How to increase my website's traffic?

With 3.5 billion searches performed on Google with definite intent, SEO is the unequivocal answer to help bring relevant visitors consistently to your website and to convert them into your customers

I breakdown the process into three steps:

Building your website’s reputation: Without a good reputation, it is almost impossible to rank on Google. Guest posts are your best friend to build this.
Keyword research and writing content: The critical aspect is to never start writing an article without keyword research. Optimise your blog and use the tools mentioned in the report to make it easy.
Distribution: Just writing your blog doesn’t guarantee ranking on Google. Distribute it across various platforms (included in the report), social media, and also a newsletter.

Then, keep repeating step 2 and 3.

Additional Context

I have shared many pro-tips, tools, and important concepts in this report. Do give it a read. Just 5 mins from your schedule — please :).

If you like the report, do support me on Twitter — your support will really help me :).

How do you drive consistent traffic to your website?

For 2 years, I focused on everything but SEO - foolish to not recognise its power.

Not anymore. In the last 6 months, I've grown:
📈 DR to 38
🚀 Monthly traffic to 10,000

Report: https://t.co/CiN86dFh8l

Thread👇🏻#startups
— Karthik Sridharan (@KarthikS2206) October 14, 2020

Problem

I want to increase my website's traffic. Not a temporary spike but something that sustains.

Solution

The truly sustainable and long-term growth in traffic to your website comes from search engines. So, focusing on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the only reliable way to achieve it.

Why and when to worry about this?

a. Rationale

There are other ways to get traffic to your website - social media, launch platforms, etc. - which are all important. However, these give only a spike in traffic and not long-term hits to your website.

Each day Google sees 3.5 billion searches which are performed with definite intent. So, it doesn't get better than showing up in the results whenever your potential customer searches something related to your industry.

b. Timing

SEO takes time to give results. Therefore, the earlier you start the better. Ideally, you should start immediately after building your marketing website. It is likely that you have validated your idea. Therefore, you know who your target audience is and what they want. Start writing content that they would search for.

Tools

Keyword research tools

Ahrefs - paid but recommended
Ubersuggest - free but I haven't had a great experience

For Wordpress users

Yoast - to check if your page is optimised

Find guest post opportunities

Accessily

Distribution platforms

Implementation

a. Realistic expectation

As mentioned earlier, results in SEO can't be achieved overnight. It takes time. Expect a minimum of 6 months of effort.

Also, just following the below process doesn't guarantee that you will rank for every search phrase you attempt to. Some will land and some won't. Those that don't should be reworked and tweaked.

b. Process

Covering the entirety of SEO in a 5-min report isn't possible. However, the attempt is to share enough knowledge and food for thought to know what the next steps are. Always return to the report after you have executed a particular step.

I assume you know the basics of SEO for this report. So, if you are new to SEO, start with this quick article.

Now, broadly, we can break this into three steps: building website reputation, writing content, and then distributing it.

i. Building website reputation - Guest posting

When you just buy your domain, it will have no reputation in the eyes of Google => DA/ DR close to 0
It will be tough for your pages to rank as a consequence
You need a good number of reputed websites to link back to your website (a.k.a backlinks)
Writing good content and hoping that websites will link to you, is not a great bet
Instead, writing guest posts is what works

Since, you are offering other websites free content, it is quite likely they will accept
Of course, the content still has to be of high quality
Only choose websites that give a do-follow link to your website
This is high effort but a reliable method
Read this article for a step-by-step process of executing this
You can also use tools like Accessily (I haven't used this tool)

Pro-tip: Try to write a 2-part article (related topics). One can submitted as a guest post and you can link from it to the 2^nd part of the article which is published on your website. This helps the 2^nd article to rank for a particular keyword. Here is an example:

ii. Writing content

At the same time, you also need to write content for your own website
Don't start writing without keyword research

A keyword is the phrase that a potential user will search on Google
The article topics you choose to write on should be based on such keywords
Writing good content without research, is likely going to lead to an article that ranks for nothing
Here's where tools like Ahrefs do a great job
Read this article to understand the step-by-step process

After choosing the keyword, next:

Look at the articles that are currently ranking for that keyword
Decide the article topic and the length needed accordingly
While and after writing the article, keep infusing keywords in the article

Ideal keyword density (keyword occurrence as % of total article length) should be 1-2%

Don't miss adding your keyword to the Page title, H1 tags and also write a good meta description

If your blog is on WordPress, Yoast helps in checking if you have followed all the best practices

iii. Distributing your content

With the article published, there is a small chance that it could automatically rank for the keyword
But to improve the chances, you need to distribute it
Start with the distribution platforms mentioned here

Don't forget to add a canonical tag

Share it across all your social channels
Starting a newsletter gives you yet another channel to distribute your content

Read this article to understand how to do it right

Lastly, you could also reach out to other websites, requesting them to link to your article

My experience with this has been poor. It is high effort and low on output
Here's an article to do it, but I would advice doing this only if you have the time to