Feeling overwhelmed by the infinite options for driving traffic to your website? You’re not alone.
This article doesn’t list every traffic strategy under the sun.
Instead, it lists the tactics we use at Ahrefs. These are tactics that have helped us grow our revenue by +65% year over year.
In other words, they’re proven to work.
1. Target topics with search traffic potential
The Ahrefs blog gets over ~230,000 organic visitors per month:
Besides word of mouth, this is our second best marketing channel, sending us hundreds of new users every month.
Without a doubt, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to achieve consistent, long-term results. For as long as you rank highly in Google, you’ll be able to generate passive organic traffic to your site.
To do this, you need to write about topics people are searching for. In other words: topics with search traffic potential.
Here are two quick ways to get started.
A. Find high-volume, low-competition keywords
Enter one (or a few) relevant words or phrases into Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, then choose one of the keywords ideas reports to see hundreds or thousands of ideas.
Filter this list by two metrics:
- Search volume—the overall search demand for this keyword, or how many times this keyword is searched for in Google each month, in a specific country;
- Keyword Difficulty—the ranking difficulty of a keyword, represented as a numerical value between zero and a hundred.
This gives you a manageable list of low-competition topics with decent search volumes.
For more ideas, play around with the filters until you get a list you’re satisfied with.
IMPORTANT. Filtering for Keyword Difficulty (KD) only gives a rough sense of difficulty. You should always analyze the search results manually to judge real-world difficulty and search intent before targeting a keyword.
But don’t stop there. Further prioritize your list of topics by focusing on those with high business value (i.e., the topics where your product or service is crucial for solving a particular problem).
In the end, traffic is a vanity metric. There is no point in driving a lot of traffic to your site unless that traffic somehow translates into revenue.
This is the simple scale we use at Ahrefs to determine the business value of topics:
- 3: our product is an irreplaceable solution for the problem;
- 2: our product helps quite a bit, but it’s not essential to solving the problem;
- 1: our product can only be mentioned fleetingly;
- 0: there’s absolutely no way to mention our product.
The very best topics strike a balance between high traffic potential, low competition, and high business value.
B. Use the Content Explorer ‘hack’
Content Explorer is a searchable database of over a billion web pages.
To find low-hanging content ideas that are easy to rank for, search for a broad topic and apply two filters:
- Referring domains < 5
- Organic traffic filter > 1,000
This will give you a list of relevant pages that get lots of organic traffic while having few or no backlinks.
Continue Reading at Ahrefs Blog