SEO Success Story And Case Study On Website Growth Hacking
Here’s a little context to this wonderful SEO success story. The experimental hobby website of mine is in the gaming niche.
Welcome SEO enthusiast, there’s a ton to learn from this case study. Enjoy the read!
I published the 1st web page (home page) of this website on March 31st, 2022. Since that date, 21 web pages have been published, this includes web pages like Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy and Affiliate Disclaimer.
In reality, there’s around 15 pages that actually contain valuable content around a board game. It’s NOT a lot of meat and potatoes in terms of content! However, it’s top-notch quality content. The web pages have been well optimized and have followed a successful SEO-driven process.
Keep reading, I’ll tell you all about it and share my strategy so you can replicate the process and write your own SEO success story.
The last web page to be published was on Dec 8th, 2023. That’s slightly over 1.5 years from the first to the last published page. To summarize, that’s less than 20 web pages with content in less than 2 years. That’s almost one web page per month.
Publishing one web page per month is attainable for ANYONE, no matter how complex the subject matter is. This process is certainly repeatable for any niche/industry and can be partially automated with the help of A.I tools.
Although these results aren’t typical, your odds of achieving similar success increase greatly if you follow the step-by-step system I’ve been implementing. It’s the same system that helped me generate over 1.15 million impressions and 63,400 clicks to my experimental website.
Keyword Research For Niche Website
There are plenty of keyword research softwares at your disposal. Mangools happens to be one of my favourites for its clear layout, easy-to-read dashboard and the plethora of SEO features it offers.
It’s a world-class tool for keyword research and has played a massive role in my digital marketing SEO success stories over the last 7 years. This SEO software is worth every penny and dime, and then some!
Well-optimized websites that rank at the top of search engines like Google usually have a thorough keyword research process in place, but not all of them do!
This is where opportunity comes knockin’! Here’s where I suggest you should start.
Using your keyword research tool, make a list of high-ROI, highly searched and low competition keywords. Creating content with these keyword phrases will increase your odds of getting more web traffic for FREE.
Mangools provides all the data you need to do this task. Let me give you an inside look of growth hacking a website with proper keyword planning.
How I Growth Hacked My Website With White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO means doing legitimate SEO and using the best practices in the industry. Black Hat SEO is frowned upon in Google’s eyes. Essentially, you’re trying to game the system through shady SEO tactics. Gray Hat SEO is somewhere in between.
If you ever get caught doing Black Hat SEO, your website is at great risk of tanking in the SERPs. This happens time and time again to websites doing Black Hat tactics after Google makes a core algorithm change.
Now here’s the growth hack from my niche gaming website. I targeted keyword sentences that looked like the following during a period of isolation:
- Play {boardgame} with 2 people
- Can you play {boardgame} with 2 players
- {boardgame} 2 players
- 2 player {boardgame} rules
There are many more similar versions of the keyword sentences listed above. There were a couple of dozen similar keyword phrases.
How Long Does It Take To Get Results With SEO?
It only took a couple of months before my new niche website ranked 1st, 2nd or 3rd for these types of keyword phrases. The website was outranking all my competitors who had stronger website metrics then ours. The SEO successful story was unfolding right in front of my eyes. See image below.
Some of these keyword sentences had averages of 1000-5000 visits per month. Hypothetically, if you ranked in the Top 3 spots in the SERPs for 10 of these phrases, your website would generate around 10,000-15,000 visits per month.
The number of visits vary depending on seasonality of course. Christmas season usually delivers an influx of website visitors for board game niches.
The hack here was coming up with a gap in the market of this classic board game. During a couple years of isolation, people were encouraged to remain in small numbers whether they agreed with it or not.
With this in mind, there’s the old saying that goes something like “When one door closes, another one opens”.
Strategic Keyword Thinking
After some keyword due diligence on Mangools, I determined that isolated individuals might be “forced” to play a classic +3 player game with only 2 individuals due to global restrictions at the time. Naturally, these individuals go on search engines like Google to seek answers to their questions.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it gave those individuals on Google some answers and it gave my website some FREE traffic!
“{game} with 2 players”
That’s the keyword I was ready to target and rank for. This is where a well-crafted and optimized webpage on this focused keyword phrase has delivered a ton of bang for its buck. If you look at the image above, you’ll notice that the proof is in the pudding. A brand new website with low website metrics can outrank websites with superior authority and inbound links.
Keyword Research Example
Let’s look at a keyword research example below. Let’s pretend we are making a list of keywords for a fishing niche website.
You’ll notice the red arrow in the image below pointing to our typed-in keyword phrase “top fishing rods”.
You have the option of selecting a specific location as well as the language. In this example, we’ve chosen Anywhere and Any Language.
Three options are offered in terms of the keyword list provided. The list is based on your typed-in search query by the red arrow.
Here are the 3 options Mangools provides:
1) Related keywords list
2) Autocomplete list
3) Questions list.
We’ve chosen Related keywords in this example, the font is highlighted in blue in the image below.
In the image below, the red arrow is pointing to acronyms. They mean the following:
- Trend = search volume trend in last 12 months
- Search = average # of monthly searches
- CPC = average cost-per-click
- PPC = level of competition for the specific keyword phrase
- KD = keyword SEO difficulty
How To Analyze Your Keyword Tool Dashboard
When populating these lists, you’ll want to analyze two things.
Firstly, you’ll want to look at highly searched terms. Simply click on the word “Search” in the gray section, like in the above picture. This will organize the keyword phrases from the most searched to the least.
Secondly, scan through the KD (keyword difficulty) section with the red, yellow and green colors (on the left half of the image). Underneath the section where the red arrow is pointing.
You’re looking for dark to light green numbers. This indicates the keyword phrase has a low profile strength (LPS), a.k.a. It’s an easier keyword phrase to rank for at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs) like Google.
- Red = High LPS
- Yellow = Medium LPS
- Green = Low LPS
Keyword Analyzing Tip
The trick to SEO success is to find highly-searched keyword terms with a low KD rating, ideally with a green number. The darker the green, the easier it is to rank for that phrase or sentence.
When I scroll down the list of keyword sentences that Mangools provided me, you’ll notice a keyword with a dark green number of 14. See image above where the red arrow is pointing.
This is a great keyword sentence for our fishing niche website to rank for. I would add this to my list of phrases I want to rank for.
The keyword phrase “best brand fly rods” has an average of 310 monthly searches and has low competition. The lower the KD score is, the better it is for the blogger trying to rank for that keyword sentence.
A low KD rating possibly means the top ranking websites/URLs are neither authoritative nor well-optimized for this specific search query. This is what I call LOW-HANGING FRUIT KEYWORDS.
SEO Success 101: Making A List Of Related Phrases To Your Target Keyword Sentence
Make a list of these low-hanging fruit keywords. For a new content publisher, this list will be invaluable to jumpstart your traffic growth. Your new website will have a better chance of ranking at the top of SERPs for these keyword sentences. Once your website is more established and authoritative in your niche, you can target the high ROI phrases.
After a bit more research trying to find highly-searched keywords with a low KD, I found the phrase “top surf fishing rods”. It has a monthly search average of 3,000 with a 12 KD rating.
This is really good for us!
On the right half of the image above, you’ll notice more information on our term “top surf fishing rods”.
At the top right section where the graph is, you’ll notice the keyword popped off at the beginning of the global isolation era, between Jan 2019 and July 2020.
In the bottom right section, you’ll notice website URLs with some metrics and numbers. This is the ranking order that Google has chosen for this specific keyword term. Here are the meanings of those acronyms:
- DA = Domain Authority. A ranking score by MOZ that predicts how well a domain will rank.
- PA = Page Authority. A ranking score by MOZ that predicts how well a specific page will rank.
- CF = Citation Flow. It’s a metric from the SEO software company Majestic, that expresses how authoritative a website URL is based on a score from 0 to 100.
- TF = Trust Flow. It’s a measure of a site’s perceived trustworthiness based on the quality and reputation of its backlinks.
- Links = Number of external backlinks pointing back to URL.
- FB = Number of Facebook shares.
- LPS = Link Profile Strength
- EV = Estimated visits per month
SEO Success Tip: How To Rank Less Authoritative Sites on Google
The #4 and #5 websites ranked for “top surf fishing rods” shown in the image above have lower website metrics and LPS ratings compared to their competitors. This means, their URLs for this term are more optimized than most since they are ranking amongst competitors with higher website and webpage metrics and higher LPS numbers.
They are doing something right!
It could also mean, the competition is weak and therefore, search engines like Google are forced to rank URL web pages with weaker metrics. This means, there’s an opportunity for you and your website to rank at the top of the SERPs for this specific keyword sentence.
Their EV rating indicates that they are respectively earning an average of 215 and 149 URL visitors per month for this keyword sentence.
SEO Success Story Secrets – How To Create Optimized Articles With Chat GPT
Imagine if you could attain these numbers for a dozen keyword sentences? You’re looking at +/-2000 visitors per month. Powerful stuff!
Your efforts will compound themselves and your future articles will have increased their odds of getting free web traffic and more exposure quicker.
Optimized blog articles with good engagement (social media shares and inbound links), will generate positive results for your website. It will look authoritative and credible in the eyes of search engines like Google.
Therefore, they’re more likely to rank your website over others because the search engines have deemed you as a trusted and credible source of information.
One way to craft your strategy to outrank your competitors is to study the web pages that are ranking for this specific target keyword phrase.
Studying Your Competitors
Take notice of certain things such as:
- The length of the article.
- How many subheadings do they have? How many H2 and H3 meta tags in the article?
- The style of their displayed article.
- How many images/videos did they include?
- Are there any outbound and/or inbound links? If so, how many?
- How many direct and indirect keywords have they included in their article?
I highly recommend leveraging tools like Chat GPT to help you summarize, scan and analyze these websites. Ask the A.I. tool to convey the important variables that you need to include in your article/content. You’ll need to complete this step in order to give you the best odds of outranking your competitors.
Custom Chat GPT Prompt To Write Your Blog Articles
Here’s an example of a Chat GPT prompt that can help you create an article or blog post that will outrank your competitors. In this scenario, we are currently trying to rank for “top surf fishing rods”.
Custom Chat GPT Prompt
“You are a blog writer for {insert your website}. Familiarize yourself with the writing style by analyzing the latest published blog articles. Your writing style is {witty} and/or {professional} and/or {at a 3rd grade level}. I’d like you to write a first draft of an article titled “top surf fishing rods”.
Before you start writing the article, please analyze each of the top ranking websites in the Google search engine results pages that are listed below.
When writing your first draft, take into account the length of the articles, the titles, the meta titles and meta descriptions, the sub-titles, the number of outgoing links, the number of related keyword sentences to “top surf fishing rods” and all other important search engine optimization ranking factors that Google takes into consideration for successful SEO when ranking websites for a specific keyword sentence:
1) {insert Website #1}
2) {Website #2}
3) {Website #3}
When you include important or jaw-dropping statistics about our main title of “top surf fishing rods”, I will need you to provide the source of the respective statistic provided in the article.
Make sure the link of the source is still current and doesn’t redirect to a broken link web page or a 404 page. Avoid inserting any research statistic that was completed before the year 2020.
Analyze the top ranking website URLs listed above and provide me with an average number of images, infographics and videos on their respective web page.
In addition to the first draft of the article, provide {three to five} top websites that are resourceful for the readers of this article.”
Free To Use Chat GPT Prompt
Feel free to copy and paste this prompt and amend it according to your website and niche. Friendly reminder, Chat GPT isn’t perfect, and neither is the prompt above. Tweak it as you see fit. You will need to fact check and proofread what this wonderful A.I. tool produces.
How To Optimize Your Webpage’s Metadata
Every new blog article will require new meta in the backend of its web page. In this example below, we are completing our meta data on a WordPress website with the help of a plug-in called Yoast.
The meta data shown in the image below was created for this article on the Johnny Moxx blog.
How To Optimize The Yoast SEO Section Of A Webpage For SEO Success
In section A as shown in the image below, this is where you’ll enter your Focus Keyword. In this scenario for this article, it’s “SEO Success Story”. After doing my due diligence with keyword research, that’s the term I landed on to use for this blog article.
For our fishing niche website scenario, you would type in “Top Surf Fishing Rods” in section A. In section B, this is where you’ll write your SEO title. This is the title that appears in underlined and blue font on Google’s SERPs. You can see the Google preview that is displayed in the image below.
Underneath section B, you can see a green bar. This bar indicates whether your SEO title is well-optimized or not. You’ll see the bar turn red if your title is too short or too long. Best practice is to include your focus keyphrase in your SEO Title, your slug and your meta description.
The slug is what appears in the URL after (.com/). For this article, the slug is seo-success-story as it appears in the current URL.
Section C holds the meta description area. This is what appears underneath your SEO title in the SERPs, along with the date at the very beggining. You can check out the preview of the mobile result as shown in our image below. Strive for a green bar just like the SEO title. If your meta description is too short or too long, the color will turn orange.
Yoast Readability Section Of Webpage
Section D holds 4 tabs. You’ll want to complete every tab as much as possible. You’ll notice in the image below that we’ve chosen the Readability tab to display from Section D.
In Section E, here you can find suggestions to further optimize your webpage and the content included in it. Strive for a green face beside the word Readability and SEO.
Once you’ve completed the Schema and Social tabs, do one last full run-through of your web page on desktop, tablet and mobile. Afterwards, it’s time to press that publish button.
Voila! You’ve published a well-optimized blog article. Now, the waiting game begins for your SEO success story.
To expedite the Google crawling process, I copy the URL of the blog article and head over to my Google Search Console (GSC).
After clicking on the URL inspection option in my GSC as indicated in section F in the image below, I paste the URL in section G and press ENTER.
Last step of the successful SEO process is to click Request Indexing as shown in section H. After a couple seconds of loading, your GSC will indicate that this URL is in the queue to be crawled by Google. The proverbial ball is now in Google’s hands.
Rinse and repeat this process, and you greatly increase your odds of increasing traffic to your website. The more traffic you generate, the more monetization opportunities will be available at your disposal.
How To Monetize Your Niche Website – Turn Your Successful SEO Website Into A Cashflow Machine
There is no perfect process when it comes to monetizing your website. Nowadays, a web publisher can get really creative when it comes to monetizing their website. Here a few of my favourites methods to generate some cash flow:
- Building an email list through a lead magnet opt-in from website traffic. You can monetize your emails through one-time offers, courses, discounts and promotions.
- Running ads through an authoritative platform like Google Adsense or partnering with brands to advertise on your website (maybe even your emails).
- Brand sponsorships. Offer different ways to promote a brand. This could be a mention in your article or displaying an image/video on a web page.
- Guest blog articles. Offer a writer a blog article spot on your website to drive traffic to their desired guest writer’s destination. Make sure their content is congruent with the content on your website. You wouldn’t want to confuse your readers or turn them off with off-brand content.
- Create and sell courses/tutorials offered on your website. More quality web traffic = more sales!
How I Monetized My Hobby Website
My initial game plan for monetizing my website was Amazon. However, the reality for me is that Amazon has been a total bust for me. I quickly learned that it wasn’t going to be my main source of income derived from the website.
My click-through-ratio has been terrible. There are a couple of reasons why this could be the case:
- Bad Banner Placement On Website
- Not Enough Content On Website
- Niche Isn’t Ideal To Convert Sales On Amazon
- The Niche Has Low Ticket Items And No High Ticket Items
- Not Sending Enough Emails To My List Of +700 Subscribers
More thorough research is required to pin-point the exact cause of the low earnings on Amazon, but I digress.
This quarter (two months of data, July 1st – Aug 31st 2024), I made a whopping $9.64 from 260 clicks. 4 Ordered and Shipped items with a 1.54% conversion rate. See image below.
Not great! However, there are lessons learned here. The website was still garnering a decent amount of traffic and it was growing week by week. The opportunity to bring in more cash flow was there, I simply needed to figure out how to do so.
Monetizing Your Website With Google Adsense
Right after Amazon in the pecking order, I thought Google Adsense was going to be a great asset that would produce a ton of cold hard cash.
Wrong again!
First off, who likes seeing ads when they peruse websites? No one does.
So it’s kind of a double-edged sword as a web publisher. The only way you get paid is when you show ads.
If you’re like me, there are probably a million questions running through your mind as you learn how to use Google Adsense on your website.
- How many ads should you display on your website?
- Is there a perfect number per page?
- Are video ads worth more?
- Aren’t ads going to affect the time per session?
- Will ads affect my rankings?
- Who’s advertising on my website through Google Adsense? What kind of ads are showing?
The good news is, Google has features that automate 90% of the work you need to do. Furthermore, if you’re looking to enhance your “ad game” for your website, consider using an ad publishing company like Ezoic that focuses on intelligent technology to enhance online content. One that aims to improve revenue, performance, and traffic for publishers.
3rd Party Advertising Tool – Ezoic
Ezoic in a nutshell, cuts hours of ad operations and management. Their website claims to double your ad earnings with their A.I. Ad Tester. The world’s largest website testing and machine learning platform for websites. Trusted By 12,000+ Sites.
Since making the transition from Google Adsense to Ezoic, my ePMV (earnings per thousand visitors) is significantly higher. With that being said, the amount of money I get from the traffic my niche website generates is enough to buy me a small coffee at McDonalds every two days.
My total in just over 5 months of using Ezoic is $110.39 USD. See screenshot below.
Alternatively to letting 3rd party businesses like Google or Ezoic manage your ads, you might want to consider building partnerships with business owners who want to advertise on your niche site. You can actually do both at the same time, like I am with the niche gaming website.
How To Partner With Businesses To Advertise On Your Website
What a wonderful opportunity for related businesses in my niche to get tailored advertisements on my website. It would be great exposure to their website/business/product/service since it’s board game related.
After a thorough search, I made a list of all the advertisers on Etsy that were in my niche or closely related to it. I did some cold-outreach to these advertisers on Etsy. In my mind, these were low-hanging fruit prospects because I knew they invested in their company through Ads on Etsy. They are advertisers, my target demographic for investing in ads on my website.
The first message was kept short and very direct.
Hi {name}, I hope you’re keeping well. What’s the best email to communicate with you to send a business proposal?
The Money Is In The Follow Up
If they engaged positively, this indicated they were willing to hear me out. Sometimes, the Etsy entrepreneurs would reply with their business email and other times, they preferred to keep the communication on the platform. All good, no issues at my end.
I sent them the following message by the respective communication method they preferred:
Hi there {name},
I’m sending you this quick note because I noticed some of your {boardgame} artistic products being advertised on Etsy. Excellent work!
Are you in a position to handle more potential buyers?
My name is Johnny, and I’m the founder of {website}, a {game} niche website with an average of +5,000 monthly visitors and growing rapidly (with 11K visitors in December 2023).
We’re looking for an Etsy Seller to partner up with who needs more potential shoppers buying their {game} products and it looks like you’d be a great fit.
If you’re interested, feel free to simply reply with a quick note saying “I’m interested”, and I will send you more information.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
All the best in 2024 {name},
Johnny
Founder of {website}
The above message offers an exciting opportunity for the business owner as they could leverage my web traffic. If I get them to say “yes, I’m interested” or “yes, I’d like to learn more”, then I’ve got them to commit twice to my messages. These are now warm leads.
The Etsy entrepreneurs want more information about this opportunity for their business. Make your offer sound new and exciting.
The Cold Messaging Stats – The Closing Rate
Out of the 15 cold messages I sent to these Etsy advertisers, 1 decided to become a client and partner up with a 1-year contract. There were a few others in the pipeline, but that’s not important for this case study.
1 in 15, that’s a 6.66% closing rate of a high ticket item ($600 USD/year or $810 CDN/year).
Way better than Amazon right!?
In addition, I get to help a small-medium business owner and entrepreneur grow his online store. It’s a win-win. This felt very rewarding, in more ways than one: financially and spiritually.
The contract was for advertising the business’ product on our niche gaming site with banner ads, included as well as in our newsletter for 1 year.
So Why Did I Stop Producing Content For The Website?
Unfortunately, my website was pigeon-holed from the start and I didn’t really see it at the time I started publishing. What I mean by that is, the ceiling of this niche website wasn’t high to start with.
The domain URL includes the name of the board game, and the website has reached its plateau in terms of low-hanging fruits for keyword phrases. I can’t really spread out beyond the board game. I’ve tapped out the list of keywords that I can realistically rank for that have search volumes high enough to make it worth my time.
It would require additional blogging on my part to maintain the growth. Blogging on its own is not the issue, but the passion to write about a certain topic isn’t always easy. With that being said, there’s still a chance that I find a way to consistently produce content for the niche website.
At the time of writing, I’m looking to sell the website and move on to bigger and better things.
The fact that there’s no plausible high-ticket item I can sell to website visitors, in my opinion, has led me to pursue other ventures. Like this one!
I’ve decided to zone-in and focus on serving my digital marketing community instead of the hobby gaming community. The impact is bigger and our efforts provide real results that change people’s lives!
Knowing what I know now, I might’ve chosen a different niche back in March of 2022. A niche with more options to scale monetization with low and high-ticket items.
I chose an old board game, not an ideal candidate for selling related high-ticket items. However, the good news is that I was able to rank a NEW website from scratch for a dozen highly searched keyword sentences with very low competition.
Conclusion
SEO, what a beautiful thing! It goes to show that if you follow a proven process, good things will happen. The delayed gratification of successful SEO is not for the faint of heart nor for those looking to get rich quick.
However, having a well-rounded website is the foundation to a thriving online business and there’s plenty of opportunity for business owners. Once all the SEO systems are put in place, you can generate unlimited “passive” income on a recurring basis. It’s a fantastic business model.
Are you looking to hire an SEO expert for your website?
Click here to book a Zoom call directly in my calendar.
Did you like this article? If so, you might like this one as well: https://johnnymoxx.com/marketing-activities/
Got a business that sells services and/or products? I highly recommend maximizing your efforts in SEO, it’s definitely time to consider it.
If you sell locally, you NEED to be optimizing your Google Business Profile and generating those 5-star reviews. Those reviews are worth their weight in gold.
You can repurpose them EVERYWHERE you communicate with your audience. In your website, on social media, in your local newspaper, in your email signature, your webinars, and much more!
Google still takes the majority of the search engine pie over its competitors. However, the search engine landscape is evolving rapidly with Microsoft’s Chat GPT entering the room and other A.I. search engines following closely. Consider this in your long-term SEO planning.
Final Thoughts
This SEO success story is proof that you’re still capable of ranking a new website in 2025.
Growing this niche website to over 1 Million impressions, in addition to acquiring real paying customers and monetizing the site with 3rd party ads has been really gratifying for a digital marketing entrepreneur like myself. It’s been quite the rollercoaster ride, and I’m grateful to have ridden it.
It’s now time to crank it up, and build the world’s savviest digital marketing community in the world, one blog article at a time. Thanks for reading!
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