How we grew organic traffic 1,000% in 6 months.
When we bought the domain meetric.app last year, we didn’t really know what we were building — only that we had a cool name (meetric = meeting + metric).
Fast forward to today — Meetric is now used by thousands of professionals for their meetings, saving them time and boosting their team’s accountability (watch a quick demo).
Aside from the product itself, our website, meetric.app, is visited every month by nearly 25,000 people. I wrote why your website is an extension of your product — this post is what comes before: how we get traffic to it.
For us, it’s been mainly SEO — in other words, organic traffic from Google:
You may think we invested a lot of time to grow like this — we didn’t:
- Avg time we spend on SEO/month: 5 hours
- Avg words produced/month: 4,000 words (~4 articles)
- Organic traffic in July 2020: 165 visitors
- Organic traffic in December 2020: 1,437 visitors
- Organic traffic in July 2021: 16,847 visitors
What did we do?
The days of keyword stuffing and PBN are long gone - SEO is now a long game, just like community building: you have to invest in it for months before you can reap the rewards.
Stay within your niche 🏠
From day one of having the site live in April 2020, we started to write a few blog posts each month and kept at it. The angle was to produce indexable content within our niche: future of work, team collaboration, meeting productivity (topics related to Meetric).
By doing so, we’re building meetric.app as an authority site in the eyes of Google: the more content we produce in our niche, the more likely Google will recommend us as a trustworthy source for that niche.
How do I know it’s working: blog posts that drove zero traffic for months started to bring hundreds then thousands of new visits — their Google rankings are improving.
Find what people are searching for ✍️
I don’t trust data-led keyword research — finding high-volume keywords with low competition—the best research won’t guarantee you the #1 result in Google; there are too many factors outside of your control. Instead, we:
- identified topics in our niche that we think people would be interested in (good practices for virtual meetings, how to record a Zoom meeting, best collaboration tools for remote teams, etc.) and wrote about them.
- looked at competitors with lower domain authority, found related blog posts that drive them lots of organic traffic, then rewrote these posts with more words and unique content.
- used Google search autocomplete to see popular queries and use that info to come up with new ideas but also to use the right titles for our posts.
Double down on what works 🔨
Within a few months, we started to see the 80–20 rule in action: 20% of our content was driving 80% of the organic traffic. So we looked at the blog posts driving the 20% and created alternative versions.
For example, the post 20 funny backgrounds for Zoom started to drive tons of traffic, so we duplicated it into 20 funny backgrounds for Google Meet. This took us only 5 minutes and this extra post is now bringing another thousand visitors per month.
Get technical SEO right 💻
Speed, accessibility and indexability are factors impacting the Google search algorithm. We made sure to get the following right:
- a fast and responsive site.
- a clean sitemap and robots.txt file.
- meta-data on every page (title, description, open graph tags).
- headings on every page (h tags).
- alt and title tags for all images.
- no broken links/redirection.
To stay on top of it, we use Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and Ahrefs — all free tools (Ahrefs has a free version).
What about backlinks? 🤔
I spent no time on backlinks because I think the ROI on them is awful: you can easily spend 4 hours reaching out to 30 sites to only get 1 backlink to your site which might be a no-follow (that’s not even including the time to write optional content for them like a guest post). In addition, agencies or contractors that offer you to do that on your behalf are sh** 99% of the time — they use PBN or the same list of low-quality sites with all their clients.
Instead, we got PR support (shoutout to Olive PR) and leveraged word of mouth in the Australian tech landscape to get occasionally featured in quality publications like this one. Over time, our backlink profile increases, giving us more authority in the eyes of Google.
What’s next
In total, we spent <100 hours on SEO (including writing) and a total of 100,000 visitors came.
Going forward, we want to produce more content within our niche (double down on what works!) and find new ways to promote it:
If you’ve tried any of these techniques, let me know how it went :)
Until then, say hi on Twitter!
