How You Can Get Your Landing Page to 180,000 Visitors a Year in Under 12 Months – Josh Doody

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0:15today I'm going to be talking to you about getting a hundred and eighty thousand yearly organic visitors in under 12 months I actually did it in a little under ten months so I'm hedging to say under twelve also your mileage may vary onward so i'm josh duty my core business is around a book that I wrote called fearless salary negotiation hello you can find me on twitter i'm at josh duty and as i built a business around fearless salary negotiation i found that I couldn't just write a book and build courses and all that fun stuff I also had to find people to sell those things

0:51to and so to that end I built a site fearless salary negotiation calm and we're going to use my site fearless salary negotiation calm as a case study so that I can show you what I did to get started with basic SEO to increase organic traffic to my site I see organic traffic is sort of a lagging indicator of most other kinds of traffic so in my opinion if organic traffic is trending up you're probably doing a lot of other things right as well so that's why I focus on organic traffic you may have other channels that are better for you but I like this one because it tells me

1:24that I'm doing the right things overall so to give you some perspective before I kind of share these three tactics with you this is my sites organic weekly traffic the first quarter of 2016 so January February March 2016 two things to point out here you can see that the y-axis or the number of weekly visits is a whopping forty four zero this is a brand new site that I set up a few months before in the total organic visitors to my site at the time was two hundred and twenty five people in three months total okay so then if you go over to the right side we're gonna continue

2:01and we're gonna start now in April of 2016 which happens to coincide with yes micro Kampf 2016 and a conversation that I had with Patrick McKinsey that Patrick said you need to get more traffic so I got more traffic and the end no so now the y-axis is up at five thousand from forty and you can see I'm getting 225 visitors not in three months but about every six hours so this is my sort of social proof this is what I did with fearless salary negotiation calm there's no blackhat stuff here there are no big breaks here if anything you can see there's a dipper on the holidays

2:39because I guess people are maybe less focused on salary stuff around the holidays so that's a nice lesson learned for me okay so that's my site and now I'm going to share are three general tactics things that you can do right now to start building organic traffic to your site as you try to get more traffic and hopefully find more customers and more visitors more trials more email opt-ins whatever it is that you need the first thing that you have to do is you have to create content Google can't find you and people can't find you if you don't have anything to find so obviously you're gonna want to create content but

3:12how do you create content that is useful and that will be appreciated by Google and by the people who find your site first you need to write for specific keywords so if you have an idea and you think it's gonna be a great idea and you've got this 4,000 word article content marketing that you're gonna create and you're gonna do videos around it you need to stop take your idea put it into a keyword planner of some kind and find the keywords that people are using to describe the thing that you want to write about so you don't want to just write about the words that you have

3:39in your mind for your topic you have to put those words into something like Google's keyword planner which is beyond the scope of this talk and figure out what the keywords are that people actually use to search for the topic that you're writing about then you have your keywords that you can write about and you can begin creating content that Google will index and crawl and send people to when they're searching for those keywords that you're now writing about because you've changed to the keywords that people are actually searching for you want to emphasize the keywords in three different places on your site this is a sort of on-page

4:11stuff it's pretty easy you can do it right now the first place is the slug or the URL of the content that you're creating so an easy example for this would be let's say I had the site Acme Corp com and I had to write an article on dishwasher repair the slug would be Acme Corp com / dishwasher repair so you want to start with keywords in the slug or the URL that's good for Google it's good for people to understand what they're clicking through - and it helps people to find your content next place that you want to emphasize your keywords is in your pages title I'm

4:41specifically talking about the title tags what's in between them in HTML and if you're using WordPress and a bunch of other site generators then you don't have to worry too much about where to put this but just make sure that the title in quotes has the keywords that you're trying to emphasize this could be the headline on your page it might be it might not be this is the actual thing in the title tags and it's what Google uses to show people your search results in the little blue underlined text that's on the search results pages and so you want to make sure that it reflects what

5:10you wrote about and that it entices people to click through to read your content and then the last place that you want to emphasize the keywords is above the fold which is above the fold is what you see when you load the page for the first time it's usually you know 10 lines of text or something like that depending on your device make sure that you're using the keywords that you found in your research above the fold so that again Google can crawl it and find those keywords and say yes this is a page on a topic that I want to send people to so slug title and above the folder the

5:38three places to emphasize the keywords that you found doing your research before you started writing your article as you build your article you can then do these three things this is an example from field of salary negotiation com up top you can see in very small font the slug is fearless salary negotiation calm slash salary negotiation email sample which doesn't sound like great English but it turns out that's what people are searching for so I created this page for that keyword combo at the very bottom you can see the title is again salary negotiation email sample and that's because that's going to show in the search results and then above the

6:12fold I've highlighted and pink all the variations on the keywords that I found that I'm targeting for this page so that you can see that a lot of that copy is keywords that I'm targeting but it also reads like English so it's important to emphasize the keywords above the fold but also to make it readable by human people and also Google and this is what that looks like in the search results so you can see it's salary negotiation email sample the title and the slugger kind of highlighted there at the bottom so this all trickles through your writing for specific keywords Google indexes it and then people search for

6:44that term and they find the page that you're trying to rank for okay next up is internal link structure this is important because it basically is the way that Google actually able to traverse your site and find the stuff that's on your site so before I go forward you have to make your site crawlable and what I mean by that is I want to use an analogy which is that imagine that you no longer have access to a keyboard and all you have is a mouse or your finger on a mobile device and you're trying to navigate a site all you can do is pretty much

7:12scroll and you can click links and go to other pages and you can scroll and you can click links that's how Google crawls your site so don't assume that Google is going to start punching in URLs to its web browser and finding your web pages it's going to literally go to a page like maybe your home page and it's going to read some stuff and index those words and the topics the content that's above the fold your slug and all that good stuff and then it's going to find a link and it's going to click it and it's going to scroll and it's going to index

7:40and it's going to find a link and it's going to click it and so it kind of just tumbles its way down your site stumbling into pages indexing them and putting it in its little reservoir of information and then moving on to another one so you want to make sure that Google can do that without having to type in URLs because if you put orphan pages out there that can't be accessed this way on your site it may never find them and even if it does you're telling Google it's not that important because I'm not even making an accessible for Google so a way that you can do this is this is

8:09the footer on my site and you can see that I have recent articles linked there so I'm gonna walk you through what happens when Google Scrolls down to my footer which I assume most humans don't get down there but Google will and Google clicks on recent articles and what it finds is an index of recent articles these are all kind of long reads that I've written with different titles and all that good stuff but the key is it's just a page of links that it can click to find other pages on my site that I want it to find easily so if it clicks that first read more link now

8:36it's on an article about scripts and it can read this and index it and find it and then it will find you can see links at the bottom there it can click the link in the upper left-hand corner and get back to my home page so it's now crawling my site without using URLs it's only clicking or it can go down to the footer that you saw earlier and kind of start that process all over again so I'm just allowing Google to easily navigate my site index stuff click links find more stuff and index it and keep clicking links that's what you want to build so make sure that your content is

9:02accessible in this way to Google you also want to emphasize important pages on your site so again back to my footer you can see I literally call those weird I literally call this popular pages these are my most popular pages and I want to make sure that Google knows I think these are popular and the way I'm telling you that Google is 150 pages on my site have links to these pages so you should pay attention and make sure you click through a lot and get a lot of experience there I do not recommend that you dump every single URL on your site into your footer

9:33actually emphasize popular pages and Google will sort of respect that it will crawl them it will recognize that you're pointing it frequently to those pages and hopefully rank them higher and at least it knows that you're signaling this is important stuff on my site and the last thing that you want to do is use keywords in your anchor text in other words what you want to do is make sure that the words you use in the links that I'm talking about actually reflect the keywords that you found in the research that you did earlier so for example in my footer again salary negotiation email sample our old friend

10:03from earlier which happens to be the most popular page on my site again I'm not using great English here but this is what Google wants to see and this is what the people want so that's what I give them so make sure you're emphasizing the keywords in the links themselves this is also true when you're building inbound links so the last thing that you want to do once you've actually identified pages and you've built a site that is easily crawlable is you also need to tell Google what's important from the outside in this is the hardest part of my presentation and that is getting other people to link to your

10:31pages on your site there are two ways that I recommend doing this is sort of called building backlinks and all that stuff but ultimately you just want to give Google some information that says hey other people are linking here too so maybe this is important stuff first thing is podcasts he's not here but KY Davis has a lot of great information on this in just a minute I'll tell you a link that you can go to a my site where you can read some of Coyote MZ's material or link through to it guessing on podcast is really easy earlier Ben was talking about how doing a podcast is easy getting on a podcast

10:59even easier because you can just reach out and say hey you interview people right they're like yeah well I'm in your area I have something to talk about do you want to have me on your podcast and they'll say sure because they're scrambling to try and find somebody to be on their podcast this week so reach out to people and get on their podcast get backlinks in their show notes and now you've got links that Google can say oh this one to be a fun site I'll go check it out and then guest post which is similar to podcasting but frankly you know quite a bit harder and sort of less fun so you

11:26can also do guest post which will get you backlinks to your site not in show notes but in the content that you're writing yourself make sure that you include some links back to some supporting articles on your site just so that once Google crawls the other site where your guest posting it's got evidence that your site is important and it will come back read those pages index them and do the link and scroll dance that I talked about earlier okay so those are my three tactics right for the right keywords internal link structure is very important so Google can crawl your site and then you want to build

11:54inbound links from other sites to let Google know that your site is important specifically that pages are important I went really fast here so if you'd like to get these slides and some references that I have you can go to Josh Doody comm slash micro comp there's also a forum on there if you want to reach out to me to talk about your site's SEO and my bread and butter of course is salary negotiation coaching so if you have a day job and I bet a lot of people in here do you'd like to talk about salary negotiation how to earn more while you're at that day job and build a

12:22longer runway so that you can work on your side projects give me a call thanks for your time I appreciate it [Applause] [Music] you