How I Helped Grow Organic Traffic 78%

Organic traffic is up about ~78% since I started at Range.co about 6 months ago. I break it down below.

Our organic traffic has had a lot of ups and downs, tbh. It dipped in the summer, but then some things I worked on clicked.

That number may seem crazy to some of you, and to others it’s underwhelming. I get both of those feelings. I’ll mention a few of the things I did below, so take what resonates with you and disregard the rest.

Optimize current posts.

Range had a small content engine and had an agency when I came on board. A lot of the text was dense and unoptimized for SEO. They brought me in to make SEO the main channel, so I optimized what I could on the posts that had potential for that. The others I left as is or found something to repurpose on social. Funny enough, most of our big winners over the past 6 months were articles that were already published. I tweaked the headers, metatitles, and tags to make a difference. Nothing I did was rocket science on this front — it’s things you’ve heard of. We did the work on each individual post.

Publish whenever.

When articles rolled in, I published them as quickly as possible. Sometimes that was nothing, sometimes that was 5 a week.

Remember: Google doesn’t care when you publish.

This isn’t anything new to anyone who has followed me for a while, but it still goes against the grain — especially when you have content that you need a publishing schedule for — your podcasts, your newsletter, your new brand campaign.

I found a design site that worked well to help crank out the blog headers. (It’s called DesignPickle)

Focus on the middle.

I immediately told the agency at Range to focus on middle funnel posts. Those posts are still gaining traction, but it helped with our topic authority. Honestly, they haven’t converted as well as they did at Friday or ClickUp, but many of them are on page 1.

The other middle funnel play I did was focusing on meeting templates. We’re on page 1 for that term and related ones, and it continues to grow. I started doing more specific “how-to…” blog posts for each meeting type. That hasn’t been as successful, though 1 or 2 took off.

Take a few big bets.

I swung for the fences on a few big keywords, just because it’s fun. It can help with retargeting efforts later down the road. (Yes, it does relate to our product). One of them was on team-building questions, another was on Zoom backgrounds. Another was about online drawing games that the team had already developed and it unexpectedly gained traction in SEO. I optimized it and it gained traffic.

Work on internal linking

I re-evaluated which posts were connected to what, and I try not to publish a post without 2 other posts linking to it. The easiest way to do this is do a site search for content that you’re planning on completing and then see if you have any content already mentioning it. Ahrefs has a good tool for doing this now, and Screaming Frog has a more complex report for larger sites.

For new topic clusters, use this template from Steve Toth and SEONotebook. It connects your blog posts to your landing pages in a sensible way.