Getting Your Site UnstuckHow to 5x Traffic & Revenue from SEO & Content Marketing on a Stagnant Blog

A Little About Me

• I was the Director of Marketing and third employee at WordStream, an Inc 500 company• I’ve been running my own small business providing SEO & Content Markeitng consulting

services to everyone from small to publicly traded businesses for the past 4+ years• I've contributed to various industry publications such as Search Engine Journal, Search

Engine Land, SEO Book, and several others, and have been cited by publications like USA Today, Fox Business, and Media Post and was an instructor for Marketing Profs University, and was a speaker at the Search Marketing Expo.

• I’m from the Boston area and have 2 very cute kids (photographic evidence below)

Questions We’ll Answer Today

Is Your Site “Stuck”?

Why Is Your Site Stuck? How can you analyze why your traffic & revenue have flattened?

What Can You Do? Specific strategies and tactics you can apply to any niche to help get your site unstuck

Does This Really Work? A real-life case study of a site whose traffic and revenue had flattened, and how they grew traffic and revenue by more than

5x

What is “Stuck?”

Pretty simple: your KPIs (things like traffic, leads, sales, & ROI) aren’t increasing.

Being Stuck Looks Something Like This:

Why Are You “Stuck?” How You Got Here

Why Are You “Stuck?” How You Got Here

Leveraging Outdated SEO Tactics:• Paying $100s per month & expecting consistent, compounding gains• No input from you, lots of links added every month• Cranking out short, easy-to-create content

Why Are You “Stuck?” How You Got Here

You don’t have any inputs (you’re running a “brochure website”):• You’re not producing enough (or any) new content• You’re not promoting your content enough (or at all)

Why Are You “Stuck?” How You Got Here

You’re doing it wrong:

• You’re creating the wrong type of content• You’re not executing on content outreach

Does your blog feed look like this?

• Exciting News! (Small feature release about your site most of your visitors may not even care about).

• We’ll be at (Conference lots of other people will be at, with no additional information about the conference or what you’ll be doing there).

• Our Take on (Trending Topic, which pivots away from the trending topic in the second sentence to talk about how great your product is and why none of the bad things in the industry would be happening if everyone wised up and used your product).

Case Study of an “Unstuck Site”

• Safe Sound Family – a family & home safety publishing site my company owns & operates.

• We pay writers to research & write posts on relevant topics.• Monetize through affiliate links (mainly Amazon) and advertising• In 2014 we were looking at a “stuck site”• Went from flat traffic growth, to more than 5x traffic (7,665 to 43,656) in ~5

months

Getting Unstuck – Analysis & Planning

Start by understanding:• What are you currently doing? What have you done in the past?• What’s worked for your site? What hasn’t?

Getting Unstuck – Analysis & Planning

Google Analytics Custom Reportshttps://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1151300?hl=en

Metrics Group add Users > Users and Goal Conversions > Goal Completions (you might customize this based on your site’s goals, whether you have specific values configured in GA, etc.)

Dimensions add Behavior > Landing Page

Getting Unstuck – Analysis & Planning

Getting Unstuck – Analysis & Planning

Search Console (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home) Search Query Report- Search Traffic > Search Queries

Getting Unstuck – Analysis & Planning

SEM Rush (semrush.com) “Low Hanging Fruit”:• Ranking high• Not ranking first• High estimated search

volume

Getting Unstuck – Analysis & Planning

Revenue & Sales Reports: What’s actually making you money?! What used to?• Google Analytics• Ecommerce Sales• Marketo / SalesForce / Etc.• AdSense• Etc.