2 Content Growth Hacks That Drive More Website Traffic
Website owners and digital publishers are always evaluating new strategies for driving quality traffic to their sites. Recently, I shared two common hacks that I use to quickly grow website traffic to my new websites. After just 3 months, they had used my technique to acquire 40,000 new organic Google search visitors with brand new content. They wanted to know why more publishers didn’t know about this.
I told them it was because many times the content creation strategy is thinking about traffic instead of data and behavior. In these hacks, I’ll show you how to use data collected through free tools to create content that will bring you tons of organic traffic in a short amount of time.
These hacks are 100% white hat SEO techniques that are used by content pros like Neil Patel and Larry Kim. They are not commonly discussed and will likely help you bring new organic visitors to your site in the next 3 months if you take the time to do them correctly.
Defining content that is certain to drive more website traffic
This strategy will work for anyone creating website content but I have always specifically used it to generate content for brand new sites that I wanted to drive a lot of organic traffic to quickly. This goes against most of the conventional wisdom out there that organic traffic is a long game.
It’s true. Growing a site through organic traffic is generally a slower process; with rewards coming over the long term much more so than the short term. However, there are a few hacks that can help you see traffic sooner rather than later.
The secret is starting with the right data. Many publishers write content with little data analysis up front; essentially gambling with the possibility that the new content will bring traffic to their site. Others, do some basic keyword research to ensure there will be some returns (or even advanced keyword research to guarantee it), but these often don’t deliver the quick results many publishers are often looking for.
Content Hack #1 for driving more Google traffic to your site
This is the one that is most important. The other hack is essentially a supplement to this one. This hack is designed to help you identify similar content that will help you design and build content that Google will immediately find attractive for potential searchers.
The easiest way to do this is to find content produced by other websites in your space/niche and see what type of content they have that is ranking really well in search results.
There are a number of tools that can help you do this online. SEMRush will let you do this for free (with a monthly limit). You can also do this with Moz. However, SpyFu offers some of the best free functionality for this up front (they do offer some paid solutions, but you can do most of what is required here for free).
As an example, I’ll look at competitors to my jiu jitsu website, BishopBjj.com, — I know, this is a small one, but I just want to use it as a fun example. In this case, I looked up a site called BjjHeroes.com to see what jiu jitsu content they might have ranking for popular keywords.
Because we have similar audiences, if I were to create some content on the same topic, it would probably be received well by my audience. But copying people is not a good strategy, you’ll never have a successful organically grown site if all you do is copy other people.
Instead, you want to take top content titles and rework them for similar topics. In the case of my ju jitsu website, here’s how I could potentially spin one of their top titles and mash it with some topics they don’t rank for to create some full proof content ready to rank!
Their high-ranking content title: Rickson Gracie Facts & Bio
Content titles and ideas that I could create:
- Kazushi Sakuraba Facts & Bio
- Royler Gracie Facts & Bio
- Enson Inoue Facts & Bio
- Rener Gracie Facts & Bio
My friend over at BJJHeroes obviously has a really successful piece of content here. The piece he did on Rickson Gracie is securing him tons of traffic. Rather than writing a similar piece on Rickson Gracie. I’m going to steal his approach.
I decided to take other popular martial arts figures in the jiu jitsu world and see if he did content on some of them. I found 4 good ones he didn’t. They included some of Rickson Gracies family members and a few other martial arts champions. How did I know these ones would be good ones to target? Research is the answer.
Since I am an expert on the topic of jiu jitsu, I saw that he didn’t have an article on Kazushi Sakuraba, a popular figure that Rickson Gracie was often associated with during his era. I decided to do some research to determine if Kazushi Sakuraba was a keyword with lots of traffic associated with it. What’s more, I wanted to see if he had a good number of longtail keywords I could secure traffic from as well ( in case I don’t rank super-high right away for “Kazushi Sakuraba” by itself).
Success! Kazushi Sakuraba has a ton of longtail keywords associated with his name. If you look at the initial research I did on BJJHeroes post on Rickson Gracie, you’ll remember that a lot of the search volume he was getting from that landing page was actually coming from all of the longtail keywords associated with the keyword “Rickson Gracie”.
Growth hacking this content idea
Now that I have a great content topic inspired by my competitor’s success. I can start formulating how I will write this content in a way that I am sure to start acquiring traffic quickly.
I need to start by outlining the content. Remember all of those longtail keywords I found associated with the term Kazushi Sakuraba? I need to find a way to create sections in my content that will provide that information to potential searchers that are looking for those longtail keywords.
This means I will probably need to create sections inside of my article dedicated to providing this info. These sections will be most useful if I do them as H2 headings with content and images.
For Example, One Section Might Include:
H2 Heading: Kazushi Sakuraba Net Worth
[Image of Kazushi – alt image tag = Kazushi Sakuraba net worth]
Body: – details and information about his net worth and financial history –
I can do this with every longtail keyword associated with Kazushi Sakuraba. This will help me ensure I secure some traffic immediately from the longtail terms that have very little competitiveness; while setting me up to benefit bigtime from all the associated keywords longterm. It’s win-win.
But, I’m not done yet with my outline. Once I have figured out all the sections I need to add to include all the longtail keywords, I need to go back and take another look at my competitor’s post to get a few more insights.
I can probably still learn a lot from his piece on Rickson Gracie. What sections and info did he include to get such a high ranking on such a high volume keyword? I can see that he provided some really good biographical info and went pretty deep into detail.
I can borrow his approach and use some of his formattings in my new content piece. I can learn from his success to make sure that my piece experiences a similar fate (since we already proved that the keyword has equal potential).
Write the content to increase the website traffic
Now that I have my outline, I can create and publish my content. Even if my site is new and has little domain authority on this subject I should start ranking almost immediately for some of the longtail keywords that don’t have many competitive search results.
Content Hack #2 for driving more traffic to your website fast
This second hack works really well alongside the first one. It is basically a way for your content to start gaining popularity in SERPs and other online communities quickly after it is created.
First, you should make sure to have the new content crawled by Google as soon as it’s created. You can do this in Search Console (we talked about how to do it here).
Next, we recognize that traffic volume seems to play a role in how quickly content shoots up search results., so we want to get some visitors over to that new page ASAP. Quora is a great tool for this.
Simply go into Quora, type in your keyword, and start answering questions related to your keyword. Reference your article in your answers to drive traffic to the site. Realize you do have to answer these questions, you can’t just link-bomb the platform; however, you can provide article excerpts and link to your new post.
Some answers will fall flat and produce little traffic. Others will be big hits that might drive hundreds — or even thousands — of new visitors to your website. The key is cranking out as many relevant answers as possible to get people interested in your new content.
What to expect and how long it will take to drive the traffic to your site
Here’s the good news. Between the longtail keywords with low competitiveness and the Quora answers, you will see a lot of traffic to that new post relatively quickly (much more than normal methods provide). However, if the site is new it may take a little while to start seeing the big boom in organic traffic that more well-established sites will see.
Nevertheless, even new sites will be impressed by how quickly these strategies deliver on providing new website traffic quickly.
Let me know how well the strategy works for you. I’ve been able to take brand new sites to over 40,000 monthly visitors in less than three months using these techniques. How well did it work for you?
