How we grew our website traffic by 600% in 6 months

by Tyler Rice

Created Oct. 30th, 2018

There are too many so-called “marketing agencies” and publications that will try and convince you that they have come up with the best thing since sliced bread without and sort of proof to back it up.

And of course…

the products and services they offer to “help your business” are crazy expensive.

Well… I’m here to show you exactly how we increased our website traffic by over 600% in 6 months.

615.06% to be exact.

OK, let’s get started.

1. We updated our site-wide on-page search engine optimization (SEO).

We saw almost immediate improvements to our website traffic once we improved our own on-page search engine optimization.

While search engine optimization (SEO) is a whole topic on its own, we want to brush up on the techniques we improved during this time which was…

• Plugging in more relevant keywords to each page title, headers, and images.
• Installed WordPress plugins to optimize site speed and to simplify code.
• Resized and compressed the images on the site.

These changes made the site much faster opting for a better customer experience.

With site speed running at a much faster rate, search engines saw this as an advantage to users and boosted the search engine results.

2. We created relevant and unique content for our target audience

Not only did we create relevant articles for our target audience each week, but we made sure that the content was going to rank high in search engines and be found by our target audience.

But there is a right way and a wrong way to create blog content.

Here’s the problem…

All too often, we see marketing agencies building blogs for businesses that bring in little to no traffic.

This could be for a couple of different reasons.

1. The content is “re-purposed” and is copied to multiple businesses across the web in different locations.
2. The blog articles are only 400 – 500 words and don’t deliver on meaningful content.
3. The articles lack enough images and engaging content to keep users involved.

We have seen it happen all too often.

Search engines such as Google aren’t going to give good ranks to articles if they feel that the content is too thin or is not meaningful for the target audience.

Also, if people are coming to your blog only to quickly leave due to lack of engaging content, Google will see this and penalize your website.

So, how did we create blog content that increased our website traffic by over 600% in 6 months?

First, we found keywords that our target audience was using on the internet and chose keyword terms that we had a chance to rank well.

Let’s look at the two keyword examples for our ideal target audience…

• “Starting a business” (27,100 searches a month on average)
• “Benefits of Social Media” (2,900 searches a month on average)

While both keyword terms could bring in high-converting traffic to our website, the competition on the first term would be near impossible to try and rank in the top results without the domain authority of big websites like entrepreneur.com, inc.com, and Forbes.

Focus your blog efforts on the low-hanging fruit.

Don’t just go for the terms that bring in the largest amount of traffic.

Look for strategic places on the web that your website can provide better content than what is currently ranked as the top position.

A good way to find keywords for your business is to use the Google Keyword Planner tool. 

It is 100% free to use and will help you come up with ideas for finding excellent keywords.

For example, let’s look at the keyword term, “hockey stick growth” which pulls around 320 averages searches a month.

When searching that term, we notice that the very first result on the Google search engine takes us to an article that only has 200 words with a single image.

This tells me that this is a great opportunity to create a unique and engaging post about “hockey stick growth” and easily rank above the currently thin content.

Now that we have found a good opportunity with the right keyword, we create an article that is at the very least 1,000 words (although we aim for at least 1,400 words) and has multiple engaging graphics.

Within months, we can expect that post to rise to the top of the search engines and bring in a couple hundred more people in a month.

We applied this same strategy for each article that we created on the Animas Marketing website and then sure enough…

BOOM!

Traffic on the website skyrocketed.

Having a solid website built and then adding in exceptional SEO and great content can really transform a business…

And when you are bringing in thousands of people to your business online each month, you can substantially increase your profits and lead more people through the customer journey.

Keep your Online Assets Safe

It should be noted that when you are spending all this time building up your online presence and growing your website traffic, you should take the time to protect your assets from cyber attacks.

Increasing the authority of your website gains the attention of good traffic but also sets you up to more likely be a target for spam and cyber attacks. There are many precautions you can put in place for your business and we recommend starting with security measures on your hosting account.