3 Simple Steps to Get Your First 10,000 Visitors from Google

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Today’s going to be fun.

I’m going to make a bet with you that if you follow the 3 steps below, and you really follow them, you can get 10,000 visitors from Google.

I promise it won’t be hard, but it will take time.

And if you follow my steps and don’t get the results, hit me up and I will personally help you with your marketing.

All I ask is you do it for 3 months straight. You may not get to 10,000 visitors from Google in 3 months as some niches are really tiny, but most of you should get there or be well on your way.

Again, if you prove to me that you followed everything below and you don’t achieve the results, you can get in touch and I will personally help you with your marketing for free.

Ready?

Step #1: Finding the right keywords

If you pick the wrong keywords, you’ll find yourself with little to no traffic and, even worse, you’ll find yourself with little to no sales.

So, before we get you on your way to more search traffic, let’s find you the right keywords.

I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in your competitor’s domain name.

Now, I want you to click on the “Keywords” navigational option in the sidebar.

This report will show you all of the keywords that your competition is ranking for.

If you don’t see a list of thousands of keywords, that means you didn’t type in a big enough competitor. And if you don’t know who a big competitor is, just do a Google search for any major term related to your industry. The sites at the top are your major competitors.

I want you to go through the list of keywords and look for all of the keywords that are related to your business and have an SEO Difficulty (SD) score of 40 or less. The higher the number, the harder the keyword is to rank for. The lower the number, the easier it is to rank for.

In addition to an SD score of 40 or lower, I want you to look for keywords that have a volume of 500 or more.

Volume means the number of people that search for the keyword on a monthly basis. The higher the number, the more potential visitors that term will drive once you rank for it.

Next up, I want you to click on “Top Pages” in the navigation.

This will bring you to a report that looks like this:

This report shows you the most popular pages on your competitor’s site.

Now, under the Est. Visits (Estimated Visits) column, I want you to click on “view all” for the first few results.

Every time you do that it shows you all of the keywords that drive traffic to that page.

Just like you did with the keywords report, I want you to look at the keywords that have an SD of 40 or lower and a volume of 500 or more.

The one difference though, is that I want you to check out some of the URLs on the Top Pages report.

Click on over to the site so you can see the type of content they are writing. This is important because it will give you an idea of the types of content that Google likes to rank.

When you create similar pages (I will teach you how to do this shortly), it will allow you to get similar results to your competition over time.

Now that you have a handful of keywords, I want you to expand the list and find other related keywords.

In the navigation menu, click on “Keyword Ideas.”

When you type in one of the keywords you are thinking of going after in this report, it will give you a big list of other similar keywords.

This is important because it will show you all of the closely related terms.

For example, let’s say you came up with a list of keywords of a handful of keywords, such as:

1. Dog food
2. Cat food
3. Dog bed
4. How to clean your cat
5. What do birds eat

You can’t just take all of those keywords and write one article and shove all the keywords in because they aren’t similar to each other. Someone looking for “dog beds” is probably not interested in reading about what birds eat.

So by typing in a keyword into the Keyword Ideas report, it will show you all of the other similar keywords that you can include in a single article.

When you are on the Keyword Ideas report you’ll notice some tabs: Suggestions, Related, Questions, Prepositions, and Comparisons.

I want you to go through each of those tabs. They will show you a different group of similar keywords that you may be able to include in your article (we will go over how to write the article in step 2).

Just take a look at the Questions tab:

You can see the keywords are drastically different than the Related tab:

Again, you’ll want to look for all keywords that have an SD score of 40 or lower. But this report looks for keywords that have a volume above 200.

I know 200 may seem like a small number, but if you find 100 good keywords that all have a volume of 200 or more, that adds up to 20,000 potential visitors per month. Or better yet, 240,000 per year.

Now it’s rare that you are going to get all of those people to come to your site, but you can get a portion of them. Even 10% would add up… especially if you did this with a handful of articles.

Your goal should be to have a list of at least 100 keywords that are very similar. You’ll want to do this at least five times. For example, remember that list of five keywords I mentioned above wasn’t too similar to each other…

1. Dog food
2. Cat food
3. Dog bed
4. How to clean your cat
5. What do birds eat

You’ll want to make sure that for each main keyword you use the Keyword Ideas report to find another 100 that can accompany each keyword.

Step #2: Write content

At this point, you should have a list of keywords. If your list of keywords isn’t at least 100 keywords per group, go back to step 1 and keep at it.

It’s not that hard to get to 100 similar keywords that you can include in one article. It just takes some time to continually search and find them.

In general, as a rule of thumb, I can find 100 keywords in less than 8 minutes. It may take you a bit longer than me at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’ll be easy.

With your newly found keywords, I want you to write an article.

All you have to do is follow this tutorial step-by-step to write your first article.

Or, if you prefer a video tutorial, watch this:

As for your keywords, naturally place them into the article when it makes sense.

What you’ll quickly learn is that you probably won’t be able to “naturally” include all 100 keywords within your article. And that’s fine.

The last thing you want to do is stuff in keywords because you aren’t writing this article for just search engines, you are writing it for people… and the secondary benefit is that search engines will rank it because it contains the right keywords.

Before you make your article live on your site, I want you to keep a few things in mind:

1. Keep your URLs short – Google prefers shorter URLs.
2. Include your main keyword in your headline – by having your main keyword in your headline, you’ll be more likely to rank higher.
3. Include your three main keywords in your meta tags – whether it is your title tag or meta description, include at least three main keywords in them. You won’t fit as many in your title tag, and that’s fine, but you should be able to within your meta description tag.

There are a lot of other things you can do to optimize your articles for SEO, but my goal is to keep this simple. Again, if you just follow these three steps, you’ll hit the 10,000-visitor mark.

So, for now, let’s just keep things simple and once you hit your goal, then you can get into the advanced stuff.

Step #3: Promoting your content

Writing content is only half the battle. Even if you include the right keywords in your article, if you don’t promote, it’s unlikely that it would be read or rank on Google.

So how do you make sure your content is read and ranks well?

Well, first you need to get social shares, and second, you need to get backlinks.

Yes, search engines don’t necessarily rank pages higher when they get more Facebook shares or tweets, but the more eyeballs that see your page the more likely you are to get backlinks.

And the more backlinks you get, generally, the higher you will rank.

So here’s how you get social shares…

First, I want you to go to Twitter and search for keywords related to your article.

As you scroll down, you’ll see thousands of people tweeting about stuff related to your keywords. Some of them will just be general updates but look for the members sharing articles.

And…

Now what I want you to do is click on their profile and see if they mention their contact information or their website. If they mention their email you are good to go. If they mention their website, head to it, and try to find their contact information.

You won’t be able to find everyone’s contact information, but for the people you do, I want you to send them this email:

Subject: [insert the keyword you searched for on Twitter]

Hey [insert their first name],

I saw that you tweeted out [insert the title of the article they tweeted]. I actually have an article that I recently released on that subject.

But mine covers [talk about what your article covers and how it is unique].

[insert link to your article]

If you like it, feel free to share it.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

PS: Let me know if you want me to share anything for you on Twitter or any other social network.

What you’ll find is a large percentage of the people will be willing to share your content because they already are sharing related content and, of course, you offered to share their content, which helps out too.

If you send out 30 to 40 emails like this, you’ll start getting traction on the social web.

Now that you have social shares, it’s time to build backlinks. Instead of giving you tons of link building methods as there are many that work, I am just going to start you off with one that works very well.

I want you to head back to the Keyword Ideas report on Ubersuggest.

Once you get there, type in some of the keywords that you are trying to go after.

On the right side of the report, you’ll see a list of sites that rank and the number of backlinks that each of the ranking URLs has.

Click on the “Links” number. For each result, it will take you to the Backlinks report, which looks something like this:

This will give you a list of all the sites linking to your competitor’s article.

I want you to go to each of those URLs, find the site owner’s contact information, and shoot them an email that looks like this:

Subject: [name of their website]

Hey [insert their name],

I noticed something off with your website.

You linked to [insert your competitor that they linked to] on this page [insert the page on their site that they are linking to them from].

Now you may not see anything wrong with that, but the article you linked to isn’t helping out your website readers that much because it doesn’t cover:

[insert a few bullet points on how your article is better and different]

You should check out [insert your article] because it will provide a better experience for your readers.

If you enjoyed it, feel free to link to it.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

PS: If I can ever do anything to help you out, please let me know.

I want you to send out 100 of those emails for each article you write.

Conclusion

Yes, it takes work to get 10,000 visitors but once you do it you’ll continually generate traffic and, more importantly, sales.

To achieve 10,000 visitors, I want you to do the steps above five times. In other words, you will be writing five pieces of new content following the steps above.

It’s actually not that bad because you can just do 1 a week. So, within 5 weeks you would have done your job.

So, are you going to accept the challenge? If you do everything and don’t see the results over time, you can hit me up and I’ll help.

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Build a Better Brand: Why Should I Choose You?

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As a member of the leadership team and Executive Strategist here at Waypost, I do a lot of the Strategy and Discovery work. Much of my role consists of figuring out how to make those meaningful connections between my client’s business and their target consumer. We want to build a foundation that will lead to mutually beneficial relationships, and a key element of this work is to help my clients develop a brand that will speak in meaningful ways to those prospects who will be most helped by their product or service.

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SEO Strategy

The Biggest SEO Trend You’re Ignoring

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The screenshot above is my Google traffic over the last 12 months.

As you can see, my traffic is growing. And there are many reasons for that, but there is one trend that’s really caused the majority of my SEO growth.

You might be thinking it is Ubersuggest because it makes up 22.4% of my traffic now. But Ubersuggest has been integrated into NeilPatel.com for years, so that’s not it.

Sure, that is responsible for some of my growth, but it’s not responsible for it skyrocketing like it has been.

So, what do you think it is?

Well, I’ll give you a hint…

My traffic per region

Let’s look at my SEO traffic in a few different regions.

Here’s my traffic in the United States over the last 12 months:

Now here’s my traffic in the United Kingdom:

And here are the stats for Canada:

And Australia:

You can see that they have all increased, but not enough to cause the big spikes.

Now let’s look at some of the international markets we have been focusing on over the last few years.

Here’s Spain:

Here’s India:

And here is the first international market we expanded to, Brazil.

As you can see, the international markets are growing at a much faster pace, especially Brazil. But that is because we have been focusing on our SEO in Brazil more than any other country (outside of our main English markets).

Why you may ask?

Because a Google employee told me to

The most vital SEO lesson I learned came from a friend at Google, but they didn’t tell me anything that was really a secret…

They told me that the majority of the searches on the web aren’t done in English, they are done in other languages.

And in the English markets, everyone is competing, which means tons of sites and content from Google to choose from when it comes to determining which site should rank number 1 for any given keyword.

But the international markets are the opposite. There is a lot of demand but not enough sites for Google to choose from when it comes to rankings.

So even though there are tons of algorithm updates and SEO is becoming more difficult, it isn’t always the case with many international markets.

And the graphs above show it. As you can see, I’m getting huge traffic growth in those regions.

So, what should you do? Especially if you are starting off and don’t have a big budget or any budget for that matter…

Follow Amazon

Wherever you see big corporations like Amazon investing, it means there is money to be made in those regions.

Amazon has invested billions into regions like India:

• Amazon originally decided to take a long view on India and invest 2 billion dollars.
• Then they decided 2 billion wasn’t enough so they increased it to 5 billion.
• And then they decided to add in another 2 billion dollars.
• Amazon is investing a billion dollars to digitize small and medium businesses.

It’s safe to say over the years Amazon will pour in well over $10 billion into India.

That’s a big bet for someone to make. And you can assume it’s a calculated bet because they think there is much more money to be made.

And it’s not just India…

Amazon is investing $236 million into Brazil to boost up their cloud infrastructure. And they’ve invested over $2.26 billion dollars in France. They are pretty much going after the whole world.

As you can see from the graph, Germany is its second-biggest market and Japan is also up there. But what’s interesting is the green bar as that represents the “rest of the world” and that green bar has been growing at a fast pace.

Now, I get that none of us are Amazon and we don’t have huge budgets, so I wanted to take a minute and break down how you can do this on a global scale without breaking the bank.

International SEO on a budget

When I first started to expand internationally, my business was much smaller and we didn’t have much money, if any, to spend on international SEO.

Yes, I am an SEO, so you would think that it makes it easier, but not really because the only language I am fluent in is English.

And if you fast forward to today, I’m still only fluent in English, but we have 7 offices around the world.

And we did it without laying out any of our own money. Yes, it did take time and it will for you too, but that’s the only way to do it when you are starting off and are small.

So how did we expand internationally without spending upfront?

We partnered with locals.

Why not find people in these regions who speak English as well as the local language of the country you are trying to expand to?

There are so many people without jobs, you’ll be shocked by how many people will be open to a partnership. All you have to do is look at Facebook groups and forums to find people in your space who live overseas.

Here’s how I structure each partnership:

• I have the person, or a group of people, translate my content to that region’s language.
• I have them read my English blog posts so they can learn SEO (if they don’t already know it… nowadays I look for people who already know SEO as I have been doing this long enough and can spend some money).
• In exchange for them growing my traffic in that region, I give them a portion of the profits I make within that region. You can structure where you give them anywhere from 10% to 30%. You don’t want to go too low on the profit-sharing as you want them to work hard, but you also don’t want to go too high where you are giving away everything.
• They put in the work each day, and they have 3 months to show some traction, and within 6 months they should have significant growth. Keep in mind it is less competitive, so it is easier to get results. You can also work with them on creating goals and milestones.
• If they don’t show results, the partnership ends, and I don’t have to give them anything. If they show results, we keep pushing forward.

Now that we’ve covered structuring your international SEO expansion, let’s go over how you do it.

International SEO

I’ve written a handful of blog posts that break down the steps on growing your traffic in new languages and countries, but before I share them, I wanted to break down the 2 biggest lessons I learned:

1. Transcribe the content, not translate – when you work with a partner overseas, they may think you want your content translated or that you want content written in their language just like how people would write the content in the US. That won’t work because cultures are different and keywords are different, so transcribe the content and adjust it to each country.
2. You want a partner that lives in that country – if you expand into a country where you don’t have a partner on the ground you won’t see great results. By having people on the ground, you can more easily build up your brand, which has a big impact on rankings.

Here are some resources that will show you how to do international SEO:

• This post will break down how to create a global SEO strategy.
• And follow this to setup SEO correctly for different languages and countries. Keep in mind that Google doesn’t penalize for duplicate content, so don’t worry about having similar content or the same content for different regions.
• Here’s how to expand internationally profitably.
• This will teach you the fundamentals of reaching a global audience.

Funny enough, one of the reasons I created Ubersuggest was to build a tool that would help my team and I expand internationally.

Here’s a feature in Ubersuggest that will help you, that most people don’t know about.

So head over to Ubersuggest and type in a competitor that you know is big and has a global presence.

I want you to click on the “Top Pages” navigational option in the sidebar.

This shows you all of the top pages that your competitors have.

But don’t focus on those results. I want you to look at the regions that make up some of your competitions’ traffic… you’ll see that number next to each flag.

Click on one of the regions that you are considering expanding into. You’ll now see the results adjusted.

As you can see from the screenshot above, those are all of the pages on my site that are really popular in Brazil.

Now, I want you to click on “view all” under “Est. Visits” as that will show you all of the keywords that drive traffic to that page.

This will provide you with a laundry list of international keywords that you can give to your team so they can start creating content to go after them.

I also want you to click on “view all” under “Backlinks” as this will show you who links to your competition. You can then create a list of sites to reach out to so you can get them to link to you.

That’s the simple strategy we used to hit it hard in regions like Brazil and what we are also doing in countries like India, Spain, Mexico, France, Germany, and countless other countries.

Conclusion

English is a great language. And I love the United States as well as other English-speaking countries.

But that’s not where the opportunity is. There is more opportunity in global markets, which is why you need to follow the trend of international SEO.

Even if some of these countries don’t have as high of a GDP compared to the United States, it’s fine. Remember there aren’t as many competitors, which means you will have a lot of opportunities to still do really well.

So what region are you going to expand to first?

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4 Google AdWords Strategies For Companies On A Shoestring Budget

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We're going to look at managing Google AdWords, which is an interesting topic since it’s something that's not really talked about a huge amount in the inbound world. It's only really more recently become part of the HubSpot world because in many ways paid advertising is almost seen as the wrong thing to do, right?

It's not very “inbound-y”, as our American cousins would say.

Google

Do Headings Really Impact Rankings?

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They say in SEO you need to use headings.

Those can be H1, H2, or even H3 tags.

But do they really impact your rankings?

Sure, a lot of CMS systems put headings on each of your web pages by default. They do this with the title of the page (or blog post) and sometimes to sections within a page.

But again, the real question is, do they help with rankings?

I decided to run a fun experiment to find out if they really help.

How the experiment worked

Similar to past experiments I ran, I reached out to a portion of my email list to ask if they would like to participate. Just like how I did with the one on blog comment links and this one on link building.

4,104 of you responded wanting to participate. But unlike previous experiments, we only ran this one on websites that generated at least 100,000 visitors a month from organic search.

We picked larger sites because you can easily tell if a change had an impact on traffic. With smaller sites, external factors can more easily skew results, especially if a site only gets 100 visitors a month. One simple thing like a PR push could cause double the visitors in that case.

We also removed sites with seasonality and sites that weren’t at least 3 years old. Again, we just wanted to decrease anything skewing the results.

For example, with young sites, they tend to grow faster in organic traffic versus established sites… even when they do less SEO work because they are starting from a smaller base.

In the end, 61 sites met our requirements. It wasn’t a big number, but each site on average has 426 pages.

Now with a traditional A/B test, you would show 50% of your visitors one version and the other half a different version. But when it comes to SEO, you have to make a change and once Google indexes the change you have to compare the results to the previous 30 days.

So, with each site, we ran numerous tests at the same time to see the impact of headings. With each site, we took their web pages and split them up in 4 groups:

• Control group – we left these pages unmodified. Whether they used headings or not, we wanted to see what happened to their organic traffic over time as it would give us another baseline to compare the results.
• Headings – with this group, we used H1 tags for the title of the page, H2 tags for the subsections of the page, and even H3 and H4 tags if the subsections had subsections.
• Using normal <p> text – with all of the pages in this group, we made sure they were not using headings. In addition to that, we made sure all of the font sizes were the same size.
• Using normal <p> text and adjusting font sizes – with this group, we didn’t use headings. Instead, we made sure different parts of the text were in different font sizes. For example, the title of the page was the largest font size.

Before we dive into the results, the last thing to note is the experiment ran for 90 days. Even though we were comparing results of the pages we made the changes to using data from 30 days prior and 30 days after, keep in mind Google has to index the change, so you have to account for that as well.

Control group

The control group saw an increase in traffic of 2.89%.

As I mentioned above, no changes were made to the control group. But it shows that they naturally grew in their rankings and search traffic over time.

This wasn’t much of a shocker either as 2.89% isn’t a large jump.

Headings

Now when I saw the results of the group that was using headings, the results were pretty much what I expected…

As you can see from the graph above, the before and after results weren’t much of a change when you compare it to the control group. Instead of a 2.89% gain, they had a 2.72% gain.

Keep in mind some of the pages in the control group were naturally using headings and some weren’t. Again, in that group, we made no changes.

But now as we dive into the next two experiments, you’ll see that the data gets interesting.

Using normal <p> text

What was interesting about this group is that no headings were used. And on top of that, we made sure all of the font sizes on these pages were exactly the same size.

What we saw was a decrease in traffic of 3.53%.

That doesn’t seem like a big swing, but when you compare it to the control group that’s a difference of 6.42%.

Now I wanted to see if the drop in traffic was due to the use of headings or usability. Because you have to keep in mind that when you make all of the text on the page the same size it impacts usability as well.

It makes the page less readable. And we saw that as the average time on page dropped by 12%. As for the bounce rate, we didn’t see much of a change.

Using normal <p> text and adjusting font sizes

This group didn’t use any headings but they did use different font sizes on the page to keep the pages usable (readable).

The graph shows that this group saw an increase in traffic of 2.85%.

Although headings may not be the biggest SEO factor, it does seem usability is.

When font sizes on a page are larger, it helps tell users and potentially search engines what part of a page and even which keywords are more important.

Conclusion

When you compare all 4 groups, the control had the largest gains. But it was insignificant, and you have to keep in mind that a lot of the pages in the control group also use headings. That group just had no changes.

From what the data shows, it doesn’t look like headings have a big impact on rankings.

Maybe if I ran the experiment longer the data would have shown otherwise, but my hunch tells me the data would be similar.

One thing we didn’t try was removing headings from all pages of a site or adding headings to all pages of a site that didn’t have any in the first place. If I were to re-run the experiment I would add in these 2 tests.

From what the data shows, Google does care about usability. Having different font sizes on a page helps tell the reader which elements are more important than others. It also makes the page easier to read.

Whether you make certain elements or words on the page stand out through large font sizes or headings, it’s clear that it is a good practice.

Now if I were you, I would still use headings because it can be useful for accessibility software that helps users navigate a page. Plus, it can potentially help with other search engines like Bing.

Plus with SEO, you aren’t going to see massive gains from one single tactic like you used to be able to. It’s about doing every little thing right. That’s why I recommend you run your site through this audit and fix every error.

So, do you use headings on your site?

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