Home > >

---

From 60k Visitors to 20k back up to 100k Visitors a Month? (19)

---

I have a Website which had 60.000 Visitors/Month but declined about the last year to around 20.000 Visitors.

As this section of the Forum is very empty I want to bring my website back to 60k and even more. Goal is 100k with hopefully not much effort. We will see.

Site:
- has around 100 unique Quality Pages with 600-2000 words
- has around 60 generic Pages with 300-500 words
- has 100 referring domains and around 1k backlinks total, with no dofollow Link higher than PR2
- majesticseo Citation Flow 35 and Trust Flow 20
- is non english
- is ranking on page 2 for some low/mid money but high search volume terms



So what I will try to do:
1. Buy Expired High PR Domains (just bought first PR3 for 50$)
2. Host them with different IPs
3. Create similar Content and Branding + Link to my existing domain
4. Success Hopefully..


As at least some people here have far more knowledge than I have, should I also do something else?
Also is there a difference between buying an expired domain which was previously in english about fishing and an expired domain which was for example in french and about tiers, if I link to a french car website? Or makes it no difference.

Wishing you well

---

Interesting! We haven't seen an SEO follow-along in a good long while.

I'll be looking forward to your updates.

Ideas - just a couple initially. What are your bounce rates and time on page looking like? If they're low, focusing on them might be a good first step.

Also, do you have rel=author tags set up on your site? If not, that's an easy win.

---

Thanks for the suggestions caurmen.

The BounceRate for the whole Site is around 60% and with a plugin (which pops up a read more link in the right corner) 40%, but if I disable the plugin the pageviews per visitor go slightly up. They are around 2,5 the same as time on website. Unfortunately Time spend on site and bounce rate are not an accurate reflection of user interaction, but more a relative reflection.

So do you mean with focusing on them, to focus on bad performing pages? And to improve them? Or to improve overall bounce rate etc.

---

Yep, I'd suggest finding the pages where your bounce is highest - particularly if there's also a very low time-on-page there (which is arguably a more accurate reflection of user behaviour) - and trying to improve them, as well as trying to improve site-wide engagement metrics (bounce and time on page amongst others)

The reason for that is an SEO one - it's reasonably certain that post-Panda, Google is using bounce rate and time-on-page as a ranking factor, and specifically as a flag for low-quality content. At the same time, lower bounce and higher engagement is also good for monetisation (at least, most of the time). So focusing on them is a win-win.

It's also something that you can do site-wide to a fair extent: design changes, better navigation, "read more" boxes and similar things can be implemented over the entire site and are some of the better ways to increase time on the site and on page.

---

I read about a recent test across a number of sites where keeping the bounce rate below 55% had a beneficial effect on google rankings, and therefore traffic.

---

First advice I'd give: get rid of Google analytics and start using alternatives like Clicky. You don't want google to get even more data than you really need to. If you talk to some of the big SEO guys (affiliates, not 'legit' site owners), 99% will confirm this. I'm doing a lot of SEO spam right now but was pretty 'legit' when it came to linkbuilding back 2-4 years ago. Ranked consistently in top3 for major gambling terms without any use of google analytics. It's well doable to rank without GA.

For private networks, make sure to use RELEVANT OBLs other than your moneysite. Make them look real! Your topic is let's say how to save money? Don't link to wikipedia... link to a foundation / charity on a FAQ page on how to save money or lower your living costs... Got a site for alcohol abuse? Skip wikipedia or cnn and try to find a relevant authority site, think of a forum for addicts...

You're buying domains but your domains won't be all relevant to your topic. Backlink profile won't look natural for a site in your niche unless it's previously about the same topic. Try to create backlinks to those sites and use them as buffers.

Times are over you can rank with a private network alone. Get somebody to do guest posts for you, best way to get a bit of traffic and natural links. Hit me up if you need some recommendation for this. Get social profiles like youtube, twitter, about.me, pinterest, facebook, a google + authorship and so on - then blast the hell out of those properties with pure spam. They should well handle it (expect the G+ page which is logical not to spam). Link from your money site to those social profiles to make sure google picks the connection up asap. This gives you room and a bit of safety when you start the darker stuff.

Create a blog section and hire someone to write or use stuff like WordAI. Just generate content, relevant content. Interlink those posts and every 5-7 posts link to a ranking page to get that inner juice flowing.

Hope that helps a bit, not feeling like writing down a SEO blueprint now, but that's like the very basics to do imo.

---

^^^ Quality stuff! Saved for the newsletter.

---

thanks caurmen, wozz and especially fjk87 for the great input.

fjk87 what you wrote truly reads like a great little SEO blueprint.

From your post I get the impression that it is even easier without GA. What about Webmaster-Tools? That should go too, I bet.
Well and Google Fonts?

Does it matter which kind of backlinks? No spam, but do you have favorites here?

I already set up all these accounts (one youtube video has even 60k views), but didn't link back from moneysite, is it enough to link back from the "about page" for example? Also because I never done this. Do you recommend a spam type? Like Bookmarks or Forum-posts?

I forgot to write this in the first post, the website is already built like a blog (on wordpress). So is there something special I have to think about?

Also there are around 130 internal links on each page. Especially in the Main Navigation Bar and the Sidebar (a few links are double in Navbar & Sidebar). So that I link to around 80-100 pages from every other page on the site. I get the feeling that this is not a good thing?

I upgraded the server this week so at least the pagespeed of 0,5s should be okay. Feel like that's the only thing which does not need much work. I also feel like I learned more here than in plenty of so told free "crap" advice around the net. Thanks

---

To Webmaster Tools: I didn't use it on ALL sites, though it's much less risky than GA imo.

To which kind of backlinks: contextuals best.

About youtube: make a widget or a footer where you link to your social profiles, looks sweet and sexy About page works as well though.

Don't overdo interlinking it, if you have a huge site, it's probably best to use tags in the blog section for interlinking. I dunno but I feel like 100 internal links per page in the navi alone is a bit overkill, depends on your site though, no golden rule here.

And yeah, the so called crap advice around the net is normally true statement. Shit that works won't be shared, welcome to reality

---

It's time for an update.

Traffic didn't change much, but at least there were no revers effects through some changes I made.

I installed Clicky and let GA and Clicky run parallel, the results are:
Visitors and Pages/Visitor: are nearly the same.
But BounceRate: 60% GA vs 24% Clicky
Time per Visit: 2:15 GA vs 3:30 Clicky

The cause for the difference is probably GA's way of collecting data (only by visitors action), which seems a bit inferior.
All in all I think Clicky is much easier to use, if you have the spare money give it a try. Of course there is even a free trail.

The Google+ Authorship isn't showing up, hope it will in the next days, or I have to change some things.

Also I hope to get some help with these:
1. Is Bookmarking still in? I bet not for the main page, but what about second tier links? Or only to social profiles?
2. A while ago I had "like buttons" etc. with around 20-100 likes per page on the site but I removed them, should I embed them again? (Maybe that's even a no brainer because of more traffic they give)
3. Also because freshness is a factor I counted the new posts this year: around 25, should I get this up to at least 2 per week?

Thx

---

GetClicky uses a different metric for bounces than GA, as I recall - that's why they're so different.

Personally I think GC's bounce metric is more useful (it takes into account time on page too) but of course Google's definition of "bounce" may be what they're using internally...

If you haven't seen it already, do read http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...O-Blueprint%29 - lots of great stuff in there.

---

I was gonna reply with some tips on how you could get links from guest blogging but thought it would be better as it's own thread. Check it out: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...041#post127041 - Get a few links from guest blogging and it should help your rankings/traffic.

---

didnt know there was an SEO follow along! subscribed

---

Finally a new update.
thanks aztec_ and caurmen for the infos. Don't know if I will use guest blogging for this website but I am using it for another website.

The visitors and thus the rankings didn't change much, probably because I didn't do as much as I wanted to. At least I could increase the profits with some optimizing.

The Google+ Authorship is showing up since more than 2 weeks, but doesn't seem to increase anything.
Probably I use a wrong picture and have to change it, it's like optimizing an ad. First step: I zoomed in a bit more. But I bet I have to use a different pic, because the eyes are not looking to the link and thus drawing a potential visitor away from clicking to my page.


Other Things to do:
- diversify Anchor-Text (get the feeling that google treats more than 15-30% of the same anchor-text to the same page as unnatural, what do others think?)
- increase my traffic by optimizing the titles and descriptions (at least for the top 10-20 search engine referral pages)
- also I try to look for a plugin which will automatically link all my images to one subscription page, and thus maybe increasing sales and followers if people click on the images (but changing them all manually wouldn't be time effective)

@nyc
do you also own websites and do seo?

---

For longterm projects, I aim somewhere between 2-3% max. Just think how a natural linking pattern would look like. Do you really think 1 or 2 out of 10 persons would link with 'anchor' to your site? There's soooo many variations, click here, read more, this site, check this page, (site), all the stuff that normally keeps it low

---

Graham, would you consider selling your site? If so, PM me.

---

If I were you, I would add more content. You have sufficient domain strength to pull traffic, more content will/should increase volume.

---

Nice to see an SEO follow along. It's been a while since the last post from OP. How are things looking at the moment? Has traffic gone back up and how have the various SEO tricks worked?

---

Have you purchased your own PBN's and started pushing a few more links following this route?

---

Home > >