How I grew Orai’s organic traffic by 27X in 9 months – Part 1

I knew nothing about marketing when I started as an entrepreneur back in 2014. During that time, I read many ‘how to drive traffic to your website’ articles on the internet. My team tried everything under the sun to generate traffic to my website, www.explorate.in (my first venture). However, most of these methods failed because of one of the following reasons:

1. Spray and pray techniques that did not lead to any result
2. SEO tactics drove low intent traffic to explorate

It is now my 8th year as a marketer, and a lot has changed. Many of my articles and landing pages rank on the first page. I have been able to drive millions of dollars worth of revenue for companies that I worked for. 

After my stint at Rocketium as the Head of Growth, I joined Orai Inc on 13th July 2020. One of the growth objectives was to drive high intent traffic to the Orai website via the blog to convert them to mobile installs down the funnel.

Here’s a sneak peek into what I was able to achieve in 10 months after joining Orai:

Over these months, I set up an engine in place with foolproof processes that helped me grow daily traffic 27 times. During this period, the monthly traffic rose from 3.3 K in June-July to 50K in the month of mid-March-April 2021. 

In this two-part blog series, I will reveal my secrets to achieving insane organic traffic growth for your website that you can implement for less than $370 a month. By the end of the two-part series, I guarantee that you will have a playbook that will help achieve similar results for your website. So I suggest that you bookmark it for later reference. 

I have packed eight years of organic marketing knowledge into one piece. So take your time reading and implementing the various tactics explained in this article. Remember, as a marketer; you want to look for progress, not perfection. You will see results even if you pick 2-3 steps that I discuss in the articles.

So let’s dive into it already!

Step 1: Keyword research

Keyword research is the foundation for organic marketing success. Selecting the right keywords is part science and part art. I started my keyword research for Orai with three keyword families – ‘speech,’ ‘public speaking,’ and ‘presentations.’ These are my parent keywords/keyphrases. I used SEMrush’s keyword tool to download a list of phrase match keywords that contains these keywords. 

Before downloading, I used SEMrush’s keyword filter tool to filter out low-hanging fruits that give the buck the best bang. I selected keywords that have 1000+ search volumes and keyword difficulty less than 70. I wanted to focus on keywords that are easier to rank because our domain rating was poor at the time. 

Generally speaking, go for 1000+ volumes if you are concerned with a B2C website. The volume range tends to be lower for a B2B website. The degree of Keyword difficulty that makes sense depends on your website authority. Selecting the volume and keyword difficulty range that makes sense for your business is the art. 

After downloading the list of keywords, I calculated the efficiency coefficient, which I define as the ratio of volume to keyword difficulty. You can come up with your formula depending on your priorities by multiplying the numerator with factors that impact your strategy positively (e.g., volume – the more volume a keyword has, the more likely you are to drive more traffic) and numerator by factors that impact your strategy negatively (e.g., keyword difficulty – the higher the keyword difficulty that more challenging it is to rank)

Please note that keyword difficulty and domain authority scores differ if you use Ahrefs for keyword research.

Now comes the most tedious part of the keyword research. You have to go through each keyword one by one and see whether it makes sense for your business while clustering them into logical groups.

The keyword ‘persuasive speech topics’ makes sense for Orai, while ‘mommy speech therapy’ does not. We are in the business of public speaking and not speech therapy. As shown in the image, I have also clustered ‘persuasive speech topics,’ ‘persuasive speech ideas,’ and ‘persuasive speech topics for college’ under one cluster called persuasive.

Step 2: Hiring the best writers

Once you have done your keyword research, it is time to hire the best writers out there to write your content. I prefer working with freelancers for content writing because of the following reasons:

1. Hiring an in-house content writer is expensive
2. In-house writers might require domain knowledge training
3. Hiring is a painstaking activity that takes time

I used freeup.net to hire my writers. I found iWriting Solutions, a copywriting agency based in the Philippines, and highly recommend their services. [I am not paid to recommend them to you]

You can also use the following sites to hire freelance writers:

1. Upwork
2. Problogger
3. Indeed 
4. TextBroker

If you prefer developing an in-housing team, then make sure that you read the article titled ‘How Any Writer Can Write SEO Content ‘by contentdistribution.com.

Step 3: Preparing the content brief

I would rate the content brief as the second most critical part of your content marketing process. Content brief is the single source of truth that acts as a communication tool between you, the writer, and the one who manages the writers. It is an opportunity for you to document what you expect from the writers. Be as specific as possible, and do not leave anything to chance.

I divided my content brief into the following key sections:

Keywords:

Keywords are the most crucial part of your brief. It would be best if you communicate your priorities for the article. I include three types of keywords in my article:

1. Focus keyword (1 keyword) is the single most important keyword of your article. I select the one with the highest ‘Coefficient of efficiency’ in a particular keyword cluster (refer to step 1 t understand ‘Coefficient of efficiency’). In a 2500 word article, your focus keyword needs to appear 15-20 times, including in the article’s title and at least one heading.
2. The primary keyword (1 keyword) is the second most important keyword in your article. The primary keyword is the keyword that ranks second when a cluster is arranged by descending order of Coefficient of efficiency. In a 2500 word article, the primary keyword should ideally appear 10-12 times, including at least one heading or subheading.
3. Secondary keywords (6-8 keywords) are the keywords that should appear across your article 5-6 times each. These are the keywords with a low coefficient of efficiency value in the concerned keyword cluster. Go back to step 1 to understand more about the Coefficient of efficiency. 

Questions to include:

Questions to include section gives a list of questions that the writer must use, preferably as headings or subheadings. You can use the SEMrush content marketing section or Ahref’s questions section to find commonly asked questions about the topic in consideration. 

Writing style reference: 

The writer would appreciate it if you could reference the writing style you want to see in your article. I prefer a persuasive style of writing. I like Nick Jordan’s writing style in the article ‘How Any Writer Can Write SEO Content.’

Steps to writing the best content ever:

Just ask the writer to adhere to the following steps:

1. Average length of the article: 2500
2. Google search all your target keywords: Focus, primary and secondary
3. Read the top 5-10 articles that appear for each keyword.
4. Prepare an outline that includes title, headings, subheadings, and media ideas (images/videos)
5. The last part of the outline should note the styles of articles that come on the first page: Listicles, infographics, long articles, short sales pages, landing pages, etc.
6. Summarize and transcribe the best tips of each into a new blog post on your site and make sure you go in-depth
7. Make the article better and longer by adding new information, including media such as images and links to Youtube videos (note that you don’t necessarily need to produce the YT videos yourself, you can link to others!

Hooks and open loops

Deliverables checklist for the first draft

1. Meta Title
2. Meta Description
3. Slug
4. Cover Image
5. Videos
6. Images
7. Use keywords as specified
8. Utilize hooks
9. Use open loops
10. Three sets of bullets
11. Three lists
12. Two tables
13. 8+ h2s
14. 5+ internal links
15. 5+ external links

Make sure the writer cross-checks each of these elements. 

Here’s a sample of the content brief for ‘Persuasive Speech Topic’ that I prepared on Notion.so:

That brings me to the end of part 1 in the two-part series titled ‘How I grew Orai’s traffic by 27X in 10 months.’ Let me know if you found this piece helpful. I can reveal more of the marketing secrets I used to generate millions of dollars of revenue for different companies.