Introduction
12 days after my last article was published on behalf of my first client, referral traffic has increased on their site by 86% and 27.5% of their referral traffic is from my Medium.com and HackerNoon.com articles — ranking #1 out of all their referrals, with the highest number pages/session.
Yesterday, 22.5% of the traffic was from my HackerNoon.com articles, ranking #2 in overall referrals but if you look closely the ranking #1 entry has 100% bounce rate and average session duration of 00:00:00 — while the highest average session duration on the list is 00:13:12 and second highest is 00:04:53 their ‘new users’ ratio combined is 16.67% out of 6 users and my HackerNoon traffic is 66.67% net new users. I achieved stickiness for organic traffic that’s bringing people back — 33.33% of these visits were returning users — as well as genuinely interested unique traffic.
How did I manage to push such organic growth? This article will serve to summarize my tactics so you can reproduce these kinds of results.
A Shill
If you’re reading this as a novel tech organization, individual or brand who’s looking to rank you should visit http://techvoices.club where I offer my services!
A Further Shill
If you’re reading this as a content creator or influencer, you should also head over to http://techvoices.club where you can sign up as a vendor in our community marketplace and offer your services!
Choose Titles Based on Relevant and Popular Keywords
Your article titles will be the primary source of search engine ranking for keywords.
Check out this stickiness over time in the following image! It’s been 12 days and we still have one keyword in top 3, the other two in top 10 — and the ranking’s best values vs present values work out to net equal, proving we’ve achieved stickiness!
What’s this in the next image? More proof from a separate article? While not as impressive as that first image was, and we even dropped out of top 10 for our keyword for a bit.. we’re back, and with a vengeance we’re holding tight at #5 — another 12-day stickiness triumph!
But just when you might have been disappointed at ranking in #5…
Check this next image out! While we again dropped from ranking for two whole days, our marketing efforts prove their effectiveness as we rise to #1 and #2 results for our keywords! It’s a proven fact that the higher you rank on search engines, the more organic and evergreen traffic you’ll receive — and it looks like we’ve mastered that art!
Ok, ok, enough shameless self-plugging… although my shill game is strong!
You can use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to estimate search volumes or getkeyword suggestions based on existing keywords, landing pages or etc. There are some excellent free longtail keyword suggestion tools that you can use to find specific search terms that might be higher volume that you can capitalize on.
Top Lists
‘Top lists’ are searched much more than your average search engine keywords, and your titles should generally follow this internet trend in order to prove more successful. Check out some of these pitched titles for my existing client, and identify the trend:
The Top 5 Overview of The Essential Community Management Intro Course
Top 7 Quintessential Steps to Drive Engagement
Top 6 Out-Of-The-Box Comments on Incentives (as they apply to xyz industry!)
Top 5 Points to Surviving and Thriving with Contests (in xyz industry!)
Top 6 Cornerstone Foundations re: Bounty for Me, Bounty for You, Bounties for the Everyman!
Top 5 Suggestions to Learn and Grow Professionally, Personally and Spiritually
~1000 Words
The average attention span of your readers isn’t incredibly high, so try your best to engage them with useful content and little no no spam, fluff or other low-quality wordage.
The real key here is to add value where you can. Use data to create insight and helpful suggestions, actionable information that your audience can learn and grow from. If you end up saying nothing with your 1000 words, it engages nobody and gets 0 appreciation — if you end up filling 2000 words with too much actionable, informative information you’ll lose the interest of your average reader — or they might not even start!
Backlink High Quality Content
It’s karma — you backlink high quality content, and people will backlink you! The backbone of all search engine functionality is indexing and ranking backlinks. Your readers will also sometimes follow your links — helpful if your content is sponsored! The lesson here is that you get indexed faster and make more of an impact if you directly quote successful and reputable sources.
Use a High Quality Content Platform
Back when I used to blog on my own sites, ranking for anything would take weeks of solid effort and manual backlinking from high DA and PA (domain authority and page authority — worth a Google) sites. Now that I’m on HackerNoon.com, my rankings are near immediate and are generally first-page results for non-exact keywords!
Conclusion
It’s within reason that everyone who has something to say can rank on search engines for clearly, concisely and creatively making their point. Go forth, unleash the power of free-ish (or in the case of being sponsored, you can make claims like ‘evergreen! Organic! Not free because it costs good money!) traffic for you, your clients, your loved ones or even your cats — anyone who deserves net new and returning users and views!