35% Growth In Free Traffic With 3 Simple Steps With SEMRush

Last updated on August 15th, 2018 at 05:09 am

Every blogger wants more of it, because we know that the more free traffic we can get the more likely we’ll be able to sell more affiliate products, sell our own products or services. Well, today, I thought I would share 3 simple steps that you can start using to increase your page views so you can sell more.

One of the things that I am always doing is trying to find ways that I can improve my blog and get more traffic without spending countless hours online. As you know, right now, I am publishing new content 3x per week.

I know that’s a lot of new content every week, but that’s the thing that you need to understand about content marketing. You’re going to need a lot of content to boost your traffic.

How Many Blog Posts Should I Publish Per Week?

I see this question asked so many times in Facebook groups, heck, I’ve probably asked this question when I first started my blog. If you’ve asked it then you know that the answer will vary.

It all depends on what blog growth stage you’re at. Yes, there are different levels for every blogger and this is the main reason that you never want to compare yourself to other bloggers.

Related: How to Get Free Website Traffic Using Old Content

It’s hard to compare your blogging journey to theirs when you have no clue what stage they are at. So all you can do is take this response with a grain of salt and use common sense when you’re wondering how many blog posts you should publish per week.

Beginning Bloggers

If you’re a brand new blogger who hasn’t even published your first blog post or has 1-5 blog posts, you’re going to need to churn out some new content. This strategy will not work for you until you have at least 40-50 blog posts in your blog archives.

Instead of focusing on refreshing your old content, you need to be focused on writing fresh SEO (search engine optimized content) and promoting that content to drive traffic.

Related: How to Use Keywords on Pinterest to Explode Your Traffic

Once you have some content built up and it is at least 3 months old, you can start updating your old blog posts.

Older Bloggers

If you’ve been blogging for at least six months or longer, chances are you have written several blog posts that may be able to drive more traffic to your blog. At the time of this writing, I have over 200 blog posts in my blog archives.

Not all of these articles drive traffic to my blog. One of the biggest mistakes that I made when I started this blog is I didn’t pay attention to the competitiveness of the keywords that I was using for my blog posts.

If you’re making the same mistake that I was making, I highly recommend picking up my JumpStart Your Blog Traffic. It will walk you through step-by-step on how to find low competitive keywords.

I know we all want those keywords that get 1,000’s of searches per month. But what good is it writing content for those high search volume keywords if you’ll never be able to rank on the first page of Google?

If you want to increase the traffic to your site, it all starts with choosing the right keywords.

3 Simple Steps to Get More Free Traffic From Old Posts

This post isn’t going to share some unknown secret or reveal some traffic exchanges that you can start using. I’m not even going to reveal some new or unheard of free traffic sources.

Instead, I am going to show you how you can use SEMRush to help you improve your SEO ranking to your blog posts. Yes, you can also use the Google Search Console to do this as well, but I am really loving SEMRush and it makes it so easy.

If you don’t have the money to invest in SEMRush, here’s a great tutorial that will show you how to do this using Google Search Console. I’ve used this method when I wasn’t signed up for SEMRush.

It is a paid tool, but in my opinion, it is definitely worth signing up for at least a month and making as many improvements to your blog as you can. Check out the results I’ve been getting since using the software for a little over a month.

I’ve been working hard on improving my search engine traffic because I am NOT planning on keeping SEMRush forever. I’m just running an SEO Audit, doing keyword research, and updating old blog posts. Then when I need it again later on down the road, I’ll sign back up and improve my rankings.

Here’s the improvement that I made with my organic traffic comparing June and July. You can see that my traffic grew in July. It’s been a lot of hard work, and I know that it doesn’t happen overnight. But it’s nice to start seeing the needle move in the right direction.

Step #1 Find Your Posts With Good Ranking

If you have hundreds of blog posts, then it’s probably going to be impossible to update all of them. Plus, it may not be worth your time to try to improve a blog post that will never rank on the first page of Google.

Once you see that only a handful of posts are actually driving website visitors to your blog, it’s kind of depressing.

The first thing you want to do is log into the SEMRush dashboard and see if you’re even getting any organic traffic. If you’ve been blogging for at least a year, you should be getting some traffic from the search engines.

If not, then it’s time to start learning as much as you can about how to optimize your blog posts. I recommend reading this Google Rank Brain post from Backlinko. I also spend a lot of time reading the Moz Blog.

pic organic sem rush

If you take a close look at this graph, you’ll notice that for the first full year of my blogging journey, I didn’t get any traffic from Google. The main reason is that I was writing blog posts on keywords that were just too competitive.

Now, I’ve changed my strategy and am paying more attention to the keywords that I am using for my blog posts. It does take time to brainstorm and find the right ones to write new blog posts for, but take it from me, it’s worth it.

You don’t want to spend a bunch of time publishing content that you’ll never be able to rank high for. Yes, you can build backlinks and you will need to build some.

But the last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of time building links. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather tweak my content marketing strategy and write for low competitive keywords that don’t require a bunch of links.

Step #2 Run An On Page SEO Checker

Now that you know which posts are working hard for you, but are not ranking high enough. It’s time to see if you can push them up a little bit to get them to work harder.

After all, if you can push a blog post up from the fifth spot to the third spot, you’ll notice a difference. Here’s a great article I found that explains how much traffic in the top 3 listings in the search engines will get.

Adding Your Project

You’ll probably have to add your blog as a project inside of SEMRush to use this feature? I’m not really sure, but I went ahead and created a new project inside of the dashboard.

Once you create your project then you’ll want to go to Projects >> On Page SEO Checker

If the blog post that you want to work on isn’t in there, you can import keywords and pages using different methods.

Once you’ve imported the posts that you want to work on improving then SEMRush will collect ideas that you can use to improve your rankings in the search engines.

It will help you with the following:

• Strategy ideas
• Backlink ideas
• Technical SEO ideas
• User Experience ideas
• SERP features ideas
• Semantic ideas
• Content ideas

When I first started using this method to help me improve my rankings, I was a little lost. Don’t feel like you need to implement everything that they suggest, remember, it’s just a tool and you need to use some common sense when using it.

Your goal is to optimize your blog posts and see if you can improve the ones that are already working hard for you. As you can see, I’ve managed to improve the rankings on some of mine. I’ve blurred out the information, sorry about that.

Step #3 Implement Optimization Ideas

I know you want to increase traffic to your website, and the first thing you’ll want to do is optimize all your posts. I wouldn’t recommend it, not if you’re a solopreneur who doesn’t outsource any of your blogging tasks.

Instead, you want to focus on the keywords that are ranking at the bottom of the first page or on the second or third page. Don’t worry about those keywords that are on the 10th page. It might help push it up a little bit, but I think you’ll be better of building backlinks to those posts.

Here are some things that I check before working on a blog post:

• Where am I ranking now?
• How many searches does the keyword get?
• How competitive is the keyword?
• Will I need to build a lot of backlinks? (I hate building backlinks I’d rather write new content)

How to Check the Competition of a Keyword

There are literally several ways to check the competition of a keyword, in fact, Moz has a free Chrome Addon that does it for you. When I am NOT using SEMRush, you can bet that I make it a point to use that tool to help me out.

However, in SEMRush, you can check the competition level by typing in the keyword you want to check. For instance, let’s take a look at the “walking shoes” niche. I’m getting ready to buy a new pair of shoes, so this just came to mind.

If you look closely at the phrase match report on SEMRush you will notice the KD (keyword difficulty) score for walking shoes is extremely high. I try to avoid any keyword that is over 65.

It will be extremely difficult to rank for the keyword “walking shoes.” If I was in this niche, I’d rather write a blog post on “best walking shoes for men.” It not only has a KD score of 53.75 but if people find your blog post, there’s a good chance they will make a purchase from your link.

How Much Time Will This Take?

It took me forever to use this method to help me get me more traffic. I thought that it would be too time-consuming and I would rather write new content. The truth is that it doesn’t take a lot of time to update your old blog posts using SEMRush.

You’ve already done the hard work of writing it the first time. Your old blog posts are assets that work for you 24/7. If you can update it by improving your semantic keywords or thickening the content to improve your reader experience, there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t do it.

Make The Most of Your Posts

Remember not every post is going to be worth your time. If you’re only using the free SEMRush trial, you need to make the most of it while you have it. Focus on those posts that are already working for you.

See if you can improve them by implementing the ideas that SEMRush suggests.

Once You’ve Updated Your Post

It’s time to share it just like it was a brand new post. Use your scheduler to automate your social media marketing and get your post in front of people. Post it on your Facebook page and in Facebook Groups that allow you to share your latest posts.

Don’t forget about using email marketing to get it out to your subscribers. Do whatever you can to get it out in front of as many people as possible. Eventually, people will be sharing it and it should rank higher than it did before you updated it.

Take it from me, people love sharing content that is helpful. If your writing good content that helps people, you won’t have any trouble getting free website traffic to your blog if you give it enough time.

My Biggest Regret

Is not taking the time to focus on SEO from the beginning. If you look at the graph above, you’ll notice that for the full first year, I wasn’t getting any search engine traffic. I blame that on NOT doing my keyword research correctly.

A lot of my blog posts are the beginning are either targetting extremly high competitive keywords or not targetting a keyword at all. So I’ve been going back and trying to improve them. Don’t make the same mistake as I made, make sure you use the right tools from the start.

Final Take Away

I wish I could give you a set answer on how long it will take you to see the results from updating your old blog posts. The truth is, I have no clue how long it will take. All I can tell you is that it works and this is what I have been doing for the past month and I’ve noticed an increase in my organic traffic.

The only thing I can tell you is to test it out yourself. Sign up for a free trial of SEMRush and start using it to update your old blog posts. I have no doubt that you’ll see an improvement if you don’t quit because you’re not getting fast enough results.

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Are you planning on updating your old blog posts to see if you can get them to work harder for you? Maybe you’ve already started doing it? If so let me know if this is helping you grow your blog.