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Neil Patel

Hack Your Way to 50,000 Google Visitors with These 9 Tips

Neil Patel

There’s no single hack for getting huge traffic numbers from Google. Sorry.

I wish I could tell you that if you added a very specific keyword to your site or if you optimized your images in just the right way you could net 50,000 unique views.

But it just doesn’t happen that way.

The reality is that you can’t rely on one technique to bring in unique visitors.

You have to approach it using a combination of different strategies.

Depending on your budget, some of those strategies might be out of your reach right now.

That’s okay.

Because over time (and yes, it does take time) anyone can hack their way to large traffic numbers.

What does it take to get 50,000 new visitors?

The key to getting 50,000 (or 100,000, or a million) new site visitors is to play it safe.

I know what you’re thinking. Safe?

It’s not something that entrepreneurs or marketers want to hear.

Safe means slow.

But a slow, steady, multifaceted approach to growth will always win over the quick tricks.

Take a look at this graphic from SEMRush on the most important elements of SEO:

Google traffic is a combination of paid, search, direct, referral and social traffic.

You need all of those things in some form or another to rank.

And getting all of those things takes times.

You also want to make sure that your traffic is high-quality. It should convert at some point.

So you want to focus on traffic sources from the top-of-the-funnel but also the middle and bottom, too.

A blog isn’t going to cut it.

A Twitter page isn’t going to cut it.

A case study isn’t going to cut it.

You need all of those strategies and more if you really want to pull high-quality, unique site visitors off of Google and other places around the web.

There are things you can do to make each of those strategies easier for you, though.

To be fair, these aren’t really “hacks” per se, since they don’t offer a quick-and-easy fix.

But they are hacks in the sense that they’ll take some of the pressure off.

Here are the best “hacks” for getting to 50,000 site visitors.

1. Hire a writer to boost your content creation

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: Content is king.

That’s why content creation is one of the best things you can do for your SEO traffic.

In addition to creating indexed pages (which helps you on Google), it’s also cheap compared to other traffic-generating methods.

It’s an excellent top-of-the-funnel marketing strategy.

But you do need a lot of content to really hit those big traffic numbers.

Content also takes a long time to create.

In one content creation experiment, a single blog post took 4 hours and 24 minutes from start to finish, with the majority of time spent on writing and research.

And most marketing experts recommend blogging at least three times a week, or even daily.

The fact is that unless your job revolves around writing blog posts, you probably don’t always have an extra four and a half hours every day to write.

It can be hard enough to find four hours to do much of anything.

So, if you need to blog several times a week at minimum to get traffic, but each blog posts takes four hours to do, and you don’t have 12+ hours to do it…what’s the answer?

With all the money you’re saving by directing your time elsewhere, hire someone whose job it is to write blog posts.

Writing is in demand for a reason.

There are plenty of content marketers, copywriters and other content creators who do this for a living.

It doesn’t have to be expensive, either.

You can always find freelance writers on sites like Fiverr, Upwork, or WeWorkRemotely.

In some cases, you can get help with your content for free.

So there’s no real excuse not to create content with the help of someone else.

2. Market unique content in new places

Like I said, blogs won’t be enough.

If you want a spike in Google traffic, you have to use other kinds of content spread across multiple channels.

Take webinars, for instance.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 58% of marketers use webinars for promotion.

They’re not just good for traffic, either.

Webinars have been shown to retain 40% of viewers’ attention, and between 20% and 40% of attendees turn into qualified leads.

I regularly hold webinars. Because they work.

They are huge traffic drivers, and they convert. Win-win.

Many webinar-marketing services (like GoToWebinar) offer archiving services so you can reuse the same webinar performances for fresh traffic.

This is where thinking outside of the box can really give you a boost.

Podcasts are another great way to bring in a new audience from sites like SoundCloud or YouTube.

Around 67 million Americans actively listen to podcasts every month, and the year-over-year growth for podcasts is between 10-20%.

If you’re looking to drive younger traffic, podcasts are really perfect.

A larger percentage of people 25-54 listen to podcasts more than any other age group, and 16% of podcast listeners have an annual household income of $150K or more.

They can also be pretty cheap to produce.

Shopify has a guide to creating simple podcasts for under $100.

When you start creating more content that strays from the average blog, it also opens up the possibilities of partnership opportunities.

Being a guest on someone else’s podcast, or having someone on your podcast, creates multiple backlinking opportunities.

It also helps you build relationships with influencers.

Those influencers can bring new referrals to your own channels and help your site traffic in innumerable ways.

In other words, don’t go at content creation alone.

Be creative. Reach out. Try something new.

3. Fix your metadata

No matter the content you’re producing, you still have to make an effort with your metadata.

Meta descriptions, for instance, are short blurbs that describe your page’s content accurately and concisely.

They’re what entice people to click on your Google link.

They can make or break your traffic from social media, too.

Google also uses your meta descriptions to help identify content, answer questions and index your pages properly.

Without keywords in your meta descriptions, there’s less for Google to use.

According to Evolving SEO, there are three ingredients to traffic-driving metadata:

You need to include the customer’s problem that your content is solving, a solution, and an emotional outcome.

Here’s an example of a good meta description when I search Google for the keyword “SEO hacks:”

It tells me what to expect (11 SEO hacks), why I need it (to help people find me) and a list of the strategies involved, including any relevant keywords.

From a quick glance, I can tell that this is the type of content that I need.

If you really want to get site visitors, you want to let them know that your content can solve their problems.

Meta descriptions are the best way to do that for organic searches.

4. Get a featured snippet

If you really want to boost your organic search traffic, you want a featured snippet.

Featured snippets are the informational content that shows up in Google’s SERPs after any ads and sponsored posts.

They look something like this:

One interesting thing to note is that featured snippets don’t always come from pages that rank #1 on the SERPs.

See what happens when you scroll down Google’s SERP page a little farther:

HubSpot has the featured snippet, even though they’re not the first search result.

Between the two results, who do you think will get more traffic?

While I can’t say with 100% certainty, studies show that HubSpot will probably win out.

Why?

Because featured snippets tend to get the lion’s share of organic traffic.

To put that into context, HubSpot did some research into posts with and without featured snippets.

They found that the first result without a snippet brought in about 33% of the total clicks, with the second result around 18%.

With a featured snippet, the snippet result got 50% of clicks (compared to 33%).

So if you want to hack your way to the top of the SERPs for more site visitors, get a featured snippet.

5. Reduce on-site ads

One thing that you have to remember about Google is that they love it when sites are optimized.

Their new algorithm (Fred) is penalizing sites that have any type of barrier to the user experience.

When Fred was originally rolled out, some sites saw dramatic drops in their organic search traffic.

Some saw as much as a 50-60% plummet almost overnight.

That’s an insane amount of traffic loss.

The issue, it turns out, was that websites with affiliate-heavy or ad-centered content were suffering because they were too slow.

Heavy ads bogged down the loading speeds and made the user experience less pleasant.

Basically, ads that should have been a benefit were actually reducing traffic numbers.

Even sites that weren’t necessarily “ad-heavy” still suffered under Fred’s reign because their content was so thin.

So what does this mean for you?

You don’t have to completely eliminate ads from your site.

WPSitecare recommends choosing ad providers and reducing the number of ads so that your site isn’t loaded with too many HTTP requests.

Get rid of any ads that negatively impact the user experience.

This means irrelevant ads in the middle of articles, video ads that autoplay, or spammy ads around your site.

By reducing the number of ads, you’ll avoid Fred’s wrath in the future.

6. Minimize your mobile response time

I’ve written about growth hacking before, and a lot of it comes down to mobile.

If your site isn’t optimized for mobile viewers, you probably won’t be seeing those 50,000 unique visitors anytime soon.

Google is continuing their push toward a mobile-first experience.

What you may not know, however, is why this push is such a big deal.

Google found that top 10 countries for search traffic (“emerging markets”) also have the slowest mobile Internet connection on average.

So even though they are doing the most Googling, sites are loading the slowest for them.

Google’s aim is to fix this issue by prioritizing sites with faster speeds because they’ll be easier to access for those with slow connections.

You can take advantage of this by making sure that your site is mobile-friendly, of course.

That’s almost a given.

So what’s the hack, exactly?

You can greatly improve your site speed by getting a better server.

The biggest impact will come by minimizing your server response time (also known as Time to First Byte or TTFB) to within 200 milliseconds.

There are three ways you can do this:

By putting in the extra effort for mobile, you increase your odds of more mobile views.

More mobile views = more site visitors, plain and simple.

7. Stay visible in local searches

Another thing that Fred is influencing is local search traffic.

According to Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable, it’s “counterproductive and damaging” to rely solely on ad income and forget about local SEO.

Having local content (keywords, etc.) on your site will be important, especially for commerce sites or businesses with a physical location.

If that’s you, create a Google My Business Page.

This will keep your local search engine results up-to-date, but also provide a boost to mobile users who have location services turned on.

If you have your website listed in any other directories, be sure that your information is current.

In terms of SEO, you also want to target local keywords, because Google will add your business listing (from Google My Business) to their search map.

See what happens when I type the keyword, “Seattle SEO Experts:”

I get a list of local businesses that deal in SEO.

Those also pop-up when I have my location turned on during a Google search.

Adding localized keywords to your content, meta descriptions, and business pages can help you get more search traffic with Google’s new algorithm.

Even if your business isn’t location-based, you can still target local keywords for a boost.

In terms of cheap, easy hacks: local SEO is still high on the list.

8. Choose better keywords with Google Search Console

Don’t stop at local SEO.

While you want to include local keywords in your content, you also want to stick with keywords that are already giving you a massive amount of traffic.

After all, we’re trying to get you 50,000 visitors, not just 50.

There are plenty of ways you can optimize your keywords to work with Google and drive more traffic to your site.

One of the best ways is by analyzing your current keywords with Google Search Console.

If you don’t have it already, then simply go to the Search Console website and add your website.

Once your site is listed as a property, go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics.

From there, you should be able to see any current queries that are bringing in traffic, as well as all of your searchable (indexed) pages, and traffic sources (countries, devices, search type, etc.).

You can then select any metric you want to analyze. I’m going to choose clicks, impressions, CTR, and position.

This will organize the content (URLs) according to the metrics I want to see.

If I click on a URL, it will show all of the SEO traffic information for that page or post.

You can see which keywords were most searched, what position it ranked for on Google’s SERPs, and any number of other helpful bits of information.

If needed, you can export this information into a downloadable CSV file containing a list of those keywords.

You can then go back and optimize any other posts with those keywords, or create new posts with a list that you know works.

Using Google Search Console to analyze your content is a great way to drive more traffic.

You already know that those keywords are working for you, so you can tweak your content as needed to drive more traffic.

Google already has all the information you need to succeed, you just need to leverage it.

9. Buy blogs or use a referring domain

Here’s one that might be a little out of the ordinary, but it’s actually the biggest thing that I do to get traffic.

I buy blogs purely for the traffic referrals.

It’s true.

On my site alone, I generate millions of site views each month.

I’m not getting all of that traffic based on organic SEO. I buy blogs in the marketing space, and I drive their traffic back to my site.

If you’re thinking, “That’s not something I can do,” don’t write yourself off too soon.

Even if you don’t have thousands of dollars lying around to buy up random blogs, you can still get into the “blog real estate” game if you have some income.

If a site has the following characteristics, it’s probably worth investing in:

These sites can be monetized to make money in the long run while driving huge amounts of traffic back to your site.

But you do need to have some capital to work with when purchasing them.

If that’s not your thing, you can also buy referring domains for much cheaper.

A referring domain is a website that links to your website with no content of its own.

It allows Google to count any websites linking to your referring domain as backlinks.

Actually, it ranks them better than backlinks. That’s why this strategy is often called the “holy grail of SEO.”

According to Backlink.io, “it’s better to get ten links from ten different sites than ten links from the same domain.”

So if you have one site linking to you, that’s good.

If you have ten domains linking to you, that’s better.

It’s a big hack for sites that can’t afford to pay for traffic or to buy a whole blog but can still afford a domain or two (or 20).

But the key is that domains have to have four qualities to work as a traffic booster:

  1. They have to be quality domains from a reputable source.
  2. They have to have their own domain authority.
  3. There has to be some type of trust flow.
  4. They have to be relevant to your site.

Authoritative domains will get you better results in the long run, though.

That’s why I buy blogs that already have decent domain authority.

If I just buy a domain that I’ve created from scratch, it does help me generate traffic and build backlinks.

But it doesn’t have the same power as a blog that’s generating its own traffic.

Either way, referring traffic works.

If you have can buy a successful domain (blog) and redirect traffic that way, go for it.

It’s worked great for me.

But if you’re short on cash and want a faster hack, then try buying a few domains instead.

You’re creating an investment in your website no matter what.

Conclusion

There is no one-size-fits-all hack for generating thousands of new site visitors from Google.

You have to approach the problem from multiple angles.

For starters, start producing more content.

Hire someone. Hire a bunch of people.

Do what you have to do to create content.

Then optimize it. Promote it. Create webinars and podcasts.

Get it out there to the public.

And make sure your site can handle all of that new traffic. Make it mobile-friendly and get all of your meta descriptions ready to go.

If none of those things work (or even if they do), consider buying other blogs to direct that traffic back to you.

At the very least, buy up some domains.

That way your marketing budget is going to something that can actually drive real traffic.

What are some hacks you’ve used to increase your monthly SEO traffic?

Grow your traffic