Confidentiality is key in some types of SEO, so I just can’t go around sharing client website results as proof of my work. Likewise, I need a safe space to test my SEO strategies before deploying them on client websites. So, I launched my site.
As of the time of this writing, this website has pulled in almost 16,000 all-time clicks and more than 14,000 pageviews in the past 3 months (90 days) alone.
That’s not even the best part; we’ll get to all of that soon.
In this piece, I’ll show you everything I did to make that happen, laying it out in such a way that you can follow the strategies to gain organic traffic to your websites, landing pages, offers, copy, and content anywhere on the web.
Enough talk. Let’s get right in.
First, The “Money” Shot
Why should I be teaching you how to get thousands and tens of thousands of organic clicks to your websites and other web properties if I haven’t done it myself? Yeah, valid question.
So, before we continue, how about some screenshots to get you excited?
Now that we’ve established social proof, let’s get to the business of the day.
For now, you can reach out to me to ask about anything that you don’t understand:
What Kind of Website Is This?
I won’t be revealing the niche and address of this website for obvious reasons.
The risk from content scrapers, Blackhat SEOs sending spammy links, and bot traffic, among other things, is high these days. If you have a high-performing website, I would recommend that you keep the niche to yourself, too.
That said, this is an information-based website on a fresh domain without any built backlinks. The niche is considered saturated, but with any good niche, there’ll always be avenues to explore.
Furthermore, the website’s content has a mix of commercial intent content too (reviews, best of, versus, etc), but that makes up less than 15% of the entire content on the website.
How Did I Find My Keywords?
Finding the keywords to write about is the second most important thing in content publishing. The first, of course, is creating great content.
You need to find what your prospects are typing into search engines so that you can optimize for them. That is how to ensure you are seen when they enter such queries into Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or any other search engines that they use.
There are several ways to do this. I’ll only outline the keyword tools that I have tried since I can discuss them better:
- AnswerThePublic (free): I love using ATP to find those questions that my target audience is asking about my topics. Most of the questions you get will turn up with zero search volumes (remember this term for later), but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go for them. I also use ATP to build out the FAQ section of my articles. More on that in the writing section.
- Keyword Revealer (paid): To be honest, I don’t use this tool anymore. I’ve used it for two websites now, and while it is somewhat decent at finding the “money” keywords, it’s not great for the informational intent side, which I leaned towards for this project.
- Keyword Finder (paid): I bought this tool as an alternative to Keyword Revealer when I was starting a second site. It’s slightly more powerful and offers a range of extra perks if you’re getting deeper into SEO. A good price for the money.
- AHRefs (paid): If you’re just starting, AHRefs might be a little out of your reach right now. The cheapest monthly plan is about $129/month. When you scale up, you might want to get this tool.
- Keyword Chef (free trial & paid): Keyword Chef is one of the best tools to find low-competition keywords out there today. There’s a focus on informational intent, but you’d find some buyer and commercial intent keywords in there, too. I recommend using the free trial (which gives you 1,000 credits) first to see how fine a tool it is.
Once I get all of my keywords, I arrange them neatly into a sheet as you’ll see below:
Don’t let the various cells intimidate you. I like to collect more data than I need sometimes, and I color-code things to make them more visually appealing to me.
You don’t need anything fancy like that. A keyword sheet like the one below is what you’ll get once you export from these tools, and it’s highly simple, too.
Validating the Keywords
Before I write any article at all, I do manual Search Engine Results Page (SERP) research to see if the keyword is truly low difficulty.
Here’s why:
Keyword tools will assign a difficulty level to a keyword, which is supposed to show you how easy or challenging that keyword is to rank for.
On Keyword Revealer, for example, a keyword difficulty (KD) between 0-20 is easy to rank for. On AHRefs, 0-10 is the sweet spot, and up to 20 is still considered easy to rank.
The problem with that approach is that an easy keyword in one keyword tool can be estimated as tough in another tool. These tools have different ways of estimating the difficulty. So, if you don’t do a manual search, you might end up not ranking at all.
So, here’s how to validate your keywords:
- Step 1: Get your keywords from any of the tools I mentioned, or other tools that you like better.
- Step 2: If you’re not targeting a local audience, get a VPN. I often write for the U.S. audience, so I have to use a VPN since I am not based in the USA.
- Step 3: Connect your VPN to the location of your audience. In my case, I would connect to the U.S. servers.
- Step 4: Launch Google in Incognito Mode in your browser.
- Step 5: Enter each one of your keywords into Google search.
If the search results show you any combination of:
- Two or more forums ranking in the top 10;
- Non-exact match results (that are not exactly in line with the query);
- Poor content sites ranking in the top 10
- Thin content sites ranking in the top 10; and
- Non-niche sites ranking in the top 10…
… you are good to go. Otherwise, you might have to hold on to that keyword till your website gets a bit more authority.
Writing the Content
This is where it gets dicey for most people.
Even if you have the easiest keywords in the world, they might not move the needle for you if you don’t know how to create good content.
I’m not talking about writing content that’ll win you a #1 bestselling author award or land you the Pulitzer Prize. I’m talking about content that’s more than “just decent enough” for your audience.
We’ve all had our fair share of visiting websites with poorly written content, so you don’t want to be that person creating such trash.
I have a background that spans over eight (8) years in content writing, so this doesn’t come as a challenge to me. The only challenge is finding time to write for my niche websites between client projects.
When you are just starting, you can choose to:
- Write the content yourself: The interesting thing is that you get better with every piece you write, provided you truly put your heart into it. Keep writing and you’ll soon become an authority in your niche.
- Outsource the content: I know a few content publishers who don’t want to bother with writing, so they only hire others to do it for them. If you can find good writers (trust me, they’re hard to find), hire them and pay them to write.
- Do both: There are a series of reasons why doing both is also great. I plan on hiring extra hands with some of my niche sites soon, but I’ll still keep writing. They’ll hold the fort for me when I am busy on client projects. You can also choose to have writers create content alongside you to speed up the process while you keep learning to write, too.
No matter what you do, make sure you are getting the best content for your money or effort.
Current Site Outlook and Future Predictions
One of the reasons I’m excited about this website is because of the milestones my content is reaching at this stage.
I didn’t mention this earlier (so I don’t scare you away), but I have 128 posts published, as of the time of this writing. Now, here’s why that’s interesting.
I started this project about eight (8) months ago. Any reliable SEO will tell you that the average time it takes for a piece of content to rank and start bringing in its highest level of traffic (on a brand new domain) is about six to eight (6-8) months, if not more, from the time you hit publish.
So, if you published an article in January on a fresh domain like this one, you should expect to see the maximum impact from around September to October.
That said, let me show you a breakdown of the articles on the website before I continue:
| Month | No. of articles published |
| May 2021 | 10 |
| June 2021 | 21 |
| July 2021 | 9 |
| August 2021 | 26 |
| September 2021 | 8 |
| October 2021 | 10 |
| November 2021 | 12 |
| December 2021 | 0 |
| January 2022 | 25 |
| February 2022 | 7 (so far) |
If you look at that table, with the explanation that I just gave, only the articles published in May and June 2021 have had time to rank, and they are the ones bringing in this traffic. That’s just 31 out of 128 articles (less than 25%!!!).
Imagine what happens when the rest of the articles (75%+) cross the 8-month mark.
Massive, right? It gets better.
You don’t get that traffic in one month, and it stops. This is recurring traffic, which means you write the article once and you keep getting hundreds to thousands of page views per month, without doing anything more.
You can almost leave the website there, and it keeps making you money or generating leads for your business on autopilot while you go do other great things.
Traffic Monetization on The Website
I haven’t started monetizing the website traffic properly yet.
I know I’m losing money this way, but I have a bet on myself to grow the site to a certain traffic threshold before monetizing at all. That way, I’m more motivated to keep working on the site the right way.
If you achieved such a traffic level, you could decide to monetize by:
- Selling a product directly: If you sell a $100 product or service and get 15,000 organic clicks/month, at a 1% conversion rate, that’s easily $15,000/month in revenue. The revenue keeps growing as your traffic grows – which it will.
- Putting ads on the website: If you want to earn passively, you can slap some ads on the website. The data from some of my other performing projects pegs average ad revenue at about $30/1,000 pageviews. 15,000 clicks will result in more pageviews, but even at that level alone, you’re getting an extra $450/month.
- Throw in some affiliate links: If you know how to craft high-quality buyer intent content, and you rank them well too, you can make up to $5,000 (and more) per month. Depending on the product price and affiliate commission rate, as well.
The best part is that you can do everything. No rule says you cannot monetize your website in all of those ways.
Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your Niche Site
One of the reasons why I start these niche sites is to find content writing, SEO, and copywriting mistakes that might hurt the brands I work with, so I can avoid those mistakes on their websites.
Of course, I love the idea of passive income that they bring too, but they help me do a low-risk strategy test to see what works and what doesn’t.
Some of the mistakes that I made with an earlier niche site that I avoided here include:
- Over-optimizing: You can over-optimize for keywords, and Google sees that as spam, leading to poor rankings. You don’t have to repeat your keywords multiple times within the content to rank.
- Using all generic images: There is nothing wrong with using stock images, but I’ve found, in the case of this site, that original images work best. I’m currently reaching out to friends (special thanks to AY, Solexy, TR, Habeeb, and Sydney) regarding images for another niche site I plan on starting soon. When you can, take images/videos of the products/things you’re talking about and use them in your content.
- Focusing on too many things: In the early days of one of my older sites, I was doing everything else but content. I focused on the logo, layout, etc. At the end of the day, it’s the quality and depth of your content that matters.
- Monetizing like crazy: Who doesn’t want to earn money from their website traffic? But then, you have to focus on delivering a great user experience first, and the dollars will roll in. Focus on the money alone, and you might not get the traffic to back it up, eventually frustrating you.
- Trusting keyword tools blindly: There was a time when I would take the data from keyword tools and run with it. Today, I maintain that your brain is the best tool, and every other SEO tool out there is secondary. Make final judgments from your research, not what a tool tells you.
- Ignoring zero search volume (ZSV) KWs: Keyword tools can be so inaccurate that they sometimes return a query as having zero searches in search engines. I’ll show the inaccuracies of that in an updated case study.
- Estimating the perfect word count: There’s nothing like the perfect word count. I write my articles without looking at the word counter these days so that I can create the best piece of in-depth content. While there are some general content length guides that you can use, I prefer that you keep writing till you have covered the topic in-depth instead.
These are not all the mistakes I avoided, but they represent some of the core ones.
What I’m Going to Do Next
Since more than 70% of the content on the site is yet to age, and I’m getting such decent traffic levels already, I’ve decided to leave the site for a few months.
In these few months, the rest of the articles age, I get more important data in my Google Search Console (a free analytics tool that you should get if you’re serious about organic traffic), and I can double down on creating more of the content that works.
While I update relevant articles and keep an eye on the metrics, I’m also setting up a new niche site in another interesting sub-niche. It will be a little bit challenging since I’m handling brand projects on the side, but I’ll make it work.
If you’ve got any questions to ask me, comments to share, or you just want to say hi, please follow the link below to reach out:
You can also follow me on LinkedIn, where I share insightful content daily.
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