Case Study: How I Grew Traffic on A Blog By 12,203.6% in Just 6 Months

What was the first thing that came to your mind the moment you saw the title of this post?

Let me guess… you thought it was a click bait? Or an outrageous lie?

If I was you I would have doubts too. “You grew traffic on a blog by over 12,000% within 6 months? How?”

Well, I actually did. Infact, I was quite shocked when I finally decided to start paying very close attention to the number of daily visits to the site. 

That was when I realized that my SEO strategy was performing better than I expected.

How It Started

This website belongs to a client in the financial industry. The goal was to have a platform that serves as a marketplace.

In order to build authority and thought leadership in that space, the client decided to start with a blog to educate the target audience.

The Challenge

Growing traffic on this website came with some serious challenges. As an SEO Expert, challenges in SEO projects are not new to me. 

There are usually a lot to deal with including managing and keeping to the demands of search engines like Google.

A major challenge from the get-go was that the client wanted to have 1,500 unique visitors to the site daily within 6 months.

For a blog hosted on a brand new domain, This meant that I had to be aggressive with dedicating my time and pulling resources together to achieve that goal.

The Process I Adopted

To achieve the client’s goal of 1,500 unique visitors daily within 6 months, I needed to have enough blog posts created. 

I didn’t just want writers. I wanted writers with basic on-page SEO knowledge.

I needed writers who knew how to implement content structures I provided them with, craft compelling and optimized titles and meta descriptions, properly use keywords, synonyms, and related terms within a blog post whilst still providing value with their post.

By the end of the first month, I had contracted 3 writers, completed an analysis of all the major competitors on search engines, and carried out keyword and topic research for 3 months worth of blog posts.

As much as my client wanted 1,500 visitors daily, I wasn’t expecting Google to trust a brand new site enough to bring that number to the website overnight. From experience, I knew I had to start gradually to gain their trust.

This meant that I couldn’t prioritize publishing posts that targeted keywords with very high search volume from the onset.

I started out by publishing posts that targeted keywords with very low searches and competition - posts with average searches as low as 10 - 100 per month.

By the 3rd month, the Google Search Console report showed that the posts had started getting some impressions but very few clicks. This provided me with an opportunity to find the best performing keywords and optimize for them.

Armed with these ‘opportunity keywords’, I started building backlinks and creating solid internal linking structures to the posts. 

Towards the end of the 4th month, the blog was getting between 500 - 700 unique visitors daily. This consistently grew to 1,000 - 1,200 visitors daily by the 5th month, and 1,800 - 2,200 by the 6th month.

In Conclusion

Growing traffic to this blog required an analysis of the competitors to identify what they were doing right and opportunities they were missing out on.

It also involved a combination of expertise in keyword research, technical, on-page, and off-page SEO.