PPC - Pay Per Click Management

How do you gain traffic in 2021?

There are many ways to do this, in terms of the organic SEO strategy. Maybe you will target the news. Maybe you will target Google Discover. Maybe you will churn out lots of high-quality content that rank naturally.

But, ultimately, it is a matter of time vs return on investment (ROI) – is it better to create 5 new high-quality articles, that gain 100 views a month each, or to improve an existing article, from 2,000 views a month to 10,000 views a month?

This is what a lot of people seem to forget – there is huge potential to improve existing articles to up their evergreen organic traffic.

But, how do you do this? Here is a proven technique I use to achieve just this, with a real example to accompany it.

 

#1 SEMRush/Ahrefs Keyword Research

The first step is to understand what articles are worth your time improving. This does not necessarily mean improving the highest-traffic articles – they likely have high traffic because they rank in the top 3 – the trick is to improve the content that rank on keywords that gain positions 4-20. This is because:

• Google has crawled this content and deemed it is of good enough content to rank relatively high
• Just not good enough to those above it
• So there are huge areas of gains from improving such content.

Make a list of keywords that you rank for, that gain lots of traffic, but you don’t necessarily rank high for.

 

#2 Content Analyzer with Surfer SEO

With such keywords produced from SEMRush and/or Ahref (I use both to add extra accuracy with data across two companies), use Surfer SEO to analyze the content. What is special about Surfer SEO is that it crawls the pages on the top of Google SERP for your keyword, and tells you specifically, and in detail, what you are missing and what you need to do to improve. This includes things such as:

• Keywords to use and their density
• What headings to use
• How long for the content to be
• How many images
• How to use italics, bold and more
• Where you have backlink gaps
• and much more

A great example of an article I recently had a team of mine improve using this method is with an analysis of William Shakespeare’s ‘All the World’s a Stage‘. Read the article to get a baseline as to what a Surfer SEO’ed article looks likes. Big changes included the following:

• Adding an image
• Adding italics and bold to put emphasis on words, to improve readability/scanability
• Improved headings
• Higher density keywords to compete with the keyword densities competitors had
• Lots of internal relevant contextual linking
• Increase length of content
• Smaller, more readable, paragraphs
• Add information (in headings) of content that competitors had which the article did not

 

#3 Track Positions in SEMRush/Ahref and Google Search Console

Once you have made the necessary changes to your article, track what happens after! This is your best way of gaining feedback as to if what you are doing is good, and how much of a return you can expect for such work.

You can also do this through both SEMRush, Ahref, and Google search console. For such results, you can expect to what at least a month to give enough time for the data to start to converge to a new norm.