3 million visits per month monetized with Adsense thanks to Inbound SEO - case study

In my opinion (and these are words I'm putting in my mouth, not someone else's): traffic is one of today's most important positioning factors. And not because that's what today's post is about, but because I've observed it on numerous occasions and experiences with websites.

And speaking of today's article... Here's a webmaster I was particularly excited to bring along: "Aro", formerly a Twitter avatar who caught my eye for his fun and funny (and not wild and destructive as I've seen other times) way of "trolling" a bit, within the community.

We met at the first "Cañas" SEO meeting we organized a few weeks ago in Madrid and, from that moment on, we had a very good connection. I told him he physically resembled "one of my best friends" (he's a perfect match, even in the way he talks) and after hearing how he used to hit Google Adsense niches, the mix was ready, hahaha :

I had to sign an article in Blogger3cero.

While I'm still at full speed with the membership site... I'll leave you with this.

Hey, what's up reader, what's up reader? Sorry, Dean, I had to do it. I'll introduce myself very quickly so you can find me, because I assume you're here to read a nice article on SEO and not for me to tell you my life story, right? Amos pallá:

I am a Alfonso Ojeda - although Dean wants me to introduce myself as Aro, because I used that nickname a while back on Twitter... (I didn't listen). I'm a freelance SEO consultant, nichero AdSense and you can see me on Twitter sell smokeor recently on my blog : ciberseo.com

Well, when Dean asked me to come on the blog, it was to tell the success story of a website which, for six years, has been the leader in its sector, moving an average of over 150,000 visits per day (over 3 million visits per month) and which, in AdSense, makes a lot of money, despite being in a niche market with a very low RPM.

Here's the creature... A capture from October of this year. 3.8 million visits

But don't think I'm rolling in dough, this site is a project formed by several people (greetings M.A., I know you're reading this), I'm in charge of the SEO part, but there's a team behind it. The closest I've ever come to a Mustang was trying to get the keys to Dean's car.

It's really the closest you can get to buying a Mustang...

Alongside this site, some time later I set up other projects that have also achieved a good volume of traffic and have positioned themselves using some strategies that may be useful to you.

Although now I am focusing on other other types of website (Layer 2, less traffic, higher RPM).

I think it'll be more interesting if I talk not only about this first site (success story) but also about other sites I've set up in the same style (less volume, around 450,000 visits per month) and which in some cases have lost visibility, because SEO is not a mathematical disciplineWhat works for you in one site may not even tickle Google in another.

And above all, if I show you the mistakes I've made or the things I'd do today more effectively, it can help you avoid making the same mistakes.

So, if I have to tell you about my my successes and failuresI will bring you my my successes and failures and let everyone draw their own conclusions.

Keys to a successful monster (and )

To be honest, my knowledge at the time wasn't even 0.000001 % of what I know today. If I had to do these projects all over again, I'd would spend my time and money on something else.

The "technique" that worked for me at the time was to create a content that is far superior to that of the competition and to send it traffic from Facebook.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, that's just a summary, and today if you want to use this system, you can't stop thereSo I'm going to structure each of the relevant aspects into several sections, highlighting the mistakes made and what should be added today in each of them.

Unbeatable content

Yes, I'm also a fan of the long tail and long content, but I just had to mess with Dean a bit and give him that caricature.

I'm not one of those people who think content is king, blah, blah, blah. But if you create content that eats the competition, you're more likely to come out on top.

What do I mean by unbeatable? It has to be great in Google's eyes and in the user's eyes, in that order.

You should ALWAYS analyze your competitorsWhat they offer and how they do it, to understand what Google wants to display in its results in response to a particular query. And most importantly: correctly satisfy the search intention.

For example, on one of these sites, all keywords display an image excerpt: this can be explained by the fact that many users perform a search and then click on the "Images" tab. In this case, you must so focus your efforts on positioning images with a call to action to generate traffic from Google Images .

You can also try to capture traffic with Pinterest (you'd be surprised what you can get).

A big blunder I made at

at the time:
I tried to rank for a keyword that had about 300,000 monthly searches, I did some brutal content, but I never got past position #11, do you know why?

The intention of this search was to find a certain answer that we couldn't develop because of technical problems, so we tried to "fool" Google by faking it... And... you can fool Google, but not the user.

So when they got to the landing page and saw that what we were offering wasn't what they expected to find, they went back. The website pogo stick sent us back to the second page forever.

Always check the type of results Google offers for each search intent and orient your content to meet that intent. Nowadays, it seems basic to do this, but I know it's a common mistake - I've seen it in clients' websites, in people's websites just starting out, etc...

Analyze and highlight common patterns:

• Are the results listed? "Top 10 such..."
• Where are these keywords being searched for? If your traffic has to come from Mexico, don't value the SERPS for Spain, you idiot.
• Do you have desktop traffic, mobile traffic? It's more important than it seems.
• Do your competitors have videos, images or downloadable content?

And what I learned from it:

If you see that in the SERPS, the first results are video extracts, and several video results after that... what the hell are you doing trying to rank a 5,000-word article? Create a video, that's what people expect to find. Especially in the "How to" section.

Not analyzing and understanding the SERPS is a very common failure among novices, and one of the most important, because you may think you're rowing forward when in reality you're burying yourself.

REMINDER

(keywords don't work anymore, when you plan a content search, you have to focus on search intent). #palabritadegurú
Once we're sure our content is better and satisfies search intent, let's give it somelove

Identity disorder and Facebook

I've always loved work on my content (although now, in the niches, I first build the foundations... pim pam and then I'll optimize and polish it when I start ranking. The theory of more to less is the best way to work for me).

Back in the day, I was spending too much time preparing content that I didn't know would work. So keep that in mind, okay?

The return on investment you need to get for the content should compensate for the resources you spend on creating it. Blogger3cero talked about this topic recently.

While we already had excellent Philippine content, thesocial engineering has arrived . I call it multiple identity disorder, because you end up thinking you're the people you pretend to be. Let's assume the industry is music, shall we? I'll tell you what I used to do:

Every day, I created and managed different Facebook accounts (at the time, Facebook was the most active social network, nothing to do with what it is today); these profiles were based on the website's target audience, in the case of this example, people from Spain, aged between 25 and 45, music lovers and festival-goers. Ok...

I created profiles and "fed" them so that they looked credible, I added a few photos of my entourage, a credible random name...

I mean to say: María López Rodríguez is a typical profile of a girl who loves U2, goes to Mulafest, is from Vigo and likes hiking.... It could be true, couldn't it?

Once these profiles were ready, I joined them in the various themed Facebook groups: music, concerts, festivals, etc... And I began to be an active member of each community... Do you follow me where I go?

Every day, using different accounts and different groups, during the peak hours that I had studied perfectly, I shared, commented and interacted with my army of fake accounts. This content started to go viral within the communities and the traffic arrived. My record is 25,000 hits on Facebook in one day with this technique.

Are you telling me that traffic determines rankings?

I'm not claiming it as such at the moment, but I was sending Google signals of content that responded well on the networks, and once the fuse was lit, it would turn and the traffic would keep coming in recurrently for days.

The traffic that came in was quality, it generated time spent on the page, internal navigation, recurring visitors and at the same time this URL was shared on Twitter, Google+ etc., all these signals are positive for Google...

From time to time, I put a little money into the promotion of these publicationsThis increased the traffic that came from different channels, from the promoted publication and from what I moved in the groups or shared on the respective walls of the fake profiles.

And what would I do now?

I have so devoted the time it took me to create this whole network to other things and I put money directly into promoting the publications.

Firstly, because Facebook as such does not work this way anymore; then because if you segment well, you can get a lot of visits at a low CPC. And above all, becauseyou have to know how to value the return on investment. If an action requires an effort of 10 and yields 2, try to improve this ratio or change your action.

Now, I can get traffic, but I mostly focus on link work, which is always there and if you combine a little bit of everything (less Facebook traffic and more nice links), the result is that you have a much more favorable ROI.

And why not invest that money in links?

Well, that was partly my mistake. Knowing what I know now, I would take advantage of this viralization to justify a relatively intense campaign of linksThese are available both manually (forums, 2.0 blogs, etc.) and on other industry sites.

After all, if you're going to get social traffic for a piece of content, it's only logical that it should be linked to by industry media, isn't it? Well, if you're taking care of the first part, don't be a fool like me, and put the icing on the cake by working on rational, well-done linkbuilding to those URLs.

Google will positively value this traffic / social interaction / links ratio. You will see the success you will get.

Did you come here to talk about Vintage SEO?

You may be thinking... If Facebook doesn't work anymore, why are you counting this?... So let me clarify, the combination:

Unbeatable content + social traffic + links

Heis still as effective as it was years ago, what has changed is the how to get social traffic (with a few exceptions... the manner is... paid). I still use it, but what I don't do is invest all my time in the social engineering part to get free traffic. I just pay.

Let's talk about links

There's a certain almost obsessive habit in the industry of adding the slogan "no links". As if adding links was the solution to everything, or as if creating links was the solution to everything, or as if creating links made you less good in terms of SEO. I don't know, I don't understand this nonsense, links are part of referencing, why refuse them? Imagine a chef who boasts of cooking without salt?

That said, I must admit that the links seemed to me to be something occult, black magic or at least something mysterious and difficult to understand... Especially in the early years, when we read so much gualtrapa fulminating about the dangers of bonding.

Until I met my favorite guru: my friend Víctor Misa, one - FuckingMasterOfTheUniverse - link building.

He's been doing it for many years and if, like me (and many others), you're lucky enough to have him clarify certain doubts, you'll see the world of linkbuilding in a different light (and realize the amount of false information that circulates freely, without any contrast, authority or data to back it up, so the next time someone tells you not to link, ask them to argue or clarify; because as Luis Villanueva says about 90 times in one of his videos, "Without links, you go nowhere".

From then on, in the first few projects, you can imagine the role that links played for me, they were irrelevant. Big mistake. And I'll tell you why.

It is also bad to create links aggressively and without control or criteria (I've done it too, and the results are deadly) than to say "well, I'm dedicated to making good content, which is what Google likes, and I don't need links".

If you think like that, my friend... You'll fall sooner or later, here's an example.

On one of my websites, one of the first I managed to set up and get traffic, I saw that by making good content (and I mean giving more content and better than the rest of the competition) and getting social traffic, I managed to reach the top.

In fact, at this stage, I had the illusory feeling that I knew all the relevant aspects of SEO, I had my formula and it still worked...

• Good page + great content + social traffic = Alfonso, you're the fucking SEO master.
• But... Oh surprise! I had no idea p****.

And this is what few of those who rant against links (I insist, I still don't understand why) forget to say, or don't say because they don't know... (which is a crime).

You can rank without working on links... yes, as long as you're in a low-competition sector, or one with average competition in terms of content and authority.

However, Do you know what happens when you don't work on links and the competition does? This has happened to me on several of my best websites.

Well, other SEOs came in, a lot of them, I had them under control, I knew they were their websites because one of the 10 commandments of every Team Platinero is to do CSI every time a website catches your eye. In fact, the great thing about this online environment is that today I have personal relationships with many of them (I'll never tell you who you are, but back then you screwed me, you bastards xD).

And what happened?

If you can't already imagine it, you still don't know what it's all about (moment of hatred). Well, my websites have gone down, at the same rate that my competitors' websites have gone up and up and up. And to hell with content, social traffic and all that...

WITHOUT LINKS, YOU'LL GET NOWHERE.

Finally, I'm going to tell you about another fundamental element of my positioning strategy. both in the competitive niches and on the clients' websites. And for me, it's one of the most "fun" parts, and above all one of the most rewarding in terms of performance (provided it's done well).

️ The mega secret technique called...

Inbound SEO, the keywords of attraction

I just made up the name... I call it Inbound SEO because one day I attended a conference of marketers who were talking about Inbound Marketing or Attraction Marketing, and how to generate sales. advertising that attracts potential customers, rather than seeking them out.

What does it involve?

I'll give you some examples, but to put us on the ground, we have to think about the how traditional advertising works : it seeks to have the greatest possible impact, with little or no segmentation. For example, a GoPro advertised in a radio spot or TV commercial.

This product will be seen by you, your grandmother, your cousin and the girl next door, almost collaterally and without you paying much attention, as your brain goes into "advertising bombardment" mode and shuts down. How likely is it that someone will pay attention to this ad? And of that small percentage... how many will end up buying that GoPro?

This one-way strategy is known as outbound marketing. And it seeks impact through repetition, often using techniques such as audio branding (slogan accompanied by music, or even a melody associated with the brand).

Inbound marketing doesn't seek out the user, but indirectly attracts them. And using GoPro as an example, I'm going to tell you about a real-life case of a successful inbound campaign:

They did a market study to understand who is their ideal customer, his tastes, his hobbies, the moments in his daily life when he can use their product... Well, I don't want to get too theoretical, but that's what we call defining your needs. "buyer persona and marketing people or even copywriters know the importance of creating this profile.

Once this exercise was complete, they focused their campaign on YouTube, creating amazing videos of kids skateboarding or bmx, recording their stunts in close-up. Spectacular editing and editing, which also made it clear that they were using a GoPro to capture their stunts.

Result: sales have exploded among the target audience: young people aged 16 to 30 who love sports and adventure.

I thought it was an interesting idea and recycled it in my fieldwhich is SEO. Today, this "technique" is one of my favorites, and I still apply it to all the websites I create and also to those of my clients, because it can be applied to the strangest sectors you can imagine.

And I'm not going to tell you it's something I invented, not at all, in fact I doesn't even consider it as a "something". but it's an approach that a lot of people don't take and I've proven to more than one and two its effectiveness in super-competitive niches (so much so that even blessed links had no impact on traffic).

Well, man, stop selling us the bike and tell us what it is.

Let's see, let's say I have a website about hair straighteners.

We'd set up the typical architecture of categories by type, make or model... blah blah blah. And that's it?

No, what I usually do is surround this main content, which is what I'm interested in positioning because it will give me an economic return, either because it's aboutTransactional URLs selling affiliate products, or because it is the landings which work on the keywords with the highest CPCbut of course, being the most important, they will also be more difficult to classify from the beginning.

How can I apply an inbound SEO strategy that gets me traffic right from the start in any sector?

What I'm preparing is a battery of posts based on the target audience of this website.

Let's see, who buys a hair straightener... what problems might they have, what needs or doubts etc...?

Let's define our "buyer persona seo", i.e. the people who will end up visiting your website, whether it's an informational niche, a call to click or an Amazon niche, you have to think that you're targeting a segmented audience, do you know that?

Study your visitor's profile, but not as a marketer, but as an SEO.

I'll tell you how I do it:

I want to try to indirectly attract the user who can buy a hair straightener. On this basis, I starts extracting semantically related keywords to prepare articles, for example (I'm making this up as I go along, I haven't checked whether these keys have traffic) :

• how to straighten hair?
• natural products to straighten hair.
• avoid hair loss after straightening.
• how to straighten colored hair.
• What is keratin?
• how to straighten hair without heat.

Always try to put yourself in your visitors' shoes... what problems might they have, or what concerns can you address?

Do you understand the concept? I'll tell you why we're doing this.

With these "inbound posts", what I generate is an alternative source of traffic, which will capture impressions and clicks faster for long-tail words, depending on the number of articles, you can generate a lot of traffic.

Your landing "cheap hair straighteners" receives no traffic, and it's been two months since you published your website... Yet, good incoming content will give life to your website, it can even generate clicks and sales...

But that's not all, we're going to enjoy of this content to work on establishing links to important groups, by increasing the internal pagerank of the URLs we are really interested in.

But that's not all: in addition to sending internal authority to the pages we're interested in, this type of content can be used for other purposes. they are monetizable and on the other hand we can offer an ebook of the type lead magnet or other means of obtaining social interaction within this content, in order to increase its popularity in the eyes of Google.

The fact is, at a time when everything is moving towards increasingly profiled search intent, entities and semantic relationships within content, when tackling a project, basic keyword research means missing out on a wide range of opportunities.

Believe me when I tell you that it can make all the difference. I apply it to my niches, but also to my customers' websites. prepared this type of campaign for large companies who want to feed a strong blog to surround their sales landing page and the funnel that runs on it

The power of capturing qualified organic traffic always pays off, plus it's (mostly) evergreen, so it has a longer return than if, say, we send targeted traffic directly through Facebook Ads or Adwords. So I encourage you to try this approach and let me know how it goes.

Ohh! I've written so much, I hope you can draw some conclusions that will help you with everything I've told you. As you wish, I'll see you in the comments. Insults and threats, please DM me on Twitter.

Best regards friends.