Improve SEO: How we increased search traffic by 2600%.
In January, our splash page was getting 602 monthly visits from search. In March, it had grown to 15746 visits. An SEO improvement of 2600%! What happened in between? If you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering “what ingenious way to increase traffic did he use?”
That’s exactly the kind of mindset I had when I tried to increase the traffic for our previous product, Hypemarks. Want to see the results of trying to find an ingenious way? Sad graph of bad SEO Sad. We tried virality loops, open graph actions, publicity stunts, and press pushes.
All of these techniques provided spikes, but the next day traffic would always fall to the same low levels. The graphs speak louder than words: The truth is that the most “ingenious” way to get traffic is actually to stick to the boring basics. How did I go from the second graph to the first graph? By creating a multifaceted long-term SEO strategy and taking the time and effort to spend about an hour a day executing it. What was my boring, yet ingenious SEO strategy?
Keep reading to find out! Organic Search Traffic The orange line is the organic search traffic to our splash page. The Blue line is the total. As you can see, organic search has been a major component of our growth. Search Traffic vs Referral and Direct Traffic We started out barely ranking for the name of our company and ended up with high rankings on important keywords, and healthy inbound traffic from blog posts like this!
4 Steps to Improve SEO Here are the steps I ran through to improve Tint’s SEO.
Step 0: Do the homework. If you have no experience with SEO, I highly recommend taking a couple days to immerse yourself in basic SEO concepts and techniques as a prerequisite to everything else. There are many SEO myths that continue to spread as there is no definitive formula to ranking highly. Arm yourself with knowledge. Check out SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO.
A highly recommended guide for beginners that breaks down key SEO concepts in an easily digestible format. Google provides an SEO Starter Guide that demystifies what Google looks at when ranking pages. Step 1: Find keywords. Pretend you’re a customer for your own service. Which keywords will you search for? This is a question that could be considered even before naming your business, but assuming that your business is already named, start by asking yourself what keywords you would search for, and get in the habit of asking your customers how they found your site.
Find out what keywords your competitors are using. Some good tools for this are SpyFu, Alexa, and OpenSiteExplorer. Write them all down in a big list and then use the Keyword Explorer tool to figure out which ones are high in volume and low in competition. Selecting the keywords that you should target is more of an art than a science and will require enough customer feedback to give you an intuition as to how “ready to buy” customers will be who are searching for certain terms. Search for the keywords you are targeting and see how you stack up against the competition.
Only choose keywords that you think you can actually rank highly for. You must look for weak competition. Weak pages usually don’t have the keyword in the title, are from an untrustworthy domain, or the content doesn’t exactly relate to your keyword. Strong pages include easily recognizable brands/domains, keyword optimized landing pages, and pages with great content / social validation (articles with lots of tweets/shares). Step 2: Optimize site for keywords. If possible, start by putting keywords in the name of your business or in the URL of your site. For example, if I’m selling Dog Food in Dover, your domain could be doverdogfood.com. Tailor your title and description of your pages to contain these keywords.
In January, our splash page was getting 602 monthly visits from search. In March, it had grown to 15746 visits. An SEO improvement of 2600%! What happened in between? If you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering “what ingenious way to increase traffic did he use?”
That’s exactly the kind of mindset I had when I tried to increase the traffic for our previous product, Hypemarks. Want to see the results of trying to find an ingenious way? Sad graph of bad SEO Sad. We tried virality loops, open graph actions, publicity stunts, and press pushes.
All of these techniques provided spikes, but the next day traffic would always fall to the same low levels. The graphs speak louder than words: The truth is that the most “ingenious” way to get traffic is actually to stick to the boring basics. How did I go from the second graph to the first graph? By creating a multifaceted long-term SEO strategy and taking the time and effort to spend about an hour a day executing it. What was my boring, yet ingenious SEO strategy?
Keep reading to find out! Organic Search Traffic The orange line is the organic search traffic to our splash page. The Blue line is the total. As you can see, organic search has been a major component of our growth. Search Traffic vs Referral and Direct Traffic We started out barely ranking for the name of our company and ended up with high rankings on important keywords, and healthy inbound traffic from blog posts like this!
4 Steps to Improve SEO Here are the steps I ran through to improve Tint’s SEO.
Step 0: Do the homework. If you have no experience with SEO, I highly recommend taking a couple days to immerse yourself in basic SEO concepts and techniques as a prerequisite to everything else. There are many SEO myths that continue to spread as there is no definitive formula to ranking highly. Arm yourself with knowledge. Check out SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO.
A highly recommended guide for beginners that breaks down key SEO concepts in an easily digestible format. Google provides an SEO Starter Guide that demystifies what Google looks at when ranking pages. Step 1: Find keywords. Pretend you’re a customer for your own service. Which keywords will you search for? This is a question that could be considered even before naming your business, but assuming that your business is already named, start by asking yourself what keywords you would search for, and get in the habit of asking your customers how they found your site.
Find out what keywords your competitors are using. Some good tools for this are SpyFu, Alexa, and OpenSiteExplorer. Write them all down in a big list and then use the Keyword Explorer tool to figure out which ones are high in volume and low in competition. Selecting the keywords that you should target is more of an art than a science and will require enough customer feedback to give you an intuition as to how “ready to buy” customers will be who are searching for certain terms. Search for the keywords you are targeting and see how you stack up against the competition.
Only choose keywords that you think you can actually rank highly for. You must look for weak competition. Weak pages usually don’t have the keyword in the title, are from an untrustworthy domain, or the content doesn’t exactly relate to your keyword. Strong pages include easily recognizable brands/domains, keyword optimized landing pages, and pages with great content / social validation (articles with lots of tweets/shares). Step 2: Optimize site for keywords. If possible, start by putting keywords in the name of your business or in the URL of your site. For example, if I’m selling Dog Food in Dover, your domain could be doverdogfood.com. Tailor your title and description of your pages to contain these keywords.
