Five growth hack ideas for SEO

By definition, growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation, a continuous journey of trial and error to find the best path of growth.

For a company, these experiments can be across marketing funnel, product development, sales segments, and so on.

While traditional marketing is costly, growth hacking is a low cost alternative.

Entrepreneur Sean Ellis coined the term “Growth Hacking” in 2010, although the approach is not something brand new. In various periods of human history, thoughtful persons used insights from psychology, social science, and other disciplines for the betterment of humanity or for their personal profit.

These “Nudges” can be considered as a kind of growth hack.

 

In any digital marketing funnel, content marketing, together with SEO, play a vital role. You can apply thoughtful, data-driven insights in keyword analysis and link building to improve your SEO rankings.

Here are five useful growth hack ideas for SEO that you can do for free

1. Leveraging dead competitors

Go to AlternativeTo.net to find a list of your competitors.

Check dead links using browser plugins (Check My Links, Domain Hunter, Link Analyzer etc) to find dead competitors.

Go to Google.com and Google “link: deadcompetitor.com” replacing “deadcompetitor.com” with the website you’re looking to replace.

You will find a bunch of sites which are linking to your dead competitors.

Contact the website owners and let them know about the broken link. Offer your relevant link to replace it.

2. “Alternative to” method

Link building through comments is not a bad idea if you can do it properly. Of course there are lots of spammy and black hat techniques out there for comment link building, but some are really pure and very effective.

Such as this one.

Go to Google.com and search “Alternative to” about your products.

You will find a list of result where people wrote about your competitors.

Just go to those posts and if there is any comment section, write a great informative comment.

Your comment should not be a promotional one, instead a creative blend of KLTE marketing approach.

What is this KLTE approach? 

I have recently came across this model. Structure your comment based on this:

• Know: Things you do for people to know you
• Like: Things you should do for people to like you
• Trust: Things you should do for people to trust you
• Engage: Things you should do for people to stay with you

“Know” is your company or product name. Put your homepage or desired landing page url under your name. Describe in one or two line about what your product or service do for people.

For the “like” part, give some valuable information about what you bring to the table.

To build “trust,” show some robust proof (that can be image/screenshot link of positive customer review) that your service, support or product is good.

And lastly, keep a call to action asking people to do something, so you engage with them.

3. Get quality organic links (for free)

Do you know that the probability of selling to an existing customer is roughly 12 times greater than the probability of selling to a new prospect?

“Businesses have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer while the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5% to 20%,” according to the calculation of Marketing Metrics.

This same principle can work on link building. Those who already link you, will most likely to link you again.

How to find out who already link you?

Go to your webmaster tools page.

You will see a list of your sites (properties) on the Google webmaster tool.

See mine:

Choose your website from the list.

Click on “Search Traffic” — then “Links To Your Site.”

Look at “Top Linking sites” where they list “Links from outside your property to your property.”

This is the list of the websites already linking to your website. You can download the entire list of links.

Send them a genuine “Thank you” email and tell them about your new useful article or offers.

4. Just one word in a title can give a 59% increase in organic traffic

Coderwall did this wonderful experiment.

They had 20,000 pages with user-generated tips for developers.

To increase the organic traffic, they analyzed the analytics data and found out that most visited pages were pro tips with examples.

So they decided to split 20,000 pages into two groups:

#1. Original title.

#2. Original title + one word.

The one word that they added?

“(Example)”

That’s it. Just “Normal title of how to do X (Example)”

Result after 13 weeks?

They saw a 59% increase in organic traffic from Google.

Now, you can not just blindly follow this and add ‘example’ in your titles. That would be foolish.

Instead, analyze your most visited posts from Google Analytics.

Look for the most popular articles on the web about your niche. Analyze them and find out which one word can trigger targeted readers. This will work.

5. Tool Marketing – clearly ahead!

Everyone is familiar with content marketing. But not much about tool marketing. While content marketing is competitive, tool marketing has less competition.

Tool Marketing is creating a useful tool for your targeted audiences. If the tool is very useful, you will get tons of backlinks.

Free logo makers, Free url shortener, Free slogan maker – you can come up with many creative and useful ideas. But trust me, generating a good idea is the hardest part.

Bonus: 

Update your old content. Add more story telling, new fresh images. You will see a remarkable organic traffic increase.

Muradul Islam is a Business Analyst at WeDevs.

Comments are closed.