How to Grow Traffic 114.25% With a Content Driven SEO Plan (Case Study)

Great content is the bedrock of SEO.

Without it:

In this actionable case study, learn the exact strategy that my team at The Search Initiative took to increase our client’s organic traffic by 114.25% in 12 months.

In this article, you’ll learn how to:

But first, let’s find out some more about the site’s goals and the main challenges that were faced during the campaign.

And if you prefer to consume your content via video, you can watch the full break down here:

The Challenge

The client is a finance lead generation website targeting the United Kingdom.

The main objective of the campaign was to drive further organic traffic to the core landing pages and diversify the types of keywords that the client was ranking for by targeting terms with an informational search intent as opposed to just commercial intent.

The site had many core landing pages which targeted commercial intent keywords, but was lacking in content that focused on ranking for information search terms.

This was a missed opportunity to address different stages of the user’s journey as well as create content rich pages that could be used to build backlinks and to improve internal linking.

We created a content plan for groups of topically related articles known as Power Hubs (aka Content Hubs), which you’ll learn how to do soon.

The content plan also involved creating new core landing pages (aka “money pages” that are the most important for your service i.e. product pages for an eCommerce website) to target informational keywords.

As the content strategy primarily focused on creating new pages via the Power Hubs, the next challenge was to carry out an outreach strategy with the aim of boosting their rankability while simultaneously building the overall authority of the domain.

Finally, we identified two core technical drawbacks facing the website: poor main menu navigation which resulted in a bad user experience and lots of orphan pages (i.e. URLs with zero internal or external links pointing to them) which prevented the pages from being crawled by Google.

Follow the steps outlined below to find out how you can overcome these challenges for your own website.

Targeting Informational Keywords With Power Hubs

There are four main types of keyword groups each of which have a specific purpose or intent. They are:

It’s important to optimize your website to target a wide variety of keyword types as they correspond to different stages of the searchers journey.

For example, users searching for informational keywords tend to be at the beginning of their search journey as they’re likely researching a topic that they aren’t familiar with whereas those searching transactional terms are further along the journey as they’re closer to making an actual purchase or performing an action (i.e. subscribing to a newsletter).

This client’s website was lacking informational content that catered to the former group of searchers which meant that they were missing out on ranking for a large subset of keywords related to their niche.

Instead of writing stand alone informational articles on your blog, you can grow the amount of informational content on your website by writing and publishing Power Hubs.

What Are Power Hubs?

Power Hubs (aka content hubs) are content pieces that comprise a single pillar page that is supported by a group of supplemental pages each of which are topically related to each other.

These pages are then connected to each other with hyperlinks i.e. the pillar page links to each of the cluster pages and vice versa.

What Are the SEO Benefits of Power Hubs?

Publishing Power Hubs have the following SEO benefits:

How to Find Potential Topics for Power Hubs

I’ll show you three different techniques to find potential topics for Power Hubs – two of which are free!

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

The first method is via Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool.

💡 Top Tip: use the Terms filter on the left hand side to see groups of topically related keywords that contain similar (or common) words. This is a great way to find your core topic for the pillar page.

Let’s look at the keyword opportunities for “art”.

In this case, you can see that there are several keyword variations related to what nft art is with a parent topic of “nft art” – making it a great keyword choice for our pillar page.

This is because the pillar page should target a broader topic (“nft art”) whilst cluster pages target more specific subtopics.

As you did before, use the groups in the left sidebar to find topically related keywords.

Without even clicking on any of the groups from the left sidebar, you can start to spot certain keyword groups and topics for your cluster page.

Each of the above could be a cluster page that goes into detail about how people can create, buy and sell NFT art.

For example, here are some 133 additional keywords that you can target for “how to make nft art”.

Related Searches

If you don’t have Ahrefs, you can also use Google’s Related Searches section to find pillar and cluster topics.

In this case, we have “nft art” again.

As you can see, Google and Ahrefs’ results both align as we’re seeing similar keywords appearing. The pillar page can target “nft art” with cluster pages targeting specific terms like “how to create nft” and “how to sell nft art”.

People Also Ask

Another great (free) way to find keyword ideas for your pillar and cluster pages is via Google’s People Also Ask section. This is especially useful for finding informational keywords.

All three methods can be used to put together a comprehensive list of keywords to target for both the pillar page and the supplementary cluster pages.

Before you know it, you’ve got the building blocks for your Power Hub…

💡 Top Tip: If you really wanted to take things to another level, you could repeat the same process to create a Power Hub within your Power Hub. I’ll explain…

Let’s go back to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and look at the additional keywords that we could target for “how to create nft art”.

Use a similar approach to finding cluster page ideas by looking at whether there are further ways to group keywords. In this case, we have groups for “digital” and “3d” NFT art.

This means you can turn your cluster page about “creating NFT art” into its own pillar page, with its own cluster pages.

After identifying these keywords, the next step is to start writing your Power Hub!

How to Write Content for Power Hubs

Let’s take a look at how you should go about writing your content hubs:

Here’s what you should look out for:

Based on this, write your content so that it aligns with the content that Google has already rewarded on the competing pages. Always remember to write content that:

Internal Linking Strategy for a Power Hub

One area where Power Hubs differ slightly, is with the internal linking strategy.

What Is Internal Linking?

Internal linking is the process of adding a hyperlink from one page on your website, to another page on your website.

Importantly, in the context of SEO, the links you add to other pages on your website should be relevant to the linking page.

For example, if you have a website that sells mens socks, you might have an internal link from a blog article about Christmas gift ideas for men to one of your product or category pages.

What Are the Benefits of Internal Linking?

Internal linking has benefits for you, the user and search engines like Google.

How to Structure Internal Links for a Power Hub

Power Hubs provide many internal linking linking opportunities, for example you should add internal links from the:

Following the above will create a network of links for Google and users to follow.

Frequently Asked Questions About Power Hubs

What Can a Power Hub Include?

Apart from written text, Power Hubs may also include a range of other types of content that are beneficial to improving the overall user experience such as:

What’s the Goal of a Power Hub?

The main purpose of a Power Hub is to provide informative and educational content that is suitable for all users. This means that you should aim to include content that applies to both beginners and advanced users alike.

Ultimately, you want to include as much information that showcases your expertise within a particular topic as possible.

How Do Pillar and Cluster Pages Differ?

The main difference between pillar and cluster pages is that:

Improving Keyword Visibility for Informational Keywords

As mentioned before, it’s important to ensure that your website targets a range of keywords so that you capture users at different stages of their search process.

The client’s site was well optimized for transactional intent keywords (i.e. where users are looking to perform some sort of action such as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter), but the site was lacking pages that targeted an informational intent.

This was a missed opportunity to improve visibility and create content that targets users who are researching the topics covered by the client.

Let’s take a look at how you can find informational keywords.

How to Find Informational Keywords

You can find informational keywords using all three methods I outlined in the Power Hubs section i.e. using Related Searches, People Also Ask and via Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

One important thing that’ll help you identify informational search terms, is the fact that they’re usually phrased as questions.

Let me show you how to find these kinds of keywords using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

In this example, let’s imagine you have an eCommerce category page selling and already ranking for the keyword “organic honey”.

The site may be ranking well for transactional keywords like “buy organic honey”, but is missing out on providing information that will be useful for the user to know.

After all, the more information you can provide about your product/service, the more inclined a user will be to click through and buy.

This will show you a list of keyword ideas that are phrased as a question.

How to Write Content for Informational Keywords

When it comes to writing content for informational keywords:

… or click on the SERP feature on the Questions report on Ahrefs for the target keyword and open up a few of the top ranking competing pages.

💡 Top Tip: if there’s a page displayed as a featured snippet (like in the example above), use this to craft your own answer because it means that Google deems this page’s answer to be the best.

Here’s what you should look out for:

The featured snippet page has provided a short and concise answer.

Whereas the other top ranking page from the organic search results has gone into a bit more detail.

The main thing to remember is to make sure that you provide the user with the information that they’re looking for in order to fulfill their search intent.

Improving the Main Menu Navigation

Your main menu navigation holds more importance for your website’s rankability than you might initially think.

Here’s why…

Why Is Your Main Menu Navigation Important?

Apart from content, your main menu navigation is the one element of your website that offers an almost identical experience for the user and the search engine.

Your main menu can significantly impact a range of metrics including:

A well structured main menu is about finding the perfect balance of presenting users (and search engines) with the right amount of information so that they’re able to access the most important pages on your website without becoming overwhelmed or causing confusion.

Types of Main Menu Navigation

Horizontal Navigation

The horizontal navigation bar is the most common type of main menu navigation. It displays menu items side-by-side at the top of a web page.

Drop Down Navigation

Common with websites that have complex structures or many categories. Primary navigation items expand into sub-items via a drop down menu to present users with further options to choose from.

Vertical Navigation Bar

Menu items are displayed below one another and the bar is displayed on the side as opposed to the top of the page.

Hamburger Navigation

Most commonly used for mobile main menus. Menu items are hidden behind a “hamburger” icon which when tapped expands are revealed.

Best Practices to Follow When Designing Your Main Menu Navigation

Let’s look at some of the best practices you should follow when designing (or re-designing) your main menu navigation.

Use Descriptive Labels

Avoid using generic labels such as “What we do” within your main menu as they don’t actually describe what you do or who you are.

Likewise, labels like “Products” and “Services” are too vague and offer little context to search engine crawlers as to what you actually offer.

Instead, make it as easy as possible for both users and search engines to understand what you do by using descriptive labels.

Here’s an example:

The above is better as it allows users to instantly click onto the service that is relevant for their needs.

Avoid Overcrowding

Packing your main menu with lots of links to your pages may seem like you’re doing users a favor by making them “easily accessible”. But, in reality, it can quickly confuse and overwhelm your users.

Here’s an example of a site with too many navigation items:

If you overload your main menu with too many pages, how is Google supposed to know which pages are most important to you and your users?

Including fewer menu items means that your users are less likely to skip past or miss important pages as you’re giving more precedence to a smaller number of pages.

Your homepage is arguably the most authoritative page on your website because it likely has the most internal (and external links) pointing towards it.

This means that the page has more “link juice” than any other page on your website i.e. a link from your homepage carries more importance or weight than a link from a newly published blog post for example.

Therefore, main menus with too many links dilutes the equity of the link juice (authority and trust) that is passed down to the linked pages.

A more concise navigation leads to more authority being passed from your homepage, which in turn makes them more likely to rank.

As a general rule of thumb, you’ll find that most sites tend to have between 5 to 8 items on their main menu.

Placement Is Key

This point touches on two things:

1. Where you’re displaying the main menu
2. What order you place the items on the menu

Users have become accustomed to seeing the main menu navigation at the top of a web page – just like all of the examples you’ve seen so far.

Following this practice is simple enough, but what about the second one?

Studies have shown that humans tend to retain the beginnings of ends of things better than the middles – it’s called the recency and primacy effect.

With this in mind, you want to put your most important pages at the beginning and end of your main menu.

This is why you’ll usually see “Services” or “Product” items at the very start of main menus and the “Contact Us” item at the end.

Don’t Forget About Mobile Users!

All of the main menu examples you’ve seen above look great on desktop, but what about on mobile?

With less screen real estate to play with, designing a main menu that’s descriptive, easy to use and doesn’t overwhelm the user becomes increasingly important.

The most common practice for mobile navigation is the “hamburger” icon – it looks like this:

When tapped, the icon expands and displays the main menu like so:

Displaying the menu options vertically as opposed to vertically (like on Desktop) prevents users from having to scroll.

Be Consistent With Formatting & Styling

Regardless of which navigation type you opt for, remember to maintain consistent formatting and styling.

If a user hovers over a menu item and that item changes from black to orange with an underline, you should ensure that this styling choice is applied throughout all pages on your website.

Otherwise, it’ll be difficult for users to know which items are hyperlinked and which aren’t.

Here’s a good example where both primary and secondary menu items are highlighted.

Following the above practices will ensure that your main menu navigation is optimized for both users and search engines alike.

Minimizing the Number of Orphan Pages

Apart from improving the main menu navigation, the client also had hundreds of orphan pages on the site which was preventing it from ranking for many important keywords.

What Are Orphan Pages?

Orphan pages are pages on your website that have zero internal links pointing towards them which makes it difficult for search engines to discover them.

Apart from following internal links, search engine crawlers can only find new pages on your website if they are included in your XML sitemap or from external backlinks (i.e. when another website links to your web page).

Why Are Orphan Pages Bad for SEO?

Google says the main method that it finds and indexes new content is by “following links from pages that [it] already know about”.

So, if you have any pages that do not have any internal or external links pointing to them, and you forget to add to your XML sitemap (the file that allows you to specify to Google which URLs you want it to crawl), it’ll struggle to find them.

Why? Because as far as its web crawling is concerned, the pages do not exist.

This is clearly bad for SEO as if Google isn’t able to find and index these pages, they simply won’t rank.

How to Find Orphan Pages Using Sitebulb

There are many tools that you can use to identify orphan pages on your website, but for the purpose of this guide, I’ll show you how to do it using Sitebulb (requires a license), which is a great tool for spotting a bunch of SEO issues.

Regardless of which tool you use, finding orphan pages requires the presence of a valid XML sitemap.

This is because the tool you’re using needs to know which URLs are present on your site, so that if it comes across a URL that isn’t on the sitemap, it’ll mark it as an orphan page.

In other words, the crawl only knows of a page’s existence from the sitemap.

Note: you can also connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts to the project. To find out how to do this, check out this guide.

You can then view and/or export these orphaned pages by clicking on “View URLs” or “Export URLs” respectively.

If you use Screaming Frog, follow this guide, and if you use Ahrefs, use this guide.

How to Fix Orphan Pages

To find relevant pages that you can add an internal link from, use the following site: search – site:yourdomain.com “relevant word or phrase from your orphan page”.

For example, if you had an eCommerce store that sells audio equipment and an orphaned blog post about bluetooth speakers, you could do a search like this:

This shows you all of the pages on your website that contain the phrase “bluetooth speakers”.

You can now pick one of these pages and insert a hyperlink from it to the orphaned blog post.

Add the following line of code to the page:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

Important note: remember not to block these pages in your robots.txt file, otherwise Google won’t know that the page shouldn’t be indexed.

The first step to improving your organic rankings is to make the pages on your site accessible by Google. Therefore, following the above steps will ensure that you reduce (and ideally eliminate) the number of orphan pages on your site.

Executing a Blogger Outreach Campaign to New Content Pages

Link building is one of the most effective and powerful SEO components – especially when it comes to boosting the rankability of newly created pages like we did for this client.

An effective strategy for building backlinks is blogger outreach, which involves finding topically relevant prospects who you can then reach out to for a link back to content that their audience will find useful.

Let’s break down the main steps on how to do blogger outreach:

Step 1: Finding Link Prospects

I’ll show you two ways to find potential link building opportunities towards your website using Ahrefs.

Find Website’s Who’ve Linked to Sites Within Your Niche

Ahrefs’ Content Explorer helps you find people who mention your target keyword in their articles, and those who also link to articles on a similar topic to yours.

Type your seed keyword (in this case “ai art generator”) and hit search.

Click “Add filter > Referring Domains” then type a minimum value of 50, leaving the maximum empty.

Click “Apply > Show results”.

Click “Filter”, select “One page per domain” to narrow down the results and hit “Apply”.

Find a page that’s similar to the one you’re building a backlink for (i.e. one of your newly created pages), and click on the “Details” icon on the right hand side.

Then, select the “Referring Domains” tab.

These are your link prospects.

Reverse Engineering Your Competitor’s Link Profiles

Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool lets you find all of the domains that are linking to your direct competitors, but aren’t linking to you.

💡 Top Tip: if you don’t know who your top competitors are, do a Google search for the main keyword that the page you want to build a link towards ranks for and note the sites (or pages) that are most similar to yours.

For example, an AI art generator website will want to rank for the keyword “ai art generator tool”.

In this case, you shouldn’t include the blog posts (as they aren’t tools themselves – they aren’t direct competition) – but, they might make good link building prospects! 😉

How? Well, these blog posts are covering the “best AI art generator tools”, and if your tool isn’t mentioned on them, what’s the harm in reaching out to them and asking them to consider adding you to the list with a backlink? I’ll show you how to do this later!

You can then add up to 10 competitors to the Link Intersect tool along with your domain (or target URL).

Hit “Show link opportunities”, filter the results so that you only see prospects where at least two of the competitors have a backlink from and click “Apply”.

Doing this will narrow down the prospect list, but you’ll be able to see the most relevant sites to get a link from.

Sort the results based on DR to view the prospects that have the most domain authority (i.e. the most ranking power).

These are also your link prospects!

Step 2: Finding Contacting Details

After creating your shortlist of link building prospects, the next step is to find the contact information for these domains so that you can reach out to them and ask for a backlink.

This could be an email address of someone who works there or a general contact form.

A great way to find email addresses is to use tools like Hunter.io. You can download the Google Chrome extension (you can get 25 searches per month for free if you sign up) and you’ll have that information at just a click away!

If you’re using the website, you can just enter your prospect’s domain like in the screenshot below and click “Find email addresses”.

You can see that the tool has found 5 email addresses for my domain.

Step 3: Crafting Your Pitch

The next step in the process is the pitch – this is the most important step and will make or break your effort of getting a backlink to your site.

The key to a great outreach pitch is to add personally relevant information about the website that you’re pitching to.

Crafting a personalized pitch instead of one that follows a generic template is more effective so long as you keep the pitch short, sweet and concise by:

The latter is most important as you want to show the prospect that you have a linkable asset that will be beneficial to both them and their audience.

Here’s a template that you can use for your pitches:

Step 4: Send, Monitor & Repeat!

Once you’ve sent out your emails to the prospect list, it’s important to cover your progress and trial different subject lines and email copy to find out which emails had the best conversion rates (i.e. which emails resulted in you getting a backlink).

Learn more about how to carry out blogger outreach in detail here.

Here’s a look at the kind of results we’ve got from this link building campaign:

The Results

Take a look at what we’ve achieved by executing the above strategies in just over twelve months.

When compared year-on-year,

the organic traffic grew by 114.25%.

The number of keywords that our client is now ranking for within the top 100 positions of the search results increased by 85.19% from 2707 to 5013 in the past year.

Conclusion

The bedrock of any SEO campaign is its content.

Without great content, you won’t have any linkable assets that you can use to build backlinks and in turn, your website’s authority.

And if that content isn’t made easily accessible for both users and search engine crawlers, you’ll struggle to rank.

In this case study, you’ve learned how to:

Executing each of the steps outlined in the above strategy will make sure that you’re creating engaging content that is both link-worthy, and is accessible to search engines and users alike.

Need help with your website’s SEO? Get in touch with my team at The Search Initiative.

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Matt is the founder of Diggity Marketing, LeadSpring, The Search Initiative, The Affiliate Lab, and the Chiang Mai SEO Conference. He actually does SEO too.