How I Increased Traffic to my Website by 10x in a Month

Background

I have launched a new SEO/ user friendly version of my website danyelkoca.com back in 2024 January, and set up my Google Search Console alongside it.

With Google Search Console, you can track impressions (how many times your site appeared on Google when queried) and clicks to your website. These metrics stayed pretty much constant months after I launched it:

You can see that # clicks moved between 0-2 clicks per day and impressions reaching 18 impressions a day maximum. These are really bad stats. What this shows is that my website was not being visited except random strangers.

Below sums up my state of mind looking at those numbers.

Mindset

So what did I do when I saw these miserable stats? I had worked in an SEO related project earlier and I decided to put those learnings into practice.

We consultants are usually critized for talking the talk but not walking it. This was the perfect time to prove the haters wrong.

Objective

You can see in the above Google Search Console image that my website attracted 725 impressions and 26 clicks in 3 months (Jan, Feb, Mar). On average, the site was attracting a mere 2 weekly clicks and 60 weekly impressions.

So I came up with one lofty goal to achieve 100 weekly clicks and 1,000 weekly impressions before the end of 2024 May.

This represents a 50x growth for clicks and 16x growth for impressions in the span of a month.

Was I crazy? No, because only a goal this big can be motivating.

Reason

Why do I want to do this? Because nowadays most goods are sold online and you can have more sales with more traffic (impressions, clicks) to your website. This has $ implications for businesses.

Attracting people from Google Search makes up the first leg of user conversion though. You then need to convince users to buy stuff from your website. In this blog post, I will only touch upon this first part of user conversion, which is called user acquisition.

Method

I decided to achieve my objective by making improvements to the site across 3 areas which I will cover one by one:

1. Website Content
2. Website Architecture
3. SEO tools

Improvements to Website Content

We programmers face tens of issues and find tens of things interesting to work on everyday. If you face a certain issue when coding, it is sure certain that some other programmer faced/ is going the face that same issue. The same goes for interests. What is interesting for you may be interesting for another programmer and that person might need help when working on it.

That's where sites like StackOverflow comes into play. Programmers are usually genorous people and they don't mind helping other people when they face issues.

So I decided to write a blog post every day mainly covering issues I faced while working on something and the solutions I found, as well as projects I'm working on and a bunch of other topics.

The logic is that, by creating blog posts, we will have more content on the website, which we can list on Google and increase impressions and hopefully clicks, if the content is good.

Improvements to Website Architecture

1. Added Turkish language support to the website, so that I could attract viewers from Turkish-speaking countries
2. Published English, Japanese, and Turkish version of the daily blog, thanks to ChatGPT :)
3. Added functions in the website such as leave comment to make it interactive
4. Made speed improvements to the website (e.g. Use WebP instead of JPEG for faster loading, use lazy loading)
5. Made other countless improvements such as adding dark mode, using transitions when loading content, etc.

SEO tools

Once you have good content in your website that is served in a fast and user-friendly format, then you need to make sure your website is primed for success on Google by deploying several SEO tactics listed below:

1. Add your website on Google Search Console if you haven't done it already
2. Use sitemap so that Google can crawl your site (Both as XML and as a webpage) Then upload the XML file to Google Search Console:

   Sitemap generation is what we call in Japanese めんどくさい (bothersome) so it's best if you automate it. You can find a blogpost I wrote about it here.

3. Make your website SSR (Server Side Rendering) or SSG (Static Site Generation) so that each page has its own URL. Google hates SPAs (Single Page Application). Even when you have a page that changes its content slightly with user input, try going to a new URL for serving that content. Then you can have that URL and index it in Google Search Console.
4. Carefully track indexing on Google Search Console. Watch out for issues and fix them as quickly as possible:
5. Follow SEO best practices when you create pages. Below is not exhaustive but these are what come to my mind right away:
   • Add title, description, and keywords to each page
   • Add h1 tag to each page
   • Add publication/ update date to each blog post
   • Add a main image to each page

Results

Take a look at my website trafffic for the last week: (May 18 - May 24 2024)

I was able to reach 100 weekly clicks and 1.71K weekly impressions in this week. So I can say that I was able achieve my click objective and I was almost doubling my impression objective!

Amazing what humans can do in such a short time, isn't it?

You might say that, going from 2 clicks to 100 clicks is not a big deal. I agree. It's not same as going from 2,000 clicks to 100,000 clicks. But this is also what I have to say to you:

Learnings

Although I have employed many tactics for achieving this objective, some of them worked better than expected, while some did not improve my stats at all even though I spent roughly equal amount of time on implementing these tactics.

Below, I list some of my major learnings so that you don't have to do the mistakes that I did:

Content is the king

People eventually visit your website for what's inside it. If people don't like your content, they won't revisit nor link it from other websites. This will bury your website deep down in low ranks.

I have written a blogpost recently criticizing so-called life-hacks where people expect to achieve a lofty goal (100 clicks in a week) with shortcuts. Sorry, if you want to achieve this, you need to spend time on creating quality content. There is no hack for this.

SEO tools can take you a long way

Given that you have good content on your website, by implementing SEO tools I have described above (h1 tag, title, etc.) your content will be best positioned to be picked up by Google.

These tools help Google understand what is inside a page, and you should leverage these tools to increase your chances of achieving a high search rank.

Quantity > Quality

Although I have mentioned above that you need to create good quality content, I recommend you prioritize quantity over quality.

Because you might spend time on cerating something that people don't care/ click. And you never know (Actually there are ways to guess, but this will be the topic of another post) what people are interested in.

Unless you are Steve Jobs who can guess what people need, before they know they need it, I suggest you create a lot of content, and you only need 2-3 hit pages, which will cover the losses for all your other pages.

For example, take a look at below 10 pages which make up more than 80% of traffic to my website.

All the other stuff I wrote contributed almost nothing to my website traffic. But that's OK. Because you don't know what will be a hit page, unless you create many types of content.

Leverage latest technologies to ease your workload

I mentioned earlier that I write a daily blog and each post is available in English, Japanese, and Turkish. It would take forever for me to write a post in 3 languages everyday, so I ask ChatGPT to take the first pass.

Then I make minor adjustments to the translation and publish that page. Leave a comment below if you want to know what kind of prompts I use for this task.

Overall, I have seen that ChatGPT does a great job when translating to Japanese, but it has problems, especially with software engineering terminology, when it comes to Turkish.

For example, it tries translating terms like Framework and Grid to their traditional meanings. It'd be much better if it understood that it should leave these terms as is in the context of software engineering. (This can be solved by prompt engineering though)

Publishing my website in 3 languages has helped a lot in terms of traffic. Take a look at the traffic coming from Turkey and Japan, which wouldn't be possible without the language support:

Conclusion

In this blogpost, I have explained the tactics used for growing your website traffic 10x in Google Search together with learnings from deploying these tactics.

Although it took a month to achieve this, looking at below take-off graph of my website's traffic justifies all the time I spent on this:

If you have any questions, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment below or contacting me through this page.

The beautiful part of all this is that, this is my website and I have complete control over its structure and strategy. So why stop at 100 clicks? See you in a blogpost where I share how I reached 1,000 weekly clicks.

Until further notice, happy hacking!