How We Grew Our Organic Traffic 120% in 5 Months with 4 Simple Steps. The strategy is: find the best piece of content on your target keywords or topics, and create something 10X better. Starting in 2017, we looked at what content was available on our target search terms, and then created content we thought was 10X better. The 80/20 Rule Still Applies Even following these criteria, it's been difficult to know exactly what will resonate with our audience before we publish it. So we saw revamping existing content as an important part of our SEO strategy. Earned Links: We used a lot of research in our content that other brands found valuable enough to link to. What We Learned It Takes Patience Anyone in SEO will tell you results take time. In Search Console, I'll regularly see where we finally "got credit" for a backlink months after it was published. Search engines care most about the people using their site to search. So when you add value to their users, you're rewarded with traffic.
As a B2B texting software, one of our main goals at Text Request is maximizing value, both for ourselves and our users. That’s what led us to focusing on organic traffic.
Billions of people are looking for answers or solutions to their questions or problems, and we’re trying to add value. So we saw organic search as a symbiotic relationship we could tap into.
As the guy responsible for our content and SEO, I’ve only found one “secret” to growing organic traffic. I’ll share this secret in a bit, but first I’ll walk you through the steps we took to grow our organic traffic 120% in 5 months, and what we learned through it all.
Start With Small Changes
We started making changes at the end of December 2016, and the first step was making technical updates to our website.
- We properly configured our XML sitemap, and uploaded it to our Google Search Console so Google could crawl our site more easily.
- We updated our International Targeting inside Search Console to focus on the U.S. (which is where our target audience lives).
- And we increased our site speed, because we’d seen how much speed affects traffic and engagement over previous months.
Image Credit: Think With Google
Then we adopted a new content strategy from Rand Fishkin (founder of Moz). The strategy is: find the best piece of content on your target keywords or topics, and create something 10X better.
So that’s what we did!
Starting in 2017, we looked at what content was available on our target search terms, and then created content we thought was 10X better. It worked! But the question we had to answer first was: What does 10X content look like for our market?
Create 10X Content
The most powerful pieces of content bring in traffic, leads, and backlinks. They’re normally what add the most value to everyone, and that became the essence of our content — add value to everyone.
We said, “Okay, everything needs to be 10X content, and that means it has to be valuable for three audiences.”
Me / Text Request
If this doesn’t add value to me, how can I expect it to add value to anyone else? It became important to make sure we could do two things with all new content:
- Use it to inform and direct company discussions.
- Link back to it in other relevant content on our site.
Our Targets
To bring in our targets, we had to provide something valuable, something that answered their questions and provided solutions to their problems.
An important piece in this: we had to know our targets’ wants and needs. Thankfully, our team has spent countless hours talking with and learning about our customers. Otherwise, this would have been much more difficult!
Our Competitors
Brands are always looking for information that validates and promotes their position. We thought if we created this content, our competitors would use it, and come to see us as leaders in the space.
This was a bit of a long shot, but it’s working! Nearly all of our competitors, and brands in similar niches, link to our content, which strengthens it and helps more of our targets find us.
If it sounds like this content takes a lot of time to create, it does. That’s why we only publish every other Tuesday. But we do publish high-quality content regularly, and it’s paying off!
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