Increased Organic Traffic by 194% in 12 Months

Due to confidentiality agreements, I can only share a high-level overview of my efforts behind the growth of this anonymous brand. All results can be found publicly using SEM Rush.

Blog

I owned the blog, which meant I brainstormed topics, hired writers, and edited, optimized, uploaded, and distributed all blog content. I’m a big believer in John Bonini’s advice on creating content around these three parts of the funnel: inspiration, education, execution.

  • Inspiration: "I need ideas." — [keyword] examples, [keyword] ideas, best [keyword] 

  • Education: "I need help." — how to build [keyword], what to include in [keyword], how to calculate [keyword]

  • Execution: "I need to get it done." — [keyword] templates, [keyword] tools, [keyword] integrations.

Ideally, every content idea should fall under one of your topic clusters and be connected to each of these three parts of the funnel. Therefore, you can produce three pieces of content to target your customer at each part of the funnel and internally link to each other for an added SEO benefit. 

By following this framework, I accomplished:

  • Editing and publishing 140 blog posts

  • Organic keywords that the blog ranks for after 12 months: ↑186%

  • Organic traffic that the blog earns: Aug 2020: ↑162%

Sitewide

Some search-driven content that fits into the execution bucket is a better fit for landing pages than the blog. Take CarRentals for example — they have several landing pages to target the keywords “car rentals in Seattle” or “car rentals in Boston.” If these types of pages clogged up the blog, it would appear advertorial versus engaging. 

Similarly, that’s what we did here to capture our brand’s high-value keywords in the execution stage. 

By following this framework, I accomplished:

  • Hiring 15 freelance writers

  • Editing and publishing ~3,500 SEO pages

  • Making sitewide recommendations to improve our traffic (site speed, experience, etc.)

  • Performing a content audit of all SEO initiatives on the site and made on-page and sitewide recommendations (H tag, title tag, meta description, last updated schema, improving internal linking)

  • Organic keywords that the site ranks for after 12 months: ↑182%

  • Organic traffic that the site earned after 12 months: ↑194%

Press

Earning press opportunities is a beautiful thing for SEO. If you grow your external link portfolio with high-DA links, you’ll see a positive impact on your site’s domain authority and in the rankings. 

Through a passive and active link-building strategy, I accomplished earning coverage in USA Today, Architectural Digest, and several other high-DA sites.