to website.
Hope you picked up some good tips from the case study.
Nice post!Best knowledge sharing post. It is helpful. Thank you for the post shared with us.
Glad you found the case study helpful!
Hi matthew, this is a very nice case study, will surely try this.Thanks and regards
Please do!
wow It is awesome article.
Thanks Fahim! Hope you put these tips to good use!
Thank you so much for this valuable information
No worries Abhishek! Hope you picked out some actionable tips.
Hi there! Wow! It is awesome article.Thanks for sharing
No problem, hope you learnt a thing or two 🙂
Very good blog. Nice post keep posting
I definitely will 🙂
Your articles are really amazing. love to read your blog.It will be very useful information for everyone.Carry on the hard work. Keep sharing such informative posts continuously.
Happy I could help! Glad it was so useful!
Wow Matt, this case study is amazing. So much value. I like that you insist on simplifying SEO. Just technical SEO, content and links.Do that and you’re golden. Also, I like the tip of using Ahrefs to find keywords ranking on the positions 11-30. I didn’t know Ahrefs can do that, and it’s similar to using GSC to find high impression; low CTR keywords.Thanks Matt, I’ll share your guide on Twitter:)
Thanks Nikola, sounds like you really good some good tips from the case study! Let me know how you get on implementing them.
very nice airticle super bro
Hope it helps to give your traffic a boost!
hiiam geeta very nice this website usefull
Hi Geeta, glad you found my blog useful! Come back soon 🙂
Thank you, very useful
Hope you can put it to good use Ibrahim
Hello,Thanks for sharing with us.” It’s really a great and helpful piece of info. I am glad that you shared this helpful info with us. Please keep us informed like this.
I certainly will Tarun!
Thank you. I my opinion google analytics is best because it gives the each and every details about website traffic
It sure does!
Thank you for this useful article from this article i got good knowledge about seo
Hope you can use it to your advantage!
its looking good
Cheers Kapil, hope you picked up some useful tips.
The message is, your attitude shapes your life.
Haha, yes it certainly has a massive part to play!
Thank you for to sharing this. This will really help us…
Great news, exactly what it was intended for!
Thank you for such an insightful post.
Hope you can use it to your advantage!
No worries, happy to help Akash.
Wow. Awesome Case study Matteew.Learn a lot of things.surely I will implement your advise in my next projects.thanks and shared.
Thanks for the share and I’m glad you found the case study useful!
One of the best article on gaining traffic and that to 14x times and shared information are so genuine. I have no words to say how great you are. You are guiding hundreds of aspiring blogger in right direction. Keep it up sir. If you have youtube channel then please let me know. Thanks.
Hey Srikant, thanks very much! I hope the post helped. You can find me here on Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkL2jolLeEjcS_Iuj71KwHw
Thanks for sharing the information.
Happy to Piyush!
This one is a good article for new users and I really loved it.Thanks for sharing.
Great work! There is definitely a lot of work put into this. I look forward to exploring! This is beautiful, I wish I had this when I got started in the SEO game.
Thanks Adesh! Hope things turn in your favour.
Hello, MatthewThanks for sharing your case study with us and learn us the things practically. I am learning SEO, It helped me a lot to learn some new idea and tactics.
Happy to help, keep it up!
Thanks for sharing this nice article keep posting such type of informative content mate
I certainly will do!
thanks, nice blog
Cheers Dharmesh!
Great work. Thanks for sharing Nice info.
No worries, hope it helps increase your search traffic!