SEO Case Study: How I Get 1000+ Free Users a Day

I have been in the digital marketing field for more than 10 years. I have mostly specialized in designing and executing marketing funnels for B2B and B2C brands. To design a highly efficient marketing funnel, one needs an honest command over paid advertising, marketing automation, copywriting, and most significantly, SEO.

SEO and paid advertising helps me get more people at the top of my marketing funnel. I love paid advertising because it’s targeted and scalable. I invest in paid advertising, as long as I’m getting the ROI. However, paid advertising has one downside — you have to pay for the traffic. And you’re not creating an asset which will bring traffic for an extended time to return.

Creating content assets and attracting organic traffic from the search engines is one of the simplest ways to urge target customers into the highest of your marketing funnel. Investment in content and SEO gives long term disproportionate returns. As the saying goes, “You reap what you SEO.”

Having a robust content and SEO strategy also helps me identifying content and keywords that I can promote via paid advertising. I am also able to build high-quality landing pages that get a high-quality score in Google Ads because, for ranking in the search engines, a high-quality landing page is a must.

My first set of consumers discovered me through organic search. The quality of the users who come from organic search is very high.

The above screenshot from my Google Analytics shows that for the past 30 days, my blog has been receiving 1000+ users each day from Organic Search, consistently. In fact, on Mondays and Tuesdays, it nearing 1200+ users a day.
Creating content to full fill the demand on program users features a high return on investment. Each piece of content that you create becomes an asset that brings returns over time. Even if you stop posting new articles in your blog for a while, you will notice that the traffic doesn’t disappear overnight.

You can see that over 40% of my blog’s traffic in the past 30 days has been from Organic Search, mostly from the Google search engine.
This is a healthy split for any website. I would recommend that a minimum of 30% of the traffic should be from an organic look for any web property.
In this article, let us have a look at all the things I have executed in the past 5 years to get my organic search traffic to this level. And the things I decide to do to extend my organic search traffic to 10,000+ users each day.

1. Start Early with a Good Domain Name

Domain names age like fine wine. The older the domain name is, the more authoritative it is. I registered my name DigitalDeepak.com in 2013, and since then I even have been blogging 2–3 articles a month so far.

I started making revenue with DigitalDeepak only by 2016 once I launched my very own courses. For nearly 4 years, I used to be constantly updating my blog with 2–3 articles a month consistently with none immediate return on investment.
A good name that’s regularly updated with fresh content makes it a valuable web property because it attracts top-quality attention of the web users who could potentially become your customers.
You will not be able to monetize the content until you build a product that you can sell it to your users. Once you have a product that your users want, you will be able to generate profits from your visitors and reinvest the money back into content creation.
To grow traction for my content in the initial days of my blog, I shared my published articles on my LinkedIn profile, Twitter, and Facebook. Then I created a Facebook Group for digital marketers and started sharing my articles with my followers in the group.
Once in awhile, someone would link to my articles from a forum or a blog post. And these initial links were very important to help me get ranked for some of the keywords I was targeting. The domain authority and backlinks started building over time as I published more content, and started getting more traffic.
Building a web-property with a focus on SEO is like growing a tree. The best time to start a blog was 10 years back, the second-best time is today. Do not underestimate the power of a few good articles on a domain name. They end up getting traffic and links over time.
If you are planning to start a project a few years down the line, start building your presence now. If you have already got a domain name, great. If you haven’t, register a new domain name, or purchase a premium domain name and start publishing content. Install Google Analytics and start tracking your traffic. Keep adding content regularly. Even one good article a month is going to matter a lot in the future.
Keep sharing all your articles on your social media handles. Get a couple of backlinks through PR and guest contributions. Links that are earned with good content early on can help you a lot in getting SEO traffic in the future.

2. Publish Authoritative & Research-Based Articles

Everyone on the web has an opinion. Anyone can start a blog and talk about what they think about something.
Usually, opinions do not get much traction on the web unless it is coming from a very authoritative personal brand and is very polarizing.
Mostly, opinions do not have much value. Anyone can disregard your opinion, copy your opinion, and publish their own opinions on their blog. There is no need to refer to you or link back to you.
However, if you publish authoritative, research-based articles, people have to refer you when they talk about it. They will link back to the source. Even if your article doesn’t have numbers and data, it should have solid references on which you have built your assumptions. You can see that even this article has a lot of data backing up my claims.
You can see from the above Ahrefs screenshot that I have got 648 different linking domain names to my blog, and a total of 5,800 backlinks from all the domains combined.
And the total new domains linking to my blog has been on an exponential growth curve. The organic traffic value according to Ahrefs is more than $25,000 for the past 3 months. My web asset is giving me good returns in terms of quality traffic — which I would have to pay for if they did not come to my blog through search.
The more data-backed posts I published, the more links I buy. And the more links I get, the better is my SEO.
One of the foremost linked to articles on my blog is a piece of writing on Drip Marketing. Even though I have written my thoughts and opinions on drip marketing, I have mentioned a lot of data from a lot of authoritative sources like Marketo, Marketing Sherpa, IBM, Gartner research, and so on.
Apart from my thoughts and opinions, I have added screenshots of actual data and what is happening behind the scenes. Such data is hard to argue with and naturally becomes authoritative.
When the content is well structured and appealing to the readers, it’s a better chance of earning backlinks naturally because people want to refer it to people. There is no need to build backlinks for SEO, because you will be earning links, naturally.
To give you another example, check out this blog post: Do Digital Marketing Jobs Pay More Salary? Data Says Yes
The article is totally backed by data from various sources. I have not created the data myself, but since I have curated the data, the post becomes authoritative. By the way, I have also linked to the data sources that I got the data from. That’s the way we pay it forward in the blogosphere.
You can either curate data and add an opinion to it, or you can create the data yourself. It is harder to create data, but once you have some followers, you can create new data through surveys and research.
I did a survey among my audience to seek out out the state of digital marketing talent in India. The post is formed from the info that I even have created myself through research. Such posts have a really high chance to earn backlinks.
This blog post is also based on data. I am showing you real numbers from my Analytics dashboard, and hence my opinion has more weight. If I had talked about the different ways you can improve your SEO without showing you the proof that I have already done it, you wouldn’t take my suggestions seriously. I am not giving you my opinion. I am giving you facts. You can ignore opinion. You can’t ignore the facts.

3. Optimize for Reader’s Experience and Page Load Speed

When your website users are reading content on your pages, it has to be a pleasant experience. This means that the page should have good design, good layout, good content, and more importantly, the page should load fast enough so that your website visitors do not bounce off in the first second or two after waiting.
A page with hardly any content will probably get a really high score within the page speed test, but we’d like to supply people with good content also . A functional website like Google.com where the first step is to search for something can have a very high page load speed. We need to strike a balance between content and page load speed.
There are three tools that I frequently use to check the performance of my website in terms of page load speed. They are:
PageSpeed Insights by Google
Pingdom Website Speed Test
GTMetrix Page Speed Performance Analyzer

Out of the above three tools, the most important score to consider is PageSpeed Insights.
I recommend having a score of 70+ in PageSpeed to make sure that your website is optimized well for SEO.
If you are using WordPress, the theme should be lightweight and should be able to load fast on the website.
Whenever I upload images, I make sure I compress them before uploading. I use TinyPNG.com to compress the images and the images usually come down to 1/3rd of its original size.
I also use WPX Hosting, which is one of the best-managed WordPress hosting companies out there. WPX Hosting takes page load speeds for SEO very seriously and therefore the founder may be a veteran SEO expert himself.

4. Long-tail Content Strategy for SEO

A website’s traffic is nearly never to the homepage alone. Most of the traffic involves internal content pages directly from search and links from other websites. This is the power of long tail.
If you rank different pages for a lot of long-tail keywords, you will be able to have some traffic for each of the pages targeting a different set of keywords. All the pages combined will help you increase the traffic to your website.
If I login to my Google search console, I can see that I’ve got more than 70,000 clicks for free from Google search for free in the past 3 months.
All the clicks are earned by different internal pages. If you look at the top pages that are driving traffic to my blog, you can see that some pages get even more traffic than the homepage.
Each of these pages target a different set of keywords and get traffic from the people searching for those keywords.
Short-tail keywords are in general harder to rank because the competition for such keywords is very high.
If you target long-tail keywords, the search volume for each of these keywords will be lesser than their short-tail keywords, but you will be able to rank easier, because the competition is very less.
I have tried to target both short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords and my return on investment in creating long-tail keywords have been very high.
For example,
the keyword “digital marketing” may be a very short tail keyword. It is very hard to rank for it.
“digital marketing courses” is a medium tail keyword.
“digital marketing courses in India” may be a long-tail keyword.
“digital marketing courses in Mumbai” is a long-tail keyword will lesser competition

I would be very happy if I can rank №1 for “digital marketing” but that day is very far away. There are a lot of websites with a lot more backlinks than me ranking for that keyword. It will be very difficult, if not impossible to rank on top for such a short tail keyword.
I want to focus on medium tail keywords like “digital marketing courses”, but I cannot rank for them on the highest 10 easily. I need longer and more domain authority before I can do this . But it is definitely easier than trying to tank for 2-word keywords.
I rank on the top 5 results for the keyword “digital marketing courses in India” but since I am not ranking №1 or №2, I am not getting THAT much traffic.
I rank №2 for the keyword “digital marketing courses in Mumbai” and it gets me tons of traffic. High quality, targeted traffic that can potentially convert into customers and students of my online digital marketing courses. That’s a good return on investment to have on the content created.
My page that’s ranking for “digital marketing courses” possesses 7,600 clicks within the past 3 months. The page that ranks for “digital marketing courses in Mumbai” has got 4808 clicks. That’s almost 60% of the traffic from the medium tail keyword.
So now, the total traffic I can get for targeting all the following keywords will be much more than what I can get for “digital marketing courses”.
I can target keywords like:
“digital marketing courses in Mumbai”
“digital marketing courses in Bangalore”
“digital marketing courses in Chennai”
“digital marketing courses in Delhi”
and more…

I can publish one article each for each of the medium-tail keywords and rank №1 easily for all those keywords — because the competition for long-tail keywords is very less.

Discovering Long Tail Keywords

To find out long-tail keywords, the simplest way is to use Google’s auto-suggest.
If you attend Google.com and sort in 3–4 words, Google will auto-suggest long-tail keywords. If I look for “digital marketing courses in” Google will auto-populate the highest words that are being searched after these 4 words.
Even better, I might look for “digital marketing courses in a” then Google will auto-suggest all the keywords that start with a.
I can then do another search like “digital marketing courses in b” and that we will get more results of long-tail keywords with the 5th word starting with b.
You also need to confirm that every one of those keywords has a decent search volume.
For example, I would not publish a piece of writing for “digital marketing courses in Bangalore Koramangala” yet because it’s a really long-tail keyword, and therefore the investment in creation of content won’t justify the ROI in traffic, yet. However, within the future, the search volume for specific keywords might go up, and once I rank for those keywords, I might get profitable traffic back to my blog.
Apart from Google’s auto-suggest, there are more ways to return up with keywords that you simply can target.
The top ways I come up with new keywords that have good search volume are:
Google’s auto-suggest
Fetch keywords from Search Console. Target keywords that you simply haven’t any targeted pages for but are ranking anyway. Target keywords that have very high impressions but no clicks.
Run a Google Search Ad, and fetch keywords from the search term report.
Use KeywordTool.io
Use UberSuggest
Use Ahrefs
Use Moz

You can also determine new keywords by watching what your competitors are ranking for. Many tools like Ahrefs will offer you data about your competition.
Ahrefs collects data by crawling the online a bit as Google does. and that they can determine what are the highest pages on your competitor’s websites that are becoming traffic from the search engines via long-tail keywords.
For example, let’s take a glance at the info from my competitor Sorav Jain. (He also happens to be my good friend).
I can see that he’s getting plenty of traffic from long-tail keywords.
I don’t have pages targeting many of those keywords, yet.
When I invest in content creation for my blog, I can follow the low hanging fruits, discovered through competition research.
There are many interesting keywords within the above list which I didn’t consider earlier like…
“top digital marketing agencies in India”
“digital marketing quotes”

You can see the leftmost column as “RD”. RD means ranking difficulty. Higher the amount , tougher it’s to outrank them.
When certain pages have tons of backlinks, the ranking difficulty goes up. for instance , the keyword “Sourav Jain” features a very high ranking difficulty. and therefore the number of backlinks he has for the house page URL with “Sourav Jain” because the anchor text is extremely high. there’s no way I can rank DigitalDeepak.com for the keyword “Sourav Jain”. Neither do I would like to. However, there are many other easier keyword opportunities.
A combination of keyword research tools, Google’s auto-suggest, research on the competition’s traffic will offer you enough keywords that you simply can target and rank for. Having a data-driven, keyword research-based content strategy is that the best thanks to increasing organic search traffic within the future .
As you retain building your site’s authority over time, you’ll keep earning new backlinks which will cause a better domain authority. With high domain authority, you’ll rank for the long-tail keywords even without having to create links to those pages separately.

Write for Your Readers

Having said all this, never write content for the sake of ranking in the search engines. Always write content for your readers and make sure that you are delivering value with your content. Without having a focus on giving value through content, you will never be able to attract backlinks and rank for these keywords.
If your content is not of good quality, search engines can easily find that out and lower your rankings. For example, if my article on “digital marketing courses” isn’t of excellent quality, someone who clicks on my website link and enters my page, would just click the back button and try some other result.
Google knows that this person has bounced back, and because of that, they know that your content quality is not that great. You will not be able to have a high enough ranking to attract enough clicks from the searches for that particular keyword.
You need to be data-driven in finding out the demand for content through proper keyword research. Once you’ve got finalized on the keywords that you simply want to focus on , write articles for readers that they will read and gain value from. Without adding value through content for your readers, you’ll never build a robust personal brand.
Talking about personal brands, let’s have a glance at the foremost important SEO and content marketing strategy that the majority people often ignore, or maybe forget about…

5. Grow Your Personal Brand and Authority

It doesn’t matter if the website is a personal blog or a brand’s website. The people that create content are people end of the day, and readers want to read from real people. The personal brand and authority of the author matter tons when it involves the perceived value of the content.
This blog DigitalDeepak.com has most the articles published by me.
You are reading these blog posts not because it’s published on DigitalDeepak.com, but because it’s written by me. You would be equally interested in what I have to say if I had delivered the same article as an ebook, or if I had published this article on some other website.
You do not care about the web site — DigitalDeepak.com. You are paying attention because of who I am and what I want to say. That’s why it is important to focus on personal branding and growing authority. This is part of your SEO strategy.
A while back, Google introduced something called Authorship, where you had to link your author profile to the article that you have written, and Google would show your author profile picture next to the search results. As of now, the authorship snippet doesn’t exist anymore.
When Google had launched authorship, another important keyword made rounds in the SEO space — Author Rank.
Author Rank is a thought that Google is going to be using the info it collects from the online to rank individual authors supported their expertise. It is still a hypothesis, and it is not yet proved that Google has some data point called author rank, but there is no reason why you shouldn’t focus on building your personal brand.
Even if Google is not trying to rank authors according to their expertise level, you are still going to have a lot of incoming traffic to your blog through brand searches. I get 1000s of clicks per month to my blog with the search term “Sreejit Saha”. This is because of personal branding and word of mouth marketing.
Here are the various methods that I follow to grow my personal brand and possibly my “author rank”.
Publishing books in my name
Gave a talk on the TEDx platform
I give talks at events and conferences whenever possible
Add useful videos to my YouTube channel
Participate in interviews and podcasts when people invite me
Guest post on authority publications like Entrepreneur.com and YourStory
Contribute articles to fellow bloggers in my industry
Conduct AMA sessions on Facebook Groups and Forums
Post small bits of ideas, inspiration, and thoughts across all my social media channels
Answer people’s questions on Quora, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn groups, and niche forums.
Conduct webinars and participate in other people’s webinars.

When you are perceived as an expert in your industry, people will not hesitate to link to you, quote you, and invite you for sharing your thoughts on their platform. Building authority and expertise on a subject is a side effect of wanting to learn, grow, and help other people learn new skills & get new opportunities.
I already seem to possess good search volume for the keyword “Sreejit Saha. Google even suggests words for my keyword. This is a side effect of the value I have created with my content.
When you become a known personal brand and position yourself as an authority in a specific subject, you will find it easier to get clients, get job offers, and find it easier to convert your blog readers into customers.
Your preeminence will help you increase your conversion ratios across all the stages of your funnel.

Use Your Personal Brand to Grow a Brand

Your personal brand and authority will then abrade on the brands that you simply have created and made it a valuable brand.
For example, Steve Job’s personal brand got rubbed off on Apple, Elon Musk’s personal brand rubs off on Tesla and SpaceX, Rand Fishkin’s personal brand rubs off on Moz.com. Over time, the brand(s) that you have created will become preeminent by themselves.
Your personal brand is often wont to increase the preeminence of the brands that you simply create, but successively, the brands that you simply create can abrade their preeminence on other associated personal brands as well.
For example, I have positioned myself as an expert in Digital Marketing. My performance marketing company — PixelTrack also becomes preeminent due to me. My co-founder of PixelTrack, Sanjay Shenoy builds his personal brand through me, through PixelTrack and becomes preeminent.
When people talk about SEO, they get lost in the technical terms. Yes, backlinks, on-page SEO, keyword research, etc. are important but the most important of it all is to build a brand.
A strong brand will naturally benefit SEO in every possible way. Google will reward brand mentions and sites with tons of brand name searches. People will not hesitate to link to a well-known brand. People will be more likely to click on a well-known and trustworthy brand on the search results and social media feeds than other brands.
For example, if you see an ad for the latest Search Advertising Tips on your Facebook Feed from two different people, one is someone that you do not know, and the other person is DigitalDeepak, which ad are you more likely to click on? My ad of course. Because you have heard about me before and you are confident about the quality of the content I create. Even if the other ad performs better on a blind split test, I might be able to get a higher CTR just because of my brand recall.
Out of all the above 5 ways I’ve mentioned that helped me increase my organic traffic, building a brand is what has helped me the most in SEO. It might look counter-intuitive, but it’s the truth. You have to align your marketing and branding strategy to build trust among users and that’s all it takes to win in the SEO game.

Final Words

I hope this detailed case study has helped you get insights into my SEO strategy. This is an equivalent strategy that we follow for all the clients of PixelTrack. This is the same strategy that I teach in detail in my SEO mastery course.
I decide to follow an equivalent strategy to urge to 10,000+ users each day from organic search. And I hope I will achieve it within a few years. I will update this article when I get there.

For more details visit Best SEO agencies in Bangalore for best SEO services in Bangalore.