0 to 100k traffic in 6 month on website with low DR— A surprising case study

Back in 2019, I was consulting a media client. They had a pretty strong offline presence, but had recently started their website. The vision was to create content that would inspire designers, illustrators, and architects from all over the world. The USP? These were opinion based pieces, written by industry experts. They’d also cover major happenings in the industry and offer perspective on that.

The most impressive thing about this client (let’s call them Website from here on) was how clear their positioning was. They had chosen a niche, their team was strong and their vision was clear. They also knew which path they wanted to take to target revenue generation at its earliest. They also had the backing of some early adopters. All in all, the product was exciting and everyone was optimistic that it would work well.

Problem Statement

Despite the quality content and early adopters, they had a low DAU and high bounce rate. They felt like they were in a soup. (I am assuming that your problem is somewhat similar)

Now, I’d like to explain how media websites work. Websites use their DAU, bounce rate and average session time to get sponsorships. These sponsorships could be in the form of:

• Feature articles
• Listicles
• Web banners
• CTAs and call outs
• Social media posts with Link in bio

Typically, media websites promise impressions on all these properties. And this is a very common practice. To ensure brand deals and sponsorships were always knocking on the door, it was imperative that the website maintained a benchmark readership.

Solving the problem

As I mentioned above, content intuitively felt like the perfect fit for our growth lane. It wasn’t until our SEO content strategy focused on solving customer pain points that we began to see results. Interesting, right? Immensely.

Tackling the assumptions

There were some assumptions that the website owners were making, and early analysis supported those results. Some of these assumptions were:

• The content will be appreciated by everyone who is a part of this industry.
• We should rely more on perspective and opinion, and less on trends.
• If the content is worthy, Google will rank it.
• DR or Domain Rating will fall in line when we increase rank-ability.
• Keyword density is not as important as the industry says.
• General/ user feedback can be taken in the later stage of product launch.
• Betting on competitor’s high traffic articles is a waste of time.
• Content nesting is not necessary.
• URL structure is not as important as it is said to be.

These assumptions were deep rooted. And on multiple occasions, the digital team had to go full-throttle with research and predictions to get the wheels moving.

How things started changing

In any early stage startup, there is always a tussle between the dev and marketing team. The issue arises so often because while the dev team creates a MVP, they tend to forget that this MVP should be marketable.

I remember this day like it was yesterday. I was conducting an audit on the website and the results were shocking. Mind you that at this point of time, my knowledge of SEO was very basic and technical SEO was not a skill that I was proud of.

The audit talked about:

• Low website speed (web + mobile)
• URL depth
• Incorrect meta
• Keyword placements

This was all the evidence that we needed to get the C-Team to give us the freedom to make some fundamental changes. Going forward, I will highlight the route that we took to make things fall in place and eventually go from 0 to 100K monthly traffic on this website.

Journey to 100K monthly traffic

- Technical optimisation and on-page SEO

- Pro-Technical SEO & boosting page speed

- Moving towards pain-point SEO

- Strategy against thin content

- Backlinks & DR

In the content below, I will explain each one of these in depth. However, I want you to remember that what worked for this website, might not work for you.

SEO is not about doing 100 things. It is about doing 10 things, again and again and again.

Technical optimisation and on-page SEO

The first step in the SEO initiative is going to be getting the technical SEO set up. (This part is a bit technical, so you may want to pass it along to your developers and move on to the next section.)

Sitemap.xml

In JavaScript apps, sitemaps are difficult to create as they need to be generated by the server or a utility. I’ve heard people say they aren’t important, but they definitely are if you want your content to rank in search.

If your site is made on WordPress, you already excel in this area. There are several plugins that make sitemaps a breeze. Otherwise there are several sitemap generation tools you can use online.

Robots.txt

Another “easy” technical SEO tip is to make sure you have a robots.txt file and that it points to your sitemap.xml. A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google. To keep a web page out of Google, block indexing with noindex.xml or password-protect the page.

Site Organisation

You should “never” deeply nest pages that you’d like to rank. In an ideal case scenario, you should only have 3 levels of page depth in any of your sites. This does not only offer ease to your consumers, but also makes the site easily crawl-able. Isn’t that the point?

Serving Images

There are several modern formats for images that are designed for good compression and small size. This means better images for the same file size. These formats are WebP, Jpeg2000, JpegXR and they are massively superior to JPG, PNG, etc.

If you’re able to use a plugin or a CDN that can optimise these images for you, I highly recommend it. Otherwise, there are plugins for Photoshop and other tools which will allow you to export them yourself.

Pro-Technical SEO

Have some background technical knowledge? Awesome! Let’s talk about the tricks you can do if you do. For both desktop and mobile, you should shoot to have a website that loads in roughly 3 seconds or less.

For this, you should look at your page vitals. In-fact, obsessively look at them. I use Darwin Analytics to see how those are performing over time and across devices. There are many reasons loading time may be slow, but here are some common things to look at:

• Run a quick audit of your site’s loading performance. I have mentioned this before as well. This will help you understand the on-ground and in-depth issues.
• Optimise the loading of static assets like images. You can often lazy load them or preload them as needed using relevant meta tags.
• Make sure compression is enabled. This is highly recommend.
• Assets should be minimised to remove unneeded characters likes spaces. This can improve size by ~30%.

Google’s Page Speed dashboard is your friend. In May 2020, Google officially rolled its “page vitals” update. This update judges some important vitals of your page/website against usability related performance metrics, and factors them into your ranking. The primary metrics that are measured are:

• FID — First Input Delay (under 100ms) — How long does it take until your page becomes usable.
• CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift (under 0.1) — Do you have changes that may make it an awkward loading experience.
• LCP — Largest Contentful Paint (under 2.5s) — This describes how long it takes your page to render.

Moving towards pain-point SEO

When getting started with SEO-focused content marketing, people tend to research keywords and topics they think their target customers would be interested in. The end result is a sheet of keywords prioritised based on which keywords have the highest search volume, and they end up picking the easiest ones to rank for. This prioritisation of traffic potential and difficulty for ranking is driven by a flawed success metric of increasing traffic, not conversions.

Pain-point SEO is a strategy for building high-converting traffic to your website by identifying problems your potential customers face. Post this research you create content that helps them solve that problem. In a nut-shell it’s about prioritising content around high-intent keywords over high-volume keywords and using conversions instead of traffic as the measure of success.

A lot of SEO marketers would recommend against this strategy. Specially if you tie their growth to this. It is because generically speaking, the market standard of conversion rate is <1% of the overall traffic. Although, you need to remember that pain-point SEO is built on the insights that your best customers are often already educated by someone else, creating the top of funnel content, and have already moved to the middle and bottom part of the funnel.

This strategy isn’t revolutionary, of course. However, comparing pain-point SEO to the typical keyword-driven approach reveals the back-to-the-basics brilliance of this strategy.

Strategy against thin content

Everyone reading this would agree that content is the king. It is a fail-proof way of driving interest, increase average reading time, building consideration and increasing conversion. In fact, content has become such a big part of marketing that it’s essentially the foundation for every major marketing strategy.

But if content is the king, remember that thin content is a traitor.

Thin content is on-page content that has little or no value to the visitor. This means content that is automatically generated, unhelpful affiliate content, content that has been stolen from other sites, or content on doorway pages. What else? Google can heavily penalise you for writing thin content.

“Good content” is a vague concept. It is very difficult to understand what a search engine will consider as good content and what it will discard as a waste of your effort. This, according to me, is the most frustrating part about being a content marketer or writer.

While we are talking about thin content, it is important that we also mention plagiarism. Google is a strict teacher and can punish you heavily for plagiarised content.

Bonus: Recovering from penalty on plagiarism and thin content

If you’ve been hit with a thin content penalty, then here are some steps you can take to fix your site. The nice thing about content and SEO, is that fixing your bad content can prevent manual action penalties, but going the extra mile and creating great content can make you better off than before. Some of the best practices are mentioned here:

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. I recommend using Answer The Public for this.
• To help Google fully understand your site’s contents, allow all site assets that would significantly affect page rendering to be crawled — CSS, JavaScript, etc.
• Make your site’s important content visible by default.
• Make a reasonable effort to ensure that advertisement links on your pages do not affect search engine rankings.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. If you must use images for textual content, use the alt attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

Backlinks & DR

Now that I have mentioned everything that we fixed in order to make the website easily crawl-able, let’s talk about how we fixed the low domain authority and domain rating.

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score. It was originally developed by Moz and predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). This is based on data from Link Explorer web index and uses dozens of factors in its calculations.

By default, the DR and DA is low for newer domains, and as marketers, you should try to improve it to make your content rank and get the most out of your efforts. The first and foremost step that you must take in order to improve your DR and DA is to nail the technical SEO aspect of your website. Since we have discussed this at length previously, let’s skip this and move on to the next steps:

(a) Improve your link profile

This is a part of your off-page SEO, and let’s briefly discuss this. Your website is said to have a strong link profile if:

• It has incoming links from high authority websites.
• Incoming links are from related websites.
• It doesn’t have bad links.
• It has links from a number of unique domains.

(b) Natural link building

This is directly co-related to the health of content on your website. Great content attracts great backlinks. For this to work, it is necessary to have link-worthy content published on your website. In other words, content that is insightful, useful, and easy to read so that other webmasters will be willing to reference it in their articles. To work on this, you will need a lot of help from your editorial team. At least, I did.

(c) On-page SEO

On-page is all about optimising the page and content. I helped the editorial team deal with this by offering them help with:

• Optimised titles and descriptions.
• Proper use of Headings (H1 and H2) within the content.
• SEO optimised URL structure.
• SEO optimising your images, videos, and other media elements.
• Helping them use keywords naturally in the content (no keyword stuffing).
• Interlinking to help the website in getting crawled efficiently.

Well, these were the steps that my team and I followed to increase the traffic from 0 to 100K in a few months. The most important part of this strategy that I somehow skipped to mention is that it’s very very essential to stay patient and positive. Nailing a positioning on SEO is not a one day’s task. However, when you are consistent, you will soon be reaping the results.

About the writer:

I am a marketer and strategist with 5+ years of work experience in the field of marketing. I love being a marketer as it helps me see the bigger picture and analyse the minute pixels that leads to such beautiful creation. You can read more about me on my website.