Are you wondering how to get more traffic from Google? I’d like to try and help you out.
I’ll never forget the first time I got 100,000 visitors from Google in one month. I still feel extremely lucky. And while I feel very uncomfortable sharing statistics (because it feels like bragging) I decided to mention them in this post to show you that it is possible.
When you first think about starting a blog you kind of don’t imagine you’ll ever get more than a trickle of traffic.
And then you have your first 100-visitor day.
Then your first 1,000-visitor day.
After a while you might even have a 10,000 or 20,000 visitor a day and you still can’t believe it’s happening.
What I want to do today is show you as much of what I did as possible to see whether it helps your blog get more traffic. Let’s look at all the ins and outs of how to get over 100,000 visitors a month from natural organic Google search.
Things are so much nicer when you have a plan.
Why is Google traffic still the best?
If you’ve been reading Blog Tyrant for a while you’ll know that I occasionally warn against relying on Google too much.
And I stand by that.
Organic traffic from Google search is still the most valuable traffic you can get because it grows, it’s free (sort of), and people who are using search engines are usually in a buy-ready frame of mind.
I’ll never forget the first time I got 100,000 visitors from Google in one month. I still feel extremely lucky. And while I feel very uncomfortable sharing statistics (because it feels like bragging) I decided to mention them in this post to show you that it is possible.
When you first think about starting a blog you kind of don’t imagine you’ll ever get more than a trickle of traffic.
And then you have your first 100-visitor day.
Then your first 1,000-visitor day.
After a while you might even have a 10,000 or 20,000 visitor a day and you still can’t believe it’s happening.
What I want to do today is show you as much of what I did as possible to see whether it helps your blog get more traffic. Let’s look at all the ins and outs of how to get over 100,000 visitors a month from natural organic Google search.
Things are so much nicer when you have a plan.
Why is Google traffic still the best?
If you’ve been reading Blog Tyrant for a while you’ll know that I occasionally warn against relying on Google too much.
And I stand by that.
Organic traffic from Google search is still the most valuable traffic you can get because it grows, it’s free (sort of), and people who are using search engines are usually in a buy-ready frame of mind.
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| A screen shot of my Clicky Analytics account showing one of my first 28 day periods where I had 100,000+ unique visitors hitting my blog from Google searches. |
However, if your begin to rely solely on that traffic you run the risk of getting yourself into a bit of trouble in the longterm. Every time Google updates its algorithm there is a chance your blog is going to be less relevant.
And that means your traffic vanishes.
My own little story with this issue
I’ve told this story before but when I first got into blogging I had a few fitness blogs which made money pretty exclusively through Google Adsense. One day I woke up and all my traffic (and revenue!) had gone – I’d received a pretty significant Google penalty for some unknown reason.
Lucky for me, the traffic came back.
But it was a very scary experience and it taught me that I need to ensure that I have diversified traffic sources that act as a back up in case one of them gets accidentally or deliberately turned off.
How long does it take to get 100,000 visitors a month from Google?
Something I want to stress in this post is that my approach to Google traffic is one that is very clean, natural and safe.
And “safe” isn’t always a word that sits well with entrepreneurs.
Because it usually means slow.
If you’re after some short term SEO tricks to help you get an inferior website ranked in two weeks then this isn’t the post for you. This is all about a high-value approach to blogging that you can use on a site that you love and don’t want to take unnecessary risks with.
But saying it will take 6 months or a year is kind of irresponsible of me because every blog and niche is different. It will depend a lot on how prolific you can be, and how willing you are to learn a new approach.
How to get 100,000 visitors a month from Google
Okay, now we can get into the real tofu and potatoes of the post.
And, as always, if you get to the end and think I’ve missed something important or have any questions please leave a comment and let me know.
1. Choose a topic, keywords and target market that has the depth
The very first thing you need to do if you want to have a good SEO strategy is know what keywords you are going after and what target market you are trying to tap into.
Too often I see blogs that have a very generalised topic which leads to a lot of fragmented content, an unresponsive mailing list and not a lot of success.
When researching your topic, please make sure you know what you want to talk about and how your blog is going to be different to all the others out there. It is very important that you think about deliberate ways that your topic is going to stand out.
When researching keywords, it’s a good idea to know who your competition is and how saturated the market is. There are some niches that are very, very hard to compete in. The main worry, however, is a niche with not enough traffic.
And that means your traffic vanishes.
My own little story with this issue
I’ve told this story before but when I first got into blogging I had a few fitness blogs which made money pretty exclusively through Google Adsense. One day I woke up and all my traffic (and revenue!) had gone – I’d received a pretty significant Google penalty for some unknown reason.
Lucky for me, the traffic came back.
But it was a very scary experience and it taught me that I need to ensure that I have diversified traffic sources that act as a back up in case one of them gets accidentally or deliberately turned off.
How long does it take to get 100,000 visitors a month from Google?
Something I want to stress in this post is that my approach to Google traffic is one that is very clean, natural and safe.
And “safe” isn’t always a word that sits well with entrepreneurs.
Because it usually means slow.
If you’re after some short term SEO tricks to help you get an inferior website ranked in two weeks then this isn’t the post for you. This is all about a high-value approach to blogging that you can use on a site that you love and don’t want to take unnecessary risks with.
But saying it will take 6 months or a year is kind of irresponsible of me because every blog and niche is different. It will depend a lot on how prolific you can be, and how willing you are to learn a new approach.
How to get 100,000 visitors a month from Google
Okay, now we can get into the real tofu and potatoes of the post.
And, as always, if you get to the end and think I’ve missed something important or have any questions please leave a comment and let me know.
1. Choose a topic, keywords and target market that has the depth
The very first thing you need to do if you want to have a good SEO strategy is know what keywords you are going after and what target market you are trying to tap into.
Too often I see blogs that have a very generalised topic which leads to a lot of fragmented content, an unresponsive mailing list and not a lot of success.
When researching your topic, please make sure you know what you want to talk about and how your blog is going to be different to all the others out there. It is very important that you think about deliberate ways that your topic is going to stand out.
When researching keywords, it’s a good idea to know who your competition is and how saturated the market is. There are some niches that are very, very hard to compete in. The main worry, however, is a niche with not enough traffic.
One simple place to start is by logging into Google Adwords and using their suite of Tools. One of them will estimate search volume and show you the Adwords bidding competition. This will give you a pretty good idea about whether your market is worth the effort.
Make sure you try a lot of variations of your keywords here. Even small changes like plurals or alternative words that seem similar can have a massive effect on traffic numbers.
At this stage you’ll also want to look at your competition using a service like Majestic to see what keywords are going around, who is working on what, etc. You can then go and spend some time manually searching and clicking through to websites to see if there is anything that you can do better than what is already out there.
At this point I’d like to just mention that passion really is the most important thing here. It’s something I’ve heard successful bloggers like Glen from ViperChill say again and again. Even if you find a profitable niche to work in, you’ll soon lose interest at all the hard (and boring tasks) if you don’t love it and sincerely want to help your readership.
That is very important.
2. Get your own domain name and self-hosted WordPress setup
How many times have you seen a free blog like Tumblr or Blogger in the first position on Google? Not often is the answer.
Google gives a much higher weighting to websites and blogs that have their own domain name and host because it is a pretty basic signal that that website is going to be taking itself more seriously – hence better quality. Here’s a quick video explaining my preferred setup.
Make sure you try a lot of variations of your keywords here. Even small changes like plurals or alternative words that seem similar can have a massive effect on traffic numbers.
At this stage you’ll also want to look at your competition using a service like Majestic to see what keywords are going around, who is working on what, etc. You can then go and spend some time manually searching and clicking through to websites to see if there is anything that you can do better than what is already out there.
At this point I’d like to just mention that passion really is the most important thing here. It’s something I’ve heard successful bloggers like Glen from ViperChill say again and again. Even if you find a profitable niche to work in, you’ll soon lose interest at all the hard (and boring tasks) if you don’t love it and sincerely want to help your readership.
That is very important.
2. Get your own domain name and self-hosted WordPress setup
How many times have you seen a free blog like Tumblr or Blogger in the first position on Google? Not often is the answer.
Google gives a much higher weighting to websites and blogs that have their own domain name and host because it is a pretty basic signal that that website is going to be taking itself more seriously – hence better quality. Here’s a quick video explaining my preferred setup.
- Exact match keywords
A few years ago if you could get an exact match phrase you’d be more likely to rank at the top. Now this isn’t so popular and can look a bit spammy. However, for local search, things like ArchitectMelbourne.com.au still rank extremely well if you can get them. - Keyword + noun
Another popular method is to take the keyword that you are targeting and add a noun or adjective to it. Blog Tyrant could be an example of this approach if I was targeting the keyword “blog”. - Distinctive domains
This is actually now the best option given that all the good keyword domains are taken. Being distinctive is important. Look at a site like ViperChill where the domain name has nothing to do with anything but you’ll never forget it.
3. Change your general WordPress settings for better SEO performance
For the most part, WordPress is a pretty SEO-friendly platform. That being said, there are a few little default things that we want to change from the get go.
The first is your default permalinks structure which is often set to some combo of the date and name. I like to set this to just post name as we will want the keywords that we are targeting to show up in the post. Just go Settings > Permalinks > Post Name.
Remember, if you already have your blog up and running you don’t want to change any existing permalinks as that will result in any links pointing to that old structure to throw an error. We only want it for future things.
The next thing you want to make sure is that your post titles are set to h1 tags and not anything else. Often you find that WordPress themes have the site name as the first header and then the post title is h2 which is a mistake. You can change this by going Appearance > Editor > Single Post and then changing your post title to the right tag.
The last basic WordPress thing we want to change is your sidebar. Get rid of everything in there except for an email subscriber opt-in form and maybe some links to your most popular posts. You don’t need all that Meta stuff in there, and you especially don’t want any blogroll links.
4. Install an SEO-specific plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast
Now you’ll want to get a little more advanced and install a plugin that has been specifically designed for improving your WordPress blog’s search engine performance. The most popular and well respected is WordPress SEO by Yoast.
This plugin is actually quite intimidating for beginner/intermediate level bloggers. There are a lot of settings and options and you will be introduced to a whole new lexicon of SEO-related words.
Don’t panic.
Firstly, Yoast has written a really comprehensive guide on how to get yourself properly setup. Secondly, it’s not the kind of thing you need to get totally correct before you do anything else – you can tweak as you go. I would earmark half a day of your time to add the plugin and go through the above article making changes and then just leave it for a while.
5. Carefully tweak and improve your user experience ranking factors
The above plugin and settings mostly tweak your site to make it look better in the eyes of Google bots. But what we want to do now is make sure it looks good in the eyes of your human readers.
The interesting thing about this is that improving a blog’s user experience also leads to a better ranking performance because Google only wants to refer its customers to highly useful sites.
Start by making sure you have a mobile responsive WordPress theme. This is especially important since the Google mobile update that happened a few weeks ago.
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source:https://www.blogtyrant.com/how-to-get-google-to-send-you-119717-visitors-every-month/
1 comments:
nice one
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