How to get from 30 to 2.000 organic visitors a month

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I'm Jasper Meurs, and you are listening to Growth Journal, the podcast where I talk about everything that I'm learning while I'm growing my business. In today's episode, I want to talk about a client case study. So I started working for this client in the beginning of 2019. So more or less three years ago, and at the time they had about 30 visitors a month, organically, so through Google search, mostly, and this resulted in one lead a month, more or less. Fast forward, about three years, but this is already happening through the better part of last year, and we have about 2000 organic visitors each month now, which results in about 60 leads a month. The business itself also has grown significantly. So while I was just working with the founders back then, they added on about four people, four full-time employees right now.

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So today I want to talk about what I specifically did for this client to get these results, and how you can basically do the same thing for your business. So let's start off with the main services that I provided for them. So the first thing I did, the first thing that was part of my plan at the moment was creating a new website. Their website looked a bit dated, and I set out on a mission to make their website basically the best one in their business. Now, you have to know they're in the niche business. So we had a couple of main competitors that we were looking at, and we wanted to make absolutely sure that we had the best website of all these competitors that we had identified, and we actually succeeded at this. So that's already part one.

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Now, the next part is we also wanted to make sure that we would get found for the different products and services that they're offering. So we didn't only create all the different product pages, because it's obvious that you want to show your products on your website. But since they also had a highly technical product, we started creating some more in-depth pages about technology, that went into their products. Because usually these were the things that people were looking for while they were researching the projects that they would actually use our products for in the end. So that is exactly what we did. We started creating these in-depth technical pages.

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After a couple of months, this actually started generating traffic. Though, you would think like, "Okay, these technical pages, how is this helpful?" Well, these people start to find us and the way that Google also works is that when you land on a website once, so let's say they're searching for a technology that we use, and a couple of weeks later, they are searching for a specific product that has this technology embedded in it. Then our websites will come up higher because Google knows that this person already visited this website before. So it will show more results that are familiar to you. This is one of the ways that we were able to attract a lot of organic visitors to our website. But also our product pages, definitely a handful of product pages, are also attracting organic visitors these days. So people searching for these products where we basically out-competed our biggest competitors in the business, which is quite amazing seeing that we're working as this smaller company.

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How do you actually do SEO for your website? This is something that I want to get a little bit deeper into. Step one is knowing how people actually get to your websites. So you have about three options here. The first option is people are actually searching for your brand name, and if they are searching for your brand name, the chances that your website will come up first in Google is pretty high, because there are not that many brands that are called the same as your brands. If there are multiple brands called the same, then you did a bad job at branding, but that's something totally different. Now, the second one is people are searching for your products and services. Now, depending on how big your industry is, this can be quite competitive to rank for these terms. So let's say, you are selling outdoor pools. It will be pretty hard to actually rank for the keywords outdoor pool builder.

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This is where the third option comes in. People are searching for answers to the questions that they have related to your product or service. So these can be the questions that people will ask you. So people are calling your business. People are emailing your business. They are asking you a bunch of questions in their decision making process. These are all great examples for content for your website. So you want to make sure to take note of these questions and create content around these questions themselves. This doesn't only go into SEO by the way, but it can also be used for content for social channels as well. Now, the most important part is you want to focus on the long tail. Now, what do I mean with the long tail? As I said, you have the search term pool builder, for example, which will be quite competitive. But you can also focus on the more specific questions like, how big should a private pool be?

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This is something that not a lot of companies are creating content around or that they do have a page about. So it'll make it way more easy for you to actually create content for these questions and have these pages to actually rank pretty high in Google. Now, if you want to speed things up a little bit and get some greater insight into what pages would actually be interesting to write for you, you can use a tool like Ahrefs. So that's A-H-R-E-F-S, and they have a tool specifically for you where you can see how much search volume to a certain keyword gets each month, in which countries is this keyword popular, and also how competitive is this keyword? Like, how easy is it to actually rank for this keyword or how hard is it to rank for the keyword?

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One other important part here is that a misconception that I hear quite often from clients and also friends when I talk about SEO, is that you need to stick to one keyword or basically one topic per page. So Google doesn't really rank your website. It ranks your different pages, your separate pages. So for each page, you have the chance to rank for a certain topic. You can definitely rank for multiple topics on one page, but let's say if you have a one-page website and you would answer all these different questions at the bottom of your one-pager, this will definitely not rank as well. Just so you know. Also try to get a bit into the mindset of your customers themselves. If someone would look for the answer for a question, and this answer is buried all the way at the bottom of the page. People don't arrive at the bottom of your page. People will arrive at the top of your page when they come to your website. So you want to make sure that the page is immediately giving them the answers that they are looking for.

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Now, why is SEO in general so important? Why is this so important? SEO is more or less a long term gain. So this is also one of the reasons why I'm not offering SEO as a separate service, so people can come to me for just SEO services, because I know it will take some time before these SEO efforts actually start working. The difference here is, you need to weigh time versus money. Something like general in life, actually, but this is also the case for SEO. To make it even more specific is basically you will put some effort into creating SEO-friendly content, creating content for your website, or you will pay Google through Google Ads to get phones on specific keywords. Know the less relevant that your website is to the keywords that you are betting on through Google Ads, the more you will pay for these keywords, but that's for a different podcast episode, that we can get a little bit deeper into this, but it has to do with the ad rank.

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The third reason why you want to do this is to build authority. So if people come to your website and you're just talking about your products, it's all fine, and if people would trust you, they will grant you their business. But you also want to make sure that you have the opportunity to build trust with people. So if you create content with the different questions that you get from people all the time, and you have all these different pages on your website, answering all the different questions that people have about getting a private pool in their backyard, this will immediately create some authority for you, and people will be more inclined to ask you to build their pool eventually.

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Now, what are the expectations when we start working with SEO? That's a very good question. So you have to keep in mind that there's a ramp-up period of three to six months. I've seen results sooner. I've also seen results that took a little bit more time. Definitely not more than one year. If it's still not working after one year, then you definitely need to revisit what you're doing because something is going wrong at that point. But for a little experiment, I did myself recently, I saw the first results after three or four weeks. I am consistently ranking on the first page for these search terms. Now, about two months later, not in all countries where I want to rank first, but definitely a couple of them already. So it can be faster as well.

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In the meantime, while you are creating this content, you can also use it for other purposes as well. So one of the things that I am doing is when I'm creating this content, when I'm recording this podcast, when I have a new blog post, I go through my CRM system, I'm using HubSpot for this, and I'm seeing like, "Who would be interested in this type of content?" Then I will, for example, sorts on the last time that I reached out to these people and see like, "Okay, I will shoot an email to them and I will send him an email, like, how is he doing? I will add in this podcast episode, because I know that he's interested in SEO and he wanted to get started with this himself. So I think this will be valuable content for him." This is like a great excuse for you to actually reach out to people more often, and it's something that will definitely work.

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That brings us to the end of this episode. As always, thanks for listening to Growth Journal. If you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and be sure to come back next week for another episode about how you can grow your business. Until then, this is Jasper. Thank you for listening.