#2 SEO Case Study: 0 to 150k Monthly Visitors in 8 Months

Mentioned in the show

• Cup and Leaf [00:46]
• Bluehost [5:20]
• WPEngine [5:40]
• CloudOptimus [5:40]
• WordPress [5:50]
• Webflow [6:03]
• Mangools [06:56]
• Ahrefs [07:06]
• The Writer Finder [11:09]
• Upwork [11:14]
• Clear Scope [13:30]
• Reddit [15:00]
• Facebook Groups [18:40]
• Cup & Leaf on Pinterest [20:40]
• Nat Eliason Blog [21:30]
• A Clean Bake [21:40]
• Made You Think Podcast [21:45]
• 100,000 Visitors: A 7-Part Series [26:10]

Articles mentioned

• Growing Cup & Leaf: 0 to 150,000 Monthly Organic Visitors in 8 Months
• Does Your Blog Has SEO Potential? [4:54]
• How to Find 100+ Great Keywords in Less than 1 Hour [7:29]

Show Topics

0:45 - Cup & Leaf is a property born as a side project at Growth Machine. It’s a blog about Tea, types, benefits, etc. It started out of interests with the aim to create, hopefully, a case study about SEO well applied. By today it has hit the 150.000 monthly visitors mark in just 8 months, appearing at first position for most tea related searches.

2:00 - How to create a 100.000 monthly viewers site? The 3 criteria your chosen niche must meet to attract that many people. Why ‘tea’ is better than ‘hamster sweaters’. An article can rank #1 on Google but nobody is clicking; how to avoid that. The niches you should avoid. How to assess competition.   

5:04 – Setting your blog for SEO success. Which CMS to use, and which host you should totally avoid. Recommended hosts for your site. WordPress vs Webflow.

6:22 – Finding your target keywords. How to write your posts to make them SEO-driven. Tools for keyword research. How to choose the first articles to write and rank. The metric to prioritize articles writing.

09:07 - Creating content. How many posts/week? The #1 reason people fail when creating a blog. How much you will have to wait until you see results. Detailed timeline of visitors per month for Cup & Leaf. How much you can expect paying a writer.

11:45 - Tips for those who write their own articles. How to make a better articles than the competition: adding more information, providing up-to-date info, making it more actionable, making it more readable. A tool for accelerating article writing.

14:00 - Promoting the article. How much should you spend on promotion. Tips on how to promote on Reddit, Facebook Groups and Pinterest, keeping in mind each platform idiosyncrasy and rules.

21:00 - More on promoting: how we want with the first backlinks. How to get links with ease. Podcasts, broken link building, guest posting.

23:37 – The biggest ingredient for SEO. Areas where people fail.

26:04 – Go to growthmachinepodcast.com/freecourse to get the 7 part, in-depth series about building a blog to success. Go to growthmachinepodcast.com and subscribe for future episodes. Lookf for growthmachinepodcast.com on iTunes and Stitcher. If you are enjoying the show, leave a review!