How to Increasing Search Engine Traffic by 200%

7 Lessons I learned from Increasing My Search Engine Traffic by 200% in 6 Months

I’m a huge fan of organic traffic (which is pretty much Google these days…), because it is one of the best sources of traffic to a website that can be consistent without you actually having to keep doing the same thing over and over again.

One thing, though, is that I hate complicated aspects of SEO; I want to keep things as simple as possible, and I’m not interested in cramming all SEO slogans that exist.

Last year, I decided to do something that changed how I viewed SEO completely; I spent a whole week writing 31 guest posts that were submitted to smaller blogs, and I focused on a few selected pages on my blog. The result just 6 months after has been stunning; I was able to increase my traffic by around 200% in 6 months.

Now, when I say that I increased my traffic by 200% in 6 months, I’m not just referring to a short increase in visitors. I’m talking about growing from 35,000 visitors 6 months before the challenge, to 94,000+ visitors just 6 months after. That’s a huge increase of over 60,000 visitors in 6 months, for just one week of work.

The main point of this article, however, is to share the major lessons I learned during the process. Some of these lessons are stunning, and they will probably debunk major SEO myths you’re already familiar with.

While the increase in data is subjective, I’m pretty sure the challenge contributed significantly to the traffic increase; I didn’t do anything after the challenge to help my SEO, and I noticed an increase of 100+ visitors a day just 10 days after the challenge.

Below are some of the major lessons I learned from increasing my SEO traffic by 200% in 6 months.

1. Guest Blogging Still Works

Guest blogging is currently the most trending marketing tactic online today, and it is completely overhyped if you don’t know how to use it to your advantage.

The thing about writing guest posts for big blogs is that you get a few hundred visitors the week the guest post goes live, and the traffic dies down gradually over the week. Nowadays, guest blogging on a big blog might not even send you up to 100 visitors the same month it is published, due to the fact that almost every post on the blog is a guest post. However, when I calculated the amount of traffic I got per guest post in 6 months, each blog I wrote for sent an average of 1,900 visitors.

If you consider the fact that all the blogs I wrote for combined sent me less than 150 visitors directly when the guest post was published, and that you’ve probably never heard of any of them, I think that’s impressive.

The difference, however, is that the traffic isn’t directly from those blogs. It is from the increase in search engine traffic that they influenced.

Guest blogging still works, not by going about it the traditional way, but by developing a smart approach focused on helping you get the best return on investment. For me, the best way to get the best return on investment was to build backlinks, and it was a really smart decision indeed.

What more? Those 31 guest posts for smaller blogs you’ve probably never heard of outperformed every guest post I’ve ever written for a big blog; not because the blogs are better, but because I had a strategy toward the challenge. I’d have gotten better results from a big blog, if I had a strategy.

In other words, guest blogging still works, but only if you can develop a strategy.