[00:00] How do some people get millions of monthly visits to their website while over 96% of content gets zero traffic from Google? The problem isn't tactics. It's that top performers follow a proven three-stage roadmap that makes traffic generation predictable and scalable.
[00:16] And I'm going to teach you how to do it in under 14 minutes. And it all begins at stage one. Adopting a repeatable strategy. Now, there's plenty of ways to hack traffic, but traffic hacks don't last long.
[00:29] And it's like that for most things in life. For instance, if you wanted to learn a simple song on a guitar, you could probably read a chord chart, practice a few times, and eventually get good at that song. But what if you wanted to perform a complex guitar solo?
[00:43] Well, repeating the same practice strategy probably wouldn't work. You need to learn music theory, practice scales, advanced techniques, and perhaps even work with a teacher to master the intricate parts of the solo.
[00:57] So building a repeatable traffic acquisition strategy needs to start with a strong foundation. And that involves choosing the right type of content to create and the right sources to get traffic from.
[01:10] And let me make that decision dead simple for you. This traffic chart is typical when your strategy revolves around creating viral content. You might get big initial strikes of traffic from social media or paid ads, but it almost always ends up fading to nothing, taking you back to square one.
[01:27] Now, compare that with this traffic graph, which is typical for a site that creates evergreen content and generates their traffic through search engine optimization, or SEO. Traffic isn't exactly instant, but it's free, consistent, and it compounds over time,
[01:44] helping you take steps closer to your goal of getting 10,000 monthly visits. So now that we know the strategy to get 10,000 visits per month, we need to go and actually do the work to get those visitors to our site.
[01:57] And that all happens at stage two. This happens. Now, some people get intimidated by SEO because they think it's too technical. But when you're under 10,000 monthly visits, all you need to do is focus on filling in the four pieces of the SEO puzzle.
[02:13] The first piece is keyword research, which is the process of finding topics that people are actually searching for. And this process starts by generating your big list of keywords.
[02:25] To do that, brainstorm some broad keywords related to your niche. For example, if I had a site about learning guitar, I'd write down keywords like guitar, fingerpicking, and strumming. Next, paste those into a keyword research tool like Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer, and then
[02:40] go to a keyword ideas report like the matching terms report. And just like that, we have our big list of keywords. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can use our free keyword generator, which I'll link up in the description. All right, so with our big list of keywords, we need to narrow it down to keywords that
[02:56] are actually worth going after. And to determine this, you can use a three-point checklist, with the first checkpoint being search for me. Now, this is easy because keyword research tools show you the number of monthly searches for a given keyword.
[03:10] And all you want to do is just make sure that there's a decent number of monthly searches and that there's some consistency month over month. But the second checkpoint is actually much more important, and that's to choose keywords that you have a realistic chance of ranking for.
[03:24] And while there no definitive way to quantify this a simple rule you can set for yourself is to only compete for keywords where websites of a similar authority are already ranked To figure this out go to our free website
[03:38] authority checker and type in your domain to check your website's level of so-called authority. For example, my guitar site is pretty new and has a domain rating, or DR, of just 1. Now, whatever your site's DR is, add 10 to it. And that number is kind of arbitrary,
[03:55] but it sets an upper threshold to ensure that you're only competing against websites in the same league as you, at least for now. Now, let's take this number back to our big list of keywords. And I'm going to set a lowest DR filter with a value up to our upper threshold number and hit apply.
[04:11] And if we expand the search results for one of these keywords, you'll see that there are indeed pages ranking here in the top five with low website authority scores. Now, given that you can execute on the rest of the SEO puzzle,
[04:23] you will rank for keywords that get searched regularly and therefore you can easily get to 10,000 monthly visits. But before we get to solving the rest of the SEO puzzle we need to talk about
[04:36] the third checkpoint for keyword research which is all about choosing keywords with business value. Go and look through your list of keywords and for each one ask yourself would someone searching for this topic be interested in my product or service? For example if my guitar education site sells
[04:53] courses or private lessons, a keyword like how to play F chord on guitar is definitely going to attract my ideal customer. So would keywords like how much are guitar lessons, what is a guitar
[05:05] risk, and so on. These keywords all hit this sweet spot, so they're worth going after. Now, a keyword like what is the most expensive guitar in the world? It has some search demand, and it's possible
[05:17] to rank for, but it doesn't exactly sound like something a potential customer will be searching for. So go through your entire list, save the good keywords that check all points, and you're ready to go to unlock the second piece of the SEO puzzle, which is to match the intent of the
[05:34] searcher. Google's job is to give searchers the most relevant results to any given query. This means that the pages ranking in the top three positions are what Google believes searchers want to see for that query. For example, if I search for how much do guitar lessons cost,
[05:50] you'll see that Google shows the answer directly in the search results. And if we click into that page, you'll see the author gives you the answer within the first 10 words of the blog post because they understand that that's what searchers want.
[06:03] Now, copying what the top-ranking page did doesn't mean you'll outrank them. Matching the searcher's intent by providing a price range fast is just a prerequisite to even have a chance at ranking. But if you go a step further and think about what else the searcher might want to know,
[06:18] you may be able to give yourself an edge. Like, what determines this price range? How do I know if the teacher is actually good? What can I expect to learn in the first few lessons? And is it going to be worth my money? These are subtopics that you want to cover in your post
[06:32] so you can make it as comprehensive as possible. Because ultimately, we want to give visitors the best possible experience so they either convert or leave satisfied with the answer they got.
[06:44] So when creating content, go in with a general mindset to immediately satisfy the primary desire for your visitor, and then continue to satisfy their next five questions. And if you do that, while nailing the more technical parts of
[06:58] content writing for SEO which we got a step tutorial for then you will definitely be able to nail this piece of the SEO puzzle But in all honesty there usually not a whole lot you can
[07:10] do to be better than competitors for factual informational topics like how much do guitar lessons cost or how to play F chord on guitar. And that's where the two missing pieces to the SEO puzzle are going to give you an edge, with a third piece being backlinks. Backlinks are when
[07:27] a webpage links to another page on a different website. And links have been one of Google's most prominent ranking signals from the beginning. And if you're not getting a lot of traffic now, a lack of links is likely a big part of the reason why. So let's fix that and start by getting links
[07:43] to the easiest page on your site, the homepage. Now, the first tactic you can use is podcast link building. And because podcast hosts usually have a website, they often link to the guest
[07:55] homepage and socials on our episode page. So by getting interviewed, you're pretty much guaranteeing yourself a link. Just go to Google and search for Best Whatever Your Niche Is podcast. Then click through to some relevant pages. See if there are any podcasts that you might be a good
[08:11] guest on and then contact the host with your pitch. The second tactic you can use is listicle link building. And this is when you try to get mentioned in best of lists in your niche. So go to Google and search for Best Online Guitar Lessons, and I'll click through to this page.
[08:26] And all I'm going to do is look for a reason why my site would be a good fit for their post. So, as an example, if this site changed from a free to a paid model, I can reach out to the author to let them know and suggest my site as a replacement with free forever
[08:41] online lessons. Now, the final method you can use is to reverse engineer your competitor's backlinks. So again, assuming Justin Gittal is a similar site to mine, I'll take that URL and put
[08:53] it into Ahrefs' free backlink checker. I'll set the mode to exact URL since we're looking for homepage backlinks and run the search. And right away, you'll see up to 100 backlinks pointing at that page, at least in the free backlink checker. But the full version of this report in Site
[09:07] Explorer will show you thousands more backlinks with plenty of filters to narrow down your list of prospects. For example, I can search for the word best in the titles of linking pages and in just a few seconds, I'll find over 200 pages that Justin Guitard has mentioned
[09:21] and linked on, which are opportunities for me. Now, homepage backrooms are just foundational, and every site should build them if they don't already have them. But I have two harsh truth trees. Harsh truth number one, you're going to need backrooms for the actual pages you want to rank,
[09:37] and harsh truth number two, it's not easy to get backrooms, especially to mundane pages like how to play the F chord on guitar. But the good news is that you can still rank high in Google for some topics without direct links to your pages.
[09:52] And that's done by unlocking the fourth piece of the SEO puzzle. Site structure. Your website is connected via internal links, which are hyperlinks from one page on your website to another page on the same site.
[10:06] And when it's mapped out, it kind of resembles a mind map, which helps both search engines and users navigate through your site. Now, not only is site structure important for user experience, but internal links are
[10:20] the only type of backlinks that's guaranteed because you are in full control of your site. And the reason why they helpful from an SEO standpoint at least is because of how backlinks work So backlinks essentially give power to a page through something called page rank Basically if a page has tons of quality links pointing at it that page page rank increases making it more authoritative in the eyes of Google
[10:45] Now, if that page links to two other pages, it's actually able to pass some of that page rank, which also helps to power those pages too. And if that page links to two other pages, then it's possible that more residual value can be passed down, but to a lesser degree.
[11:02] Now, if you carefully structure your internal links, you can maximize the impact of your site's backlinks while giving users a great experience with your content. For example, I might create a page on guitar chords,
[11:14] and on that page, I've linked to all relevant pages, like how to play A chord, B chord, C chord, etc. So, page rank can be passed via internal links as these pages earn backlinks.
[11:26] Now, rinsing and repeating the steps in SEO can easily help you reach 10,000 monthly visits and can actually take you into the millions of monthly visits depending on your needs. But getting traffic through search engines shouldn't be your end game.
[11:40] In this case, it's stage three. Diversify your traffic scope. When you put all your traffic in one basket, whether that's the Google, social media, or whatever basket, you're taking on unnecessary risk.
[11:53] Any of these platforms can take away your traffic overnight, be it through an algorithm update, a platform update, or even a shadow ban. And as unjust as it might feel, they have every right to do it unapologetically.
[12:08] But the good news is that you aren't starting from scratch anymore because your SEO machine should be doing its job, sending you consistent and compounding traffic. Now, unlike before, when we chose just one traffic source, this is a good time to catch multiple traffic sources.
[12:27] But there's a couple of things that you should consider before choosing. Number one, your target audience should spend time on whichever platform you're trying to get traffic from. And number two, you'll want to choose low effort traffic sources with high reward potential.
[12:41] And I want to expand on this a bit, starting with the low effort part. Now, because our traffic foundation was built with SEO, you should have a ton of content on your site that can be repurposed to different platforms.
[12:53] For example, this post on 56 Google search stats is a perfect piece of content to repurpose into a Twitter thread and LinkedIn post, two platforms where our target audience spends a lot of time.
[13:05] Now, this post on finding competitor keywords can also be repurposed for Twitter and LinkedIn, but it'd probably be better as a YouTube video. another platform where a target audience spends time.
[13:17] Now, whichever traffic sources you try, give them a fair shot learning from each previous attempt. And as you do this, you're going to notice that you're better at creating content for some platforms than others,
[13:30] and that other platforms have disproportionate effort-to-reward ratios. And once you identify the best platforms to expand to, focus your efforts there while keeping the SEO train still running.
[13:44] Now, one of the best ways to grow fast is to network with a group of like-minded marketers and business owners. And there's no better place to do that than in Singapore. In October, we'll be hosting our first ever Global SEO and Digital Marketing Conference,
[13:58] where you'll get to hang with me and some of the brightest minds in our industry. Early bird tickets are still available, so I'll leave a link in the description. Hope to see you there.