Key Drivers of Traffic Growth
knowing the few key elements that led to the widespread and sustained growth of a new web site , which starts from commonsense to technical, it is being brought down into three main focus areas:
• Math – Using mathematical approach if possible in designing an evaluation model that would allow us to check opportunities based on their potential returns. Ultimately this led to the creation of what we now call our keyword opportunity evaluation, which is a financial model that measures the approximate output (traffic) based on a finite set of inputs, including elements like average DA, number of links / linking domains, age of site, content footprint, etc.
• Analysis – by the adoption of a newly built algorithm that could be tested, in order to create the websites at testing content patterns and architecture.
We were quick to declare defeat within verticals without traction, and paid close attention to where the traffic was growing the most. The algorithm started to take shape and after roughly 3 months was able to identify within an order of magnitude the amount of traffic we could acquire for a given set of costs.
• Pumpkin Hacking – This ia term being used by popular blogger that seems to describe exactly what we did to continue to grow our traffic by double and even triple digits, month after month.
The core concept is simple;by concer focus resources on building what works. What this meant for us was paying attention to the search verticals and content that received the most traffic, most comments, most social shares, and being quick to cut the cord on traffic that didn’t perform.
Building a Keyword Datahub as a SEO’s, however, unlike most search campaigning – this was a big keyword database,
amounting to the tune of 50,000 keywords.
The main idea here was leave no stone un-turned. Since we were of the mind to test everything and let the performance metrics dictate where to allocate resources, we had to get creative with query combinations.
We first went through all of our target search verticals, as dictated by our chosen go-to-market categories, which I think was roughly 19 to start.
its next step was to identify the top 100 highest search volume terms within those verticals and scrape the top 100 URL’s that were currently ranking.
as people began what tstarted out as an exhaustive process of evaluating the opportunities for each keyword, and then aggregating opportunities to discern which categories we needed to focus on to grow traffic.
Essentially by targeting the low-hanging fruit; keywords identified in the our model structure that could generate a minimum level of traffic in 3 months or less, with a minimum investment in content development.
by momitoring it which got the phrases and topics that generated the most traffic.
As soon as a topic began to grow into someting,it become imperative we beam light on other additional keyword research thereby finding concepts and phrases that were both complimentary and contextually relevant.
Designing a Content Strategy
This is the single hardest part of any content-focused website or project.
the key to its success in th thisthis particular project was taking a page out of Jeff Bezos’ book, and becoming obsessed with our users.
first embarking on an aggressive a/b testing schedule, but we constantly reached out to our users for feedback.
learn the art of asking tough questions, ranging from what users’ liked and disliked (colors, fonts, and layouts) but also the specific components of the website they found to be less than ideal or even ‘sub-par.’
We took the responses seriously, making changes as they came in, trying to take something constructive from every piece of feedback, and pushing as many as 10 deployments a week.
It started to work.
. We began with targeting a very large segment of users (remember that time I talked about a keyword database of over 50,000 keywords?) but after a few months it turned out our largest (and most active) users were finding us from only a handful of targeted categories.
Information Architecture with SEO in Mind the architecture of a website is cruical
My largest successful SEO projects have come due to a variety of factors, but tend to come down to 3 core components of architecture:
• It’s Scalable
• It’s Crawlable
• It’s Tiered