How do some people get millions of monthly
visitors to their website, while over 96% of content gets zero traffic from Google? The problem isn’t tactics. It’s that top performers follow a proven
3-stage roadmap that makes traffic generation predictable and scalable. And I’m going to teach you how
to do it in under 14 minutes. And it all begins at stage One –
adopting a repeatable strategy. Now, there’s plenty of ways to hack
traffic, but traffic hacks don’t last long.
And it’s like that for most things in life. For instance, if you wanted to learn a simple
song on the guitar, you could probably read a chord sheet, practice a few times,
and eventually get good at that song. But what if you wanted to perform
a complex guitar solo? Well, repeating the same practice
strategy probably wouldn’t work. You’d need to learn music theory, practice
scales, advanced techniques, and perhaps even work with a teacher to master
the intricate parts of the solo. So building your repeatable traffic acquisition
strategy needs to start with a strong foundation.
And that involves choosing the right type
of content to create and the right sources to get traffic from. And let me make that
decision dead simple for you. This traffic chart is typical when your strategy
revolves around creating viral content. You might get big initial spikes of
traffic from social media or paid ads, but it almost always ends up fading to
nothing, taking you back to square one. Now, compare that with this traffic graph
which is typical for a site that creates evergreen content and generates their traffic
through search engine optimization, or SEO. Traffic isn’t exactly “instant”, but it’s free,
consistent and it compounds over time, helping you take steps closer to your
goal of getting 10,000 monthly visits. So, now that we know the strategy to get 10k
visits per month, we need to go and actually do the work to get those visitors to our site. And that all happens in stage 2: The tactics.
Now, some people get intimidated by
SEO they think that it’s too technical. But when you’re under 10,000 monthly
visits, all you need to do is focus on filling in the four pieces of the SEO puzzle. The first piece being “keyword research” –
which is the process of finding topics that people are actually searching for. And this process starts by generating
your big list of keywords. To do that, brainstorm some broad
keywords related to your niche. For example, if I had a site about learning
guitar, I would write down keywords like "guitar," "fingerpicking," and "strumming." Next, paste those into a keyword research
tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and then go to a Keyword ideas report like
the Matching terms report. And just like that, we have our big list of keywords.
Now, if you don’t have an Ahrefs account,
you can use our free Keyword Generator which I’ll link up in the description. Alright, so with our big list of keywords,
we need to narrow it down to keywords that are actually worth going after. And to determine this, you can use a 3-point
checklist with the first checkpoint being search demand. Now, this is easy because keyword research
tools show you the number of monthly searches for a given keyword. And all you want to do is make sure there’s
a decent number of monthly searches and that there’s some consistency month over month. But the second checkpoint is actually much more
important – and that’s to choose keywords that you have a realistic chance of ranking for. And while there’s no definitive way to quantify
this, a simple rule you can set for yourself is to only compete for keywords where websites
of a similar authority are already ranked. To figure this out, go to our free Website
Authority checker and type in your domain to check your website’s level of “authority.” For example, my guitar site is pretty new
and has a Domain Rating, or DR of just 1.
Now, whatever your site’s DR is, add 10 to it. And that number is kind of arbitrary, but it
sets an upper threshold to ensure you’re only competing against websites in the
same league as you —at least for now. Now, let’s take this number back
to our big list of keywords. And I’m going to set a “lowest DR” filter
with a value up to our upper threshold number and hit Apply. And if we expand the search results for
one of these keywords, you’ll see that there are indeed pages ranking here in the
top 5 with low website authority scores. Now, given that you can execute on the rest of
the SEO puzzle, you will rank for keywords that get searched regularly, and therefore, you
can easily get to 10,000 monthly visits.
But before we get to solving the rest of the
SEO puzzle, we need to talk about the third checkpoint for keyword research, which is all
about choosing keywords with business value. Go and look through your list of keywords, and
for each one, ask yourself: would someone searching for this topic be
interested in my product or service? For example, if my guitar education
site sells courses or private lessons, a keyword like “how to play f chord on guitar”
is definitely going to attract my ideal customer. So would keywords like “how much are guitar
lessons,” “what is a guitar riff,” and so on. These keywords all hit the sweet
spot so they’re worth going after. Now, a keyword like “what is the most
expensive guitar in the world” has some search demand and is possible to rank for. But it doesn’t exactly sound like something
a potential customer would be searching for. So, go through your entire list, save the good
keywords that check all points and you’re ready to go to unlock the second piece of the SEO
puzzle which is to match the intent of the searcher.
Google’s job is to give searchers the most
relevant results to any given query. This means that the pages ranking in the
top 3 positions are what Google believes searchers want to see for that query. For example, if I search for “how much do
guitar lessons cost,” you’ll see that Google shows the answer directly in the search results. And if we click into that page, you’ll see
the author gives you the answer within the first 10 words of the blog post because they
understand that that’s what searchers want. Now, copying what the top ranking page
did doesn’t mean you’ll outrank them. Matching the searcher’s intent by providing
a price range fast is just a prerequisite to even have a chance at ranking. But if you go a step further and think about
what else the searcher might want to know, you may be able to give yourself an edge.
Like, what determines this price range? How do I know if a teacher is actually good? What can I expect to learn in my first few lessons? And is it going to be worth the money? These are subtopics that you’d want
to cover in your post so you can make it as comprehensive as possible. Because ultimately, we want to give visitors
the best possible experience so they either convert or leave satisfied with the answer they got. So when creating content, go in with the
general mindset to immediately satisfy the primary desire for your visitor, and then
continue to satisfy their next 5 questions. And if you do that, while nailing the more
technical parts of content writing for SEO, which we’ve got a step-by-step tutorial
for, then you’ll definitely be able to nail this piece of the SEO puzzle. But in all honesty, there’s usually not a whole
lot you can do to be better than competitors for factual informational topics like
“how much do guitar lessons cost” or “how to play f chord on guitar”. And that’s where the two missing pieces
to the SEO puzzle are going to give you an edge… with the third piece being backlinks.
Backlinks are when a web page links
to another page on a different website. And links have been one of Google’s most
prominent ranking signals from the beginning. And if you’re not getting a lot of traffic now, a lack
of links is likely a big part of the reason why. So let’s fix that and start by getting links to
the easiest page on your site: the homepage. Now, the first tactic you can
use is podcast link building. And because podcast hosts usually have
a website, they often link to the guest’s homepage and socials on an episode page. So, by getting interviewed, you’re pretty
much guaranteeing yourself a link. Just go to Google and search for
“best [whatever your niche is] podcast”. Then click through to some relevant pages,
see if there are any podcasts that you might be a good guest on, and then
contact the host with your pitch. The second tactic you can use
is listicle link building.
And this is when you try and get mentioned
in “best of” lists in your niche. So I’ll go to Google and search for “best online
guitar lessons” and I’ll click through to this page. And all I’m going to do is look for a reason
why my site would be a good fit for their post. So as an example, if this site changed from
a free to a paid model, I could reach out to the author to let them know and suggest my site
as a replacement with free forever online lessons Now, the final method you can use is to
reverse engineer your competitors backlinks. So again, assuming Justin Guitar is a similar
site to mine, I’ll take that URL, and put it into Ahrefs’ free Backlink Checker. I'll set the mode to “exact URL” since we’re looking
for homepage backlinks and run the search. And right away, you’ll see up to 100 backlinks pointing
at that page – at least in the free Backlink Checker. But the full version of this report in Site Explorer,
will show you thousands more backlinks with plenty of filters to narrow down your list of prospects.
For example, I can search for the word “best”
in the titles of referring pages, and in just a few seconds, I’ll find over 200 pages that
Justin Guitar is mentioned and linked on, which are opportunities for me. Now, homepage backlinks are just foundational
and every site should build them if they don’t already have them. But I have two harsh truths for you. Harsh truth #1. You’re going to need backlinks
to the actual pages you want to rank. And harsh truth #2. It’s not easy to get
backlinks. especially to mundane pages like “how to play the f chord on guitar.” But the good news is that you can still rank high
in Google for some topics without direct links to your pages. And that’s done by unlocking the fourth
piece to the SEO puzzle: site structure. Your website is connected via internal links,
which are hyperlinks from one page on your website to another page on the same site.
And when it’s mapped out, it kind of resembles
a mindmap, which helps both search engines and users navigate through your site. Now, not only is site structure important
for user experience, but internal links are the only type of backlink that’s guaranteed
because you are in full control of your site. And the reason why they’re helpful from an SEO
standpoint is because of how backlinks work. So backlinks essentially give “power” to a
page through something called “PageRank”. Basically, if a page has tons of quality links
pointing at it, that page’s PageRank increases, making it more authoritative in the eyes of Google. Now, if that page links to 2 other pages,
it’s actually able to pass some of that PageRank which also helps
to power those pages too. And if that page links to 2 other pages,
then it’s possible that more residual value can be passed down – but to a lesser degree. Now, if you carefully structure your
internal links, you can maximize the impact of your site’s backlinks while giving users
a great experience with your content. For example, I might create a page on guitar chords.
And on that page, I’d link to all relevant pages
like “how to play A chord”, "B chord," "C chord" etc. So PageRank can be passed via. internal
links as these pages earn backlinks. Now, rinsing and repeating the steps in SEO can
easily help you reach 10,000 monthly visits and can actually take you into the millions
of monthly visits depending on your niche. But getting traffic through search
engines shouldn’t be your end game. And this takes us to stage 3:
diversify your traffic sources.
When you put all your traffic in one
basket, whether that’s the Google, social media or whatever basket,
you’re taking on unnecessary risk. Any of these platforms can take away your
traffic overnight be it through an algorithm update, a platform update, or even a shadow ban. And as unjust as it might feel, they have
every right to do it unapologetically. But the good news is that you aren’t starting
from scratch anymore because your SEO machine should be doing its job – sending you
consistent and compounding traffic. Now, unlike before when we chose just
one traffic source, this is a good time to test multiple traffic sources. But there’s a couple things that
you should consider before choosing. #1. Your target audience should
spend time on whatever platform you’re trying to get traffic from. And #2. You’ll want to choose low effort
traffic sources with high reward potential. And I want to expand on this
a bit, starting with “low effort.” Now, because our traffic foundation was built with
SEO, you should have a ton of content on your site that can be repurposed to different platforms.
For example, this post on 56 Google search
statistics is a perfect piece of content to repurpose into a Twitter thread and
LinkedIn post – two platforms where our target audience spends a lot of time. Now, this post on finding competitor keywords
can also be repurposed for Twitter and Linkedin, but it would probably be better as
a YouTube video – another platform on where our target audience spends time. Now, whichever traffic sources you try, give them
a fair shot, learning from each previous attempt. And as you do this, you’re going to notice
that you’re better at creating content for some platforms than others. And that other platforms have
disproportionate effort to reward ratios.
And once you identify the best platforms
to expand to, focus your efforts there, while keeping the SEO train still running. Now, one of the best ways to grow fast is to
network with a group of like minded marketers and business owners. And there’s no better place to
do that than in Singapore! In October, we’ll be hosting our first ever
global SEO and digital marketing conference where you’ll get to hang with me and
some of the brightest minds in our industry. Early bird tickets are still available,
so I’ll leave a link in the description. Hope to see you there!.