Growing blog SEO traffic from 100K to 300K – Part 1

When I made this tweet, I initially thought I would get only 20 to 30 likes. 970 likes and 141 DMs later I have now chosen to do this via a WhatsApp group.

My next SEO project will be growing a blog's traffic from 100K visitors to 300K without writing lots of new content over 6 months.

If you would like frequent updates on how I am going to accomplish this, msg me or like this tweet. I will create a Twitter DM group when I start

— Yemi Johnson (@yemi_uc) July 8, 2018

The goal is to triple blog traffic from 100K to 300K. This is a very ambitious feat as the team I am working with started this blog from zero back in June 2017 and only crossed 100K in traffic back in December 2017. The team consists mainly of writers who were mostly novices at what SEO was, but we had a clear plan before we started or even hired writers.

Today I work in marketing and business operations which focuses on strategy before execution, so I don’t get to do a lot of the marketing or SEO again. In the past, I did SEO for 3 years at large content sites and I have picked up many tricks that helped us grow that blog from 0 to 100K in 5 months. Now I am going to use those tricks to triple blog traffic.

What you should know

• I have 171 pieces of content written on the blog. All of that content was written by writers over 3 months.
• The blog has not been updated since March.
• A lot of fundamental SEO tricks went into making the blog. Things like H1 and H2 headers, readability, et al.
• Most of the content on the blog are evergreen content.
• I use different SEO tools to give me insights on how to create and optimize content. My favorites are Keywordseverywhere (free), and Ahrefs (paid).
• The website had a high domain ranking before I started out with it.
• I will not be revealing the blog I am working on until I reach my goal 🙂

I will do my best to simplify things as much as I can. Please feel free to ask questions if you do not understand, however, I might not be able to answer your question as clearly as you would like if you are a beginner, but I will try 🙂

That’s a view of traffic growth since Apr 1, 2017 – May 1, 2018. I crossed the 100K mark in March. The huge spike in December was the CPC campaign I ran.

This view shows all traffic, you can see most of the traffic is organic and comes from Google.

This is a view showing traffic between April 1, 2018 – May 31, 2018. There are over 200K sessions on the blog for 2 months. 70% of traffic comes from organic while the rest mostly comes from direct. This blog was built predominantly for SEO traffic, so the traffic coming from direct could be that a lot of users have the links saved in their bookmarks or they are sharing the links via email and other platforms.

My strategy to accomplish this will include a combination of white hat & black hat SEO tactics:

• I will not be writing a lot of content, instead I will be auditing written content to improve readability, the questions answered, and its rank.
• I will be building some really good backlinks. I might not tell you my exact method here, but I will give you enough primer.
• I will be targeting featured snippet positions
• I will do new keyword research to find high search volume keywords in my niche and write about them

That’s my strategy to go from 100K to 300K. Over time, I will show you the actual things and methods I used to scale this traffic.

I will be kicking off this project sometime in August. So hold your beer till then.

P.S: The even more exciting project for me is that I am starting a completely new content site with zero content and backlinks and I intend to scale it up to 500K ranking pages over the next 15 months. Wish me luck as I am going to be deploying completely different strategies from what I am showing you here 🙂 And if it is successful, you can bet who would be the first set of people to learn how I did it.