Journey To Generating 300,000 Unique Monthly Visitors
From 2k to 300k traffic: How one SWOT analysis helped us achieve it for WhatsHot
If you are starting your SEO journey, the numbers in the title may seem like a dream. I understand this feeling because about 3 years ago, I was at the same place. My target was to increase the monthly traffic from 2,000 to 300,000 in a span of 6 months. When I started, this number seemed so impossible to reach. Let me tell you how did my team finish this journey, the analysis we relied on, and the content marketing and strategy that paid off.
(Disclaimer: This case study is for a media website. This might not be as useful for a business that does not rely heavily on content)
The Deal About Website Traffic
Website traffic is crucial, and I can not emphasise enough on this. For a blogger seeking to monetise their content, for a startup and specially for a media company, the sweet zeroes that take the traffic to 6 digit number, is important for all ad sales and brand partnership.
Every business is different. Every consumer is different. And the bridge between the business and the consumer, is CONTENT.
The Starting Point
People say that over-analysis is paralysis. But what do they say about lack of analysis? Nothing. Because anyone who suffers through lack of analysis is too busy with damage control to offer a wise quote.
Whats Hot at that time was suffering from a similar problem. Over the years of its existence, it had gone from being a column in Times City to being a lifestyle page to a hyperlocal discovery FB/Insta page. Whats Hot, that now operated as a vertical of Indiatimes Lifestyle Network, was the bad sheep of the lot. Everyone wanted it to work, to yield revenue. The management tried so many different things, and whatever failed, was credited on bad luck.
However, in business, there is no bad luck. Just bad analysis. The moment we realised this, we scratched everything, cleared our minds of what we were doing and sat down to conduct one SWOT analysis that changed it all.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats. SWOT analysis is a key component to any marketing and strategic planning and is highly effective in developing marketing strategies. It is one of the most salient (free) tools that a marketer or a strategist has.
You can read more about how to conduct a successful SWOT analysis on my blog SWOT Analysis: Develop Strategic Marketing Goals.
Now, Whats Hot had some major strengths and opportunities. But it also had weaknesses that could not be ignored, and the market variables posed threats that needed to be tackled. The SWOT Analysis went something like this:
Inference
The SWOT analysis was a revelation. We had conducted the research and now it was time to work on actionable. The inferences that were drawn from the above SWOT analysis were:
- Introduce agility in the team.
- Focus on SEO.
- Go mobile-first or give it equal weightage.
- Decentralise promotions.
- Repurpose content to buy time.
- Go with affiliate marketing.
One thing that was in our favour was that the DA (Domain Authority) of the website was high. At the same time, something that was difficult to crack was the competition on high volume keywords.
Changes in the content strategy
In order to achieve business objectives, we rely on a content strategy. It is a higher-level planning process that constitutes a comprehensive approach to content creation. Content creation without a sane content strategy can be compared to a headless chicken. It moves in all direction and never reaches the goal.
As soon as the inferences were out, we made some quick changes to the overall content strategy that the Whats Hot team was following.
- Chase trending topics
- Restrict thin content and features, and increase listings.
- Turn blogs into videos and videos into blogs.
- Embed videos to blog pages to increase average session time.
- Be ok with content with shorter life span.
- Increase social sharing, repurposing and cross-posting.
I will focus on each of these points briefly going forward. In the meanwhile, if you need help in creating content strategy, you can use the template mentioned below.
(A) Revisiting content marketing
Content marketing is very different from content strategy. It is the nuts-and-bolts process of creating, publishing, and promoting content.
Our initial analysis said that we needed to understand the platform that was yielding traffic and the platform that was pushing brand trust. After this, we needed to create content that pushed both agendas.
We zeroed down on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook for sharing blog links, events and announcements that would ultimately lead people to website. Before we went ahead with this, we ensured that all the blogs were mobile friendly (by adding Whats Hot as an app on FB) and would open on clicking the link within 2 sec. It was also ensured that the blog links are being debugged and crawled before posting on FB. This helps with organic traction.
For Instagram, we hopped on trends, memes, reposts and filler content that would increase engagement and keep users coming back to Whats Hot’s content. Videos were common for both platform.
(B) Restrict thin content
A major mistake that the content team was making was by creating thin content. Google defines thin content as on-page content that has little or no value to the readers.
Albeit, churning thin content would have given us an edge on coverage. However, it was decided that such content will be restricted only to trending topics and then be revisited to add more details.
(C) Turn blogs into videos and videos into blogs
A lot of us shy away from creating videos, despite knowing that videos are the most important real estate on any/all distribution mediums. This was one of the most important decisions that was made. It was decided that we’d convert all blogs to text-audio video, and convert all video IPs (First Look, Eat This, In A Minute) to blogs. We then embedded these videos to article pages.
This served as one of the greatest factors in reducing the bounce rate, increasing website traffic and increasing average session time. This also was an instant success and the result was out there to be seen within the span of 1 month.
(D) Chasing trending topics and be ok with content with shorter life span
Before this SWOT analysis, Whats Hot used to operate purely as a hyperlocal discovery platform. This was awesome. However, the content that Whats Hot served, was need based. If someone was in a mood to explore hill stations or was looking to explore the most romantic cafes in Delhi-NCR, they would turn to Whats Hot for guidance. Two things that were going wrong here were:
- The population of daily visitors on the website in any case would be limited.
- The TG of explorers was not as aware of Whats Hot as we would have wanted them to be.
To tackle this, we added Trending Topics as one major pillar of our content bucket. The primary reason behind serving hyper-local trending content was to increase the traffic. It also served in changing the narrative the brand served content only for explorers. It also started bringing in awareness around the brand. I remember that in the initial days when we were trying out this strategy, a writer wrote a funny piece on a couple in metro. This was trending and the video was being going viral on Twitter. The writer finished the content in less than 30 min and social media took absolutely no time in distributing it. Within 10 min of this being shared on social media, the realtime readers on this content piece had exceeded 2K. This was a validation on the assumption that we had made.
(E) Increase social sharing
Social media is a lethal strategic tool. It lets you communicate with your audience and appear in front of them multiple times a day. No matter what we say about the toxicity of social media, if you have a website or a brand that you would like to bring attention to, you have got to be active on social media.
Let me elaborate this further. Social media can help you with the following:
- It will boost your brand awareness across multiple platforms.
- Social media provides an opportunity to demonstrate your authenticity through storytelling.
- You’ll be able to encourage direct engagement on interactive channels.
- You can use social media to provide real-time support to your customers.
- Cost-effective social media marketing can help you grow your brand affordably.
Pro Tip: Social media is useful for businesses built on websites only if your website has a good Ui/Ux
Going back to Whats Hot, my social media team increased the number of slots. Through analysis we knew that our readers were most active between 6 & 7 PM. This was a pre Co-vid world and the time slot was a prime time for when people were commuting. The next best slot was 9 PM. Analysis says that most users are active around this or after this time. Reason? Because they are done with their day and are seeking dopamine on social media. 1 PM was another slot that we were very careful about. This was because our target audience that constituted majorly of office-goers, were having lunch around this time.
We kept this slots as our Prime Slots and stories that we knew would have better reception or trending stories, were pushed during this time.
For the remaining slots, my team would either re-share an old (evergreen) article that had clocked in great views, or would share guides. Our understanding was clear. Get as many visitors as possible through as many articles as possible. On FB, we were sharing 13 articles per city (6 cities back then) and on Instagram, we were posting 5 natives. The referral that we gained from here, really helped us in serving the ultimate goal.
How important is the length of blog
Keeping trending topics and situational content aside, let’s get an understanding of how SEO helped in reaching the target.
For everyone who is reading this article and has reached till this point, I would like to tell that SEO is not an option. It is also not a magic ingredient. SEO is like investment. There are probably about 10 steps that you follow religiously again and again and again. And then one day, it will give you results that you weren’t expecting.
I wouldn’t get into the technical aspects of SEO. You can read about that on my other blog — 0 to 100k traffic in 6 month on website with low DR (through SEO). I would rather answer the most asked question, “What should be the length of our blogs/articles?”
No matter what anyone says, there is no magic word limit. Some blogs rank with 700 words while there are blogs with 3000 words that desperately seek a position on Page 1 of SERP. The best way to factor in word limit is to:
- Search the content on the keyword that you are targeting.
- Look at the first 5 articles. Count the word length and look at keyword density
- Once you have done this, take an average of the word length and keyword density. On high volume keywords, this word limit is usually between 2100–2400 words.
- Frame your content while keeping the two factors in mind.
- Now for edge, and to slowly move up the ranks, provide value. Understand the intent of your readers. List down all the questions that they might have regarding that particular topic and answer them all.
- Once your average session time has increased, over the time your blog will shift to 1st or 2nd position of the 1st page of SERP
Interlinking: the magic ingredient
Interlinking is one of the best SEO practices. For those who don’t know what Interlinking is, know that it is the process of linking your current article to other similar article on your website. An example of this is mentioned about 2 paragraphs above.
You dabble with interlinking to:
(a) Increase average session time.
(b) Decrease bounce rate.
(c) Increase number of page visited per session.
(d) Give more weightage to the keyword that you have targeted.
(e) Help Google crawl your site better.
A good content strategist always plans more than one content around one keyword. You don’t target the same keyword with all these content because that would lead to cannibalism and it’s a whole another headache. Instead, you focus these content around intent and similar keywords. With Whats Hot, the SEO team created a list of all articles that were related to each other and interlinked them. This helped us in decreasing the bounce rate and increasing avg. session time, two metrics that positively influences your website’s reputation in Google’s eyes.
Paid marketing
Although, the major chunk of traffic that was being directed to the website was organic, paid marketing also played an important role. Contradicting the common understanding that for increasing keyword related volume on an article one should rely on Google PPC, we relied on social media marketing.
The main platform that Whats Hot was targeting was Facebook, and we know that FB organically promotes a content based on recency and user interest. We couldn’t have done a lot about user interest but we decided to target recency.
The first 15 min after you share your post is crucial. You will be able to gauge the performance and understand how the post will perform amongst readers. The social media team started keeping a keen eye on this, and the moment we’d notice an increasing value of reads, we would promote that story. This helped us with a couple of things:
(a) Traffic (definitely)
(b) Increased CTR which led to low CPC
My team also used these “high paying” articles and started converting them as natives on IG with Link In Bio, thus boosting the traffic more and more.
In brief, this was how Whats Hot increased its monthly unique visitors to 300,000 in the span of 6 months. This tactic might not work for your website, but some pointers are universal for all businesses, no matter which industry you are from. I hope I was able to add value to your marketing prowess with this article. In case you need any questions answered, feel free to drop in a comment.
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.
