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SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

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Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#51

Post by duxup »

tilolebo wrote: post #12

> The main issue was that the writers weren’t SEO specialists: they knew how to write good content, but good content is NOT always the same as SEO content. > The main difference between SEO content and generic content is that the first is written with user search intent in mind. You need to keep in mind what the Googler is looking for when they search for any given keyword. Then, you create content based on that inte…

I feel like I want to blame that for so many landing and home pages that just I can't figure out what they do.

But then again I have the same problem with most open source projects too... probabbly not just SEO at play.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#52

Post by duxup »

dhruvkar wrote: post #4

>> Tallyfy, a SaaS startup based in St. Louis Ironically, I'm based in St. Louis, looking for business automation software for my company based in St. Louis and the only reason I know Tallyfy exists is because of this HN article.

I live in the Twin Cities and I'll be at a meetup and I STILL find out about places and products

"Wait that ... is made here?"

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#53

Post by codingdave »

Keep in mind that this is posted on the site of an organization that provides SEO services.

In my experience, the SEO game is a waste of time if you are looking for long-term traffic. Not that it doesn't work in the short-term - it does. And there are good practices in how to structure your pages, and making sure they perform well on multiple devices.

But all of my personal and work-related sites have gotten their long-term traffic by delivering a good product, and having our customers speak well of us. Then people search for us, and when they find and go to our page, our rankings go up. You end up in a positive feedback loop due to the quality of your content and your product.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#54

Post by 1123581321 »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #31
noelceta wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the case, actually. Your content should be based on the intent of the search. For example, if someone's Googling "how to improve a process," they're looking for practical advice on improving processes. They're NOT looking for "benefits of process improvement," "why you should improve your processes," etc. Sure, you can write the BEST article on one of these topics, but it's not going to rank because that's…

Some of the best content isn't searched for by anyone at all before it was written, though. In the extreme case, consider the Harry Potter series—fantastic content, but it would have been horrible SEO content when it was written.

Fiction sites typically use additional descriptions (story categories, genre, etc.), words that don’t appear in the story, to help it rank. This happens independently of the creative writing process.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#55

Post by noelceta »

codingdave wrote: post #53

Keep in mind that this is posted on the site of an organization that provides SEO services. In my experience, the SEO game is a waste of time if you are looking for long-term traffic. Not that it doesn't work in the short-term - it does. And there are good practices in how to structure your pages, and making sure they perform well on multiple devices. But all of my personal and work-related sites have gotten their lo…

Yep, a good product / service and happy customers can take you a looooong way. If your product sucks, no traffic in the world is going to make it work.

But that doesn't mean that SEO is useless. We might be biased, but there are a ton of benefits - traffic, leads, brand awareness, etc.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#56

Post by pier25 »

lhuser123 wrote: post #18
PaulRobinson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but interestingly (to me, at least), Google have modified their search engine crawler over many, many iterations so that what it values is the same as what a user would value. When people would keyword stuff, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working. When people would work on backlink farms, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working. When price comparison search e…

You kind of describe the reason I can’t get rid of Google. Many people keep saying that DuckDuckGo is good enough. But no matter how hard I try use it for everything, always end up googling a few questions. Many times, Google knows what I’m looking for better than myself.

I agree which is why I switched to Startpage and enjoy Google results without privacy concerns:

https://www.startpage.com/

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#57

Post by throwawaypa123 »

lxcfan wrote: post #14
diminish wrote: post #2

> done right, SEO can be a game-changer... SEO is still one of the few free ways to get customers. Any ideas how to best leverage it for startups?

I do SEO work for a large (DJIA component) tech company, so I'm pretty far removed from startup-land, but I'll still share the number one piece of advice I give out internally: Write high-quality content about topics that people are searching for. Simple? Yes. But it still seems so hard to get people to do it. Everyone would rather talk about page load time and HTML markup and structure and meta tags and exactly how…

Writing good content is hard. If a writer could do it, they are rarely going to be writing it to sell. So gaming the system and writing average content (much easier to produce) and gaming the system is the best way to go.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#58

Post by dang »

finger wrote: post #50

Small nitpick but title says 0 to 200k, and 3 paragrafs down from the headline it says ~8.000 to 200.000: > which is why we created this guide - a complete step-by-step SEO case study on how we took Tallyfy, a SaaS process management software, from ~8,000 monthly traffic to about 200,000 in less than 2 years. I imagine there is a big difference between starting from 0 and from an already established baseline.

Ok, we've added 8k to the lower bound in the title above. Thanks!

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#59

Post by at-fates-hands »

tilolebo wrote: post #12

> The main issue was that the writers weren’t SEO specialists: they knew how to write good content, but good content is NOT always the same as SEO content. > The main difference between SEO content and generic content is that the first is written with user search intent in mind. You need to keep in mind what the Googler is looking for when they search for any given keyword. Then, you create content based on that inte…

>Isn't it sad that nowadays you don't create content for the users but for a search engine crawler...

So true. I recently had a tree company contact me about their poor results in Google and the amount they were paying a marketing company who were doing videos and other monthly content for them, but nothing was moving the needle.

The amount of content on a given subject is also just as powerful with Google as the type of content you're putting on your site. I had a professional writer put together a half dozen pages on a single topic, then put those in a bullet list on the front page in a sort of blog-like structure without actually calling it a "blog" or "journal" or "news" section. Just informative articles, all on the same subject running a few paragraphs, optimized for SEO.

Within a month, traffic had spiked (doubled and then some once all the pages were indexed) and the amount of leads coming off the site increased dramatically. it was obvious Google was giving precedent to our site because we had more "relevant" material on this particular subject (tree trimming) than their competitors.

It just reinforced the idea that content is still king.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#60

Post by gwbas1c »

wackget wrote: post #19

Are they really trying to say that SEO was the sole reason that the organic traffic grew so much? That is ludicrous. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that the service itself grew in popularity, or relevancy, or reputation, etc.? I'm convinced SEO is modern-day snake oil. If you have a useful website/service with well-written content then the traffic will come to you. The idea of trying to "SEO" a useless…

It's very easy to know how people came to your site. If they came from a Google search, you can track that and use that data to validate if SEO is working or not.
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