Initial Traffic
60,000 /day (1.8 M/Mo)
Six Moths After We Started Working
160,000 /day (4.8 M/Mo)
SEO Strategies Used
-
Link Baiting/Link Earning
A lot of experts talk about creating content that automatically gets linked to by the top blogs, but few experts and companies are actually able to do it. I will take 2 examples of how we did it at 91Mobiles
1. The Idea of Concept Phone: We started with the Google Nexus-6 concept phone. The idea immediately caught fire and it went crazy viral. All the popular and established tech and gadget blogs like GSM Arena, Indian-Express and many others linked back to us. After that, concept phones became a regular growth hack at 91Mobiles and now they have 10s if not hundreds of concept phones. The reason why concept phones naturally do better than normal feature blog posts is they give shape to people’s imagination. Everyone wants to know what the iPhone 8 would look like and top blogs want to talk about it. But concept phones are incredibly difficult to create compared to feature articles. You need imagination, graphics, and 3D modeling skills to create a believable concept phone. But once you create it, top blogs can just borrow your hard work by giving you a backlink.
2. The Phone Finder Tool: At the time when it was created, 91Mobile’s phone finder was one of the few tools where you could filter almost every existing phone based on your preferred parameters like price range, display size, RAM, camera quality … naturally, it attracted a lot of backlinks from top publications.
Here’s a tip if you want to earn links– Don’t just create blog posts with images, gifs and embedded videos, anyone can do that. Go a step beyond. Create something (maybe a tool) that’s hard to create and needs some expertise. It will need some investment but trust me it’s worth it. Because if it’s useful the top blogs will want to talk about it. Hence, they will have no option but to link back to you.
Or don’t take my word for it- hear Neil Patel and Eric Siu ranting about the effectiveness of tools in this marketing school podcast.
-
On-Page SEO
Again, it is normal on page SEO stuff like keyword rich headings, URLs, image optimization, effective usage of search console, internal linking, keyword research, controlling duplicate content etc. The standard on page SEO drill. But when you are a huge site with thousands of pages, getting all these ‘standard’ on page factors in place can have a huge impact on the overall traffic. Up to the extent of increasing traffic per month by hundreds of thousands and even millions. See how Neil Patel added 5 million to Gawkers traffic with just on page SEO. Sadly Gawker was destined to die. I am actually kinda happy it did. Thank you, Peter Thiel!
-
Widget Distribution
We had WordPress widgets that we used to build no-follow and sometimes do follow links. That boosted referral traffic and even SEO score. This kind of shit used to work then, but it does not work today. So use it with care. In fact, I suggest don’t use it at all.
-
Guest Blogging
This just keeps coming. Despite it’s shitty ROI even high traffic blogs seem to be obsessed with guest blogging. If you are wondering why. Here’s the hack- The ROI is not shitty if you can get 1000-1200 decent articles for less that $8-$10. That’s what happens when you have a team of Indian writers working for you who are supposed to submit at least 100 articles a month. The SEO guy gives a sheet of all the target keywords with titles, meta descriptions, and URLs. Then the writers get it done. You pitch to the smaller (more targetted) niche blogs who are happy to get ‘a post written by an expert’ in exchange for an outbound link. If they are still reluctant, you just have to tell them ‘Imagine how knowing me can benefit you in the future’.
The result- In under $15/piece, you get a contextual editorial backlink from a relevant niche website with a dedicated reader base. Not bad eh!
For those of you who are already thinking, this is so shady- well, open your eyes. Everyone gets what he wants, the writes, the SEO guy, the smaller bloggers, and the company. In this arrangement, no one looses. Try it. Maybe even you can do it and succeed.
Challenges
Crunch Target (266% Traffic) for an already successful website in a hyper competitive niche of mobiles and gadgets.
When We Left
260,000/day (7.8 M/Mo)
One year after we left
220,000/day (6.6 M/Mo)
Note:
Everywhere in this post I say WE because this is a project that I did in collaboration with my mentor and buddy Sanjay Negi who I still think is a great SEO but I kick his ass when it comes to overall content marketing.
And for those who are asking why we left 91Mobiles when we were doing so well, either we or the company was too ambition. In either case, I choose not to reveal.