35K+ Clicks a Year: Canadian SEO Agency Traffic Growth Success Story — Serpstat Blog

The Journey from Zero to 35K+ Clicks

The growth of our SEO blog is one of our proudest achievements. We’ve surged to 35,000+ clicks annually with our agency blog, and Serpstat played a pivotal role in this journey. It’s not just about web traffic boost; it’s about reaching the right audience effectively.

Early Challenges on the Way to Boost Visits

So when we got started, we had a few hundred clicks a month at best. I wanted to ensure that people knew we existed and that we would get more website traffic and constant leads. One day, we started and decided to invest our time into this. My colleague, Myriam, is an SEO trainer by trade, so it was easy to gather all the ideas for content her students asked for during corporate training sessions. She spent one entire month in December, after work, planning and writing all the content and doing all the research with Serpstat. 

Discovering Serpstat: Tools and Strategies to Increase Website Hits

We wanted an SEO software that would not remove features, constantly change pricing, or the way things worked to force customers to upgrade non-stop. Additionally, we needed a tool with realistic search volumes, not overly optimistic.

Serpstat’s search volume accuracy addressed a major pain point. Additionally, it provides statistics for smaller markets and databases, such as Luxembourg and Switzerland.

Tool 1: Ways to Maximize Keyword Research

Conducting thorough keyword research enables you to comprehend your intended audience’s search queries and how you can customize your content to cater to their needs. This practice can enhance your website’s visibility, draw in more natural traffic, and boost clicks.

What we do as consultants is fix client problems. As trainers, we teach people how to do what we do. So it was a win-win for us; we could address common issues students have by writing blog posts but also get work from training and our blog posts to fix things people didn’t have time to fix or didn’t have the expertise to fix. The content fits in a process for the agency. It is a brand visibility effort, a pre-sale tool, and a post-sale support element.

We found Serpstat’s keyword research features to be quite valuable.As an example, the platform offered SERP-based keyword clustering long before other tools did. But mostly, we used Keyword selection and Related keywords in the SEO section:

• to fight content decay;
  
• to improve the content that didn’t have proper visibility;
  
• to find other ways to talk about a topic;
  
• to find keywords and topics and also keywords/topics opportunities;
  
• to check keyword trends.
  

Compiling keywords and their search volumes allowed us to pinpoint the most suitable ones aligned with user intent and current market trends. Subsequently, we exported and categorized these keywords according to their plan and keyword difficulty, KD.

Tool 2: Analysis of Competitor Insights

As trainers, we know where the gaps of our clients are. But sometimes, we wonder what our competitors are doing differently. It’s always good to quickly gain insights about the competition. You can check, for example, the Top pages to:

• Figure out if the search intent is mixed
  
• Check who is your competitor for specific content cluster
  
• Analyze which agencies show up for the topic
  
• Figure out if someone ranks better than Google’s official documentation 🙂
  

But what if we have already published the content expected to rank well but still need optimization? We like the ability to compare multiple URLs to determine what we have or don’t have compared to others. 

In that way, we can uncover more missed keywords. It’s nice, but we also use this tool to fight cannibalization. One would be a URL from the article, which is not ranking cause it was suspected of cannibalization with another one. I would check both, check what is happening, and decide how to proceed.

Another valuable option is the Competitor’s report. This feature allows us to assess a selection of competitors in bilingual regions. For instance, you can use it to identify competitors who have written content in French, conduct an analysis, and refine your own content to make it more locally relevant.

Tool 3: How to Monitor SEO Performance?

What truly sets Serpstat apart is its precision in monitoring rankings. This precision has allowed us to thoroughly analyze the Canadian landscape, from Québec (French Canada) to the rest of Canada (anglophone provinces). 

The tool’s capability to compare multiple domains without spending additional credits has been invaluable in gaining insights into our competition.

By learning from your competitors and staying attuned to their ranking, you can proactively increase traffic to a website. You can create content that fills gaps and provides value to your audience by identifying your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

Tool 4: Backlinks for Traffic Increase

While many digital marketers prioritize keywords and on-page SEO, the role of backlinks in driving traffic to the website is often underestimated. However, incorporating links from other websites is crucial for enhancing your website’s visibility in search results.

While we didn’t engage in extensive link-building for our website, we did examine the websites of the non-profit organizations we collaborated with. Throughout the year, we actively participated in various conferences, meetups, and podcasts, where we employed Backlink analysis to assess the potential quality of these mentions.

Traffic Growth Calculations

In our industry of SEO/SEA/Analytics in French Canada, we had a targeted approach to growing our online presence. 

The improvements over time are not necessarily super eye-catching, but they’re real. The GSC shows a steady increase in impressions and clicks. The Keyword trend from Serpstat is only based on the last 12 months but also shows a steady progression in the keywords our website ranks on.

Visibility trend: Google the US

These are the steps we’ve taken on our journey toward success, driving increased website visits and broader impact in our specialized field. We grew to 35K+ clicks a year with a two-person SEO agency blog; honestly, Serpstat helped with that.