Ask Me Anything (AMA); I took my agency's site to no barely any traffic, to a steady stream of leads and sales over the course of 2 years. using one well thought out article and infographic.
TL;DR – I made a post on how to hard refresh a browser, posted it to my agency's blog, whipped up a pretty little infographic and posted it to Reddit. 2 years later our rankings and traffic are through the r00f. Back story: A year or so ago my team and I were spitballing ideas on evergreen content. We had made some articles in the past around Pay Per Click (PPC) and they did ok in terms of long-tail keyword ranking, but nothing amazing. I'm a big believer in lateral thinking, after an hour of banging our heads against the table, I decide to give it a rest and move on to something else. I was doing something when I overheard one of the team pick up the phone and greet a well-known customer and then say, "Have you tried to hard refresh your browser?". I knew the response because I knew their technical acumen. Suddenly, it dawned on me – our evergreen content will be on how to hard refresh a browser. After a little more digging we decided to cover all platforms and browsers. We wrote the content, created an infographic and sent it live…. Nothing really happened for 6 months or so though – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a long ball game and its something we tell our clients every day. After submitting it to Reddit, backlinks literally started to flooding in. We had universities citing us in their "how-tos", we had the infographic shared across 10 – 20 very well-respected domains. Now we rank on the first page (A lot are in position 1 – 5 may I add) for 100's of hard refresh themed keywords all across the globe. We now also rank pos 1 – 3 for extremely competitive SEO based keywords throughout New Zealand. Sitting this high up on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) has generated us 270K a year consistently 2 years later. Next year we're set to double that due to such a long sales cycle for some of the bigger websites. It just goes to show that all it takes is one well thought out piece of content and the SEO experts (and the use of this beautiful platform) will reward you. Ask me anything. 46 💬🗨
InAlteredState Interesting example. Was that success planned somehow, or just simple serendipity?
dontputnamehere ✍️ We had set up our site with a really solid onsite SEO as we had planned on getting some juicy back links. I think finding a niche topic that doesn't have any good content is a good start. Takes a few tries but once you hit the content piece on the head and get a few peoples eyes over it, if it's good content, it'll stick. We conceptualised it's for a few hours to break down the structure of the article ensuring we had enough relevant keywords in it. Sometimes content sticks, other times it doesn't. But having a process that ensures you cover all of the basics first helps.
DryLeg8 How did you create the Infographic (e.g. Photoshop/Illustrator)? And is there any good resources available to help those with no design experience/expertise?
dontputnamehere ✍️ We used Sketch for this one. In hind-site could have easily made something in Adobe Experience design which in my opinion would be the easier and quicker for something like this. I was just fortunate that our User Interface (UI) designer literally whipped up the infographic in an hour after I gave him the initial wireframe.
Official_Government This is a cool principal. If you were doing a local real estate site how would you implement such a technique?
dontputnamehere ✍️ The content is only a catalyst to get some good domain juice. The real magic is when you get the nitty gritty keyword and technical side right. Start with on page SEO, get your site structure right and make sure on page boxes are ticked. From there (and this is the part that is the creative side of SEO IMO) would be to conceptualise content that is loosely related to the niche but broad enough to help your average joe. Yeah I know it's a little confusing but there's no real logical way to it. It may take 3 – 5 goes but if you invest time in some juicy pieces of content it will help. Do not forget to internal link in your blog back to a page that you realllllly want to rank and ensure that the anchor text doesn't sound spammy.
CaptainStark619 How much do you charge for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on average? And how long does one customer stays with you?
dontputnamehere ✍️ We don't do any retainers under 15 hours per month. Each customer generally spends 2-3 years with us.
Kebabsalon In which context did you place it on Reddit, without being marked as spam/sponsored/etc?
dontputnamehere ✍️ I posted it to a web dev form and was literally like "use this if your customer keep on complaining that they can't see any new changes they make"
JungleBruce Wow! Super inspired by this. I'm a big believer in the power of innovative, high quality content. Sadly, modern business doesn't allow their workers the time to produce such. When I quit my agency job, I suddenly got all the time in the world to put the time and effort needed to produce world-leading content. My production went way down, but the quality of each published piece was way higher. Seizing featured snippets has become a duck shoot – with my new approach, I nail every one I target, with plenty of surprise extras. IMO, the surest way to the top is by providing the best quality info with the best User Experience (UX). Buying links to rank in 2020 is like brute Neanderthal. That's the breadline for SEO hacks. Great case study OP, thanks for posting!
dontputnamehere ✍️ Yeah bro 100%. I'm a huge believer in amazing content. We simply just do not build any shitty back links any more (apart from the ones that are automatically created from those silly SEO on page checker things). Even if a customer specifically asks for quantity over quality. The only time we come close is when we do hyper targeted local citations but even then are we super careful.
[deleted] I'm curious in something: you said that previously you posted things about Pay Per Click (PPC), and then you change into this post about hard refresh your browser. After that, you started to receive leads, but the content doesn't relate to your core business (which I think is Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)). Any thoughts about that? On the other side: do you have any checklist when you are writing a post?
dontputnamehere ✍️ We posted industry specific content. Stuff on Pay Per Click (PPC), Landing page design etc and I had this random moment where I thought "hey let's try this". But the truth is, everyone in the niche is writing about the same stuff – your reach is super limited when you're writing about a specific niche. It doesn't appeal to the 'masses' therefor it's not going to be picked up and syndicated to the masses. The reason we got leads for our core business is because we had the foundation set up perfectly along the rest of the site, titles tags, h1s, blah blah blah. All we needs then was domain juice and the rest was history.
[deleted] So the article just gave you domain authority that impulsed the rest of the well-optimized pages you had on your website? Nice! It is a nice case, because I would thought that Google would understand the content of the page whole page, but in this case looks like an article with no direct relation to your business got benefited from it. dontputnamehere ✍️ Yeah, pretty much. Our service page have good page authority due to other link building we had done – But the article is what super charged the domain authority. The context of the content is within out line of work. We were asked the same questions 10 times a day, so we addressed it with content.
We_Dont_Like_You Please answer this: What is the strategy behind using both grey text and black text. Is it as logical as, the grey text is less important than the black text, which stands out more? Have you split tested this, or how do you, or don't you , know this is optimal .. over just having all grey or all black text.
dontputnamehere ✍️ I just think it looks better when headlines are big and bold. I sometimes bolden specific keywords throughout the body text for emphasis but only sometimes.
waldito I did a similar approach for 'best sunglasses for my face' with famous people photos as examples and a photo uploader where you could try different models as a little game. Interfaces that have a little invitation to 'play' are the best engagements. OP,
Sitting this high up on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) has generated us 270K a year consistently 2 years later.
How?
dontputnamehere ✍️ Yeah man I like that! It's interactive. How did it work for you?? We rank 1-5 for a whole bunch of industry related keywords that have 300 – 1000 searches a month. We've got very well thought our sales cycle that once the lead dings in our HubSpot, we've got sales guys that go out and see them etc.
waldito It was just for spanish searches, so our total traffic was around 60ish visits a day. It was pre GDPR, so everyone and their mother would upload a photo of their real face without thinking too much. We erased the files every 24hs. Conversion was bad, we had a lot of traffic from latin america and payments were super hard to pull off. All in all, for a year and half of free potential customers, almost no conversions. I feel I failed hard at that one, but I did learn a lot on how Google ranks pages and which were the signals we had to work on the hardest.
altamiraweb The Problem is that Google is showing the responses to "how to" questions without need to click the result. I have read that 70% of search end in no click, because of that.
dontputnamehere ✍️ Yeah I get what you mean. We still get plenty of traffic from it so it would be interesting to see what the split of having the info displayed on the SERPs vs not.
