How to make a New Website to 100,000+ Organic Visits Per Month Part-1

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This is a case study on how I built a website that receives over 100,000 visitors per month, in less than 1 year, without spending $1 on advertising.
This was done 100% through SEO and content strategy.
Before we dive in, allow me to clarify a few things:
  1. The website reached over 100,000 visitors in 9 months.
  2. This was a new domain, registered just a couple months before launch.
  3. This was done in a language I do not read nor speak (Japanese).
  4. Japanese is a non-roman character language, making it nearly impossible to use most of the popular SEO tools.
The purpose of this post is to walk you through precisely how my team and I reached this milestone, the approach we took, and show how technical SEO combined with content strategy can deliver serious results.

Key Drivers of Traffic Growth

There were a few key elements that led to the widespread and sustained growth of the project, these range from commonsense to technical, but come down to three main focus areas:
  • Math - we took a mathematical approach to designing an evaluation model that would allow us to gauge opportunities based on their potential returns. Ultimately this led to the creation of what we now call our keyword opportunity evaluation, which is a financial model that measures the approximate output (traffic) based on a finite set of inputs, including elements like average DA, number of links / linking domains, age of site, content footprint, etc.
  • Analysis – Using our newly built algorithm we got to testing, creating websites to test content patterns and architecture. We were quick to declare defeat within verticals without traction, and paid close attention to where the traffic was growing the most. The algorithm started to take shape and after roughly 3 months was able to identify within an order of magnitude the amount of traffic we could acquire for a given set of costs.
  • Pumpkin Hacking – This is a term that I came across (thank you Peter Da Vanzo) that seems to describe exactly what we did to continue to grow our traffic by double and even triple digits, month after month. The core concept is simple; focus resources on building what works. What this meant for us was paying attention to the search verticals and content that received the most traffic, most comments, most social shares, and being quick to cut the cord on traffic that didn’t perform.

First Month After Launch

Traffic January 2012
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With zero promotion and no advertising, we had a decent first month, bringing in over 2,000 visitors. This was mostly due to our pre-launch strategy – which I’ll detail further later in the post.

Nine Months After Launch

First Month 100000 Visits
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After only 9 months we were 3 months ahead of schedule to pass 100,000 visitors with no signs of slowing down.



Traffic Sources

Traffic Sources September 2012
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As you can see in the screenshot above, organic search drives the most significant portion of our traffic. Referral traffic is almost entirely from blogs and industry publications, and campaigns is representative of the ads that we place, only on our website, to test different language and call to actions to drive conversions.

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