Getting to 19,000 monthly clicks: Everything I've learned about SEO as a beginner

It’s been a while since my last post! Since then, I’ve been focusing on growing Remote Rocketship. I’m super excited to announce that it’s reached $2,000 MRR! 🥳

You may recall from the last post that I mentioned that the only sustainable channel to grow the website is SEO and that I was learning how to do it from scratch (and it’s now getting 19,000 monthly search clicks!). In this post, I want to share everything I’ve learned about SEO and how to approach it. In doing so, I hope you’ll also share your tips and help me fill in any gaps in my knowledge!

19,000 clicks! (Excluding “brand searches,” i.e., people searching for Remote Rocketship directly)

1a. The basics

At a high level, Google works like this: Someone types something into Google (or another search engine), and then it must decide which are the most relevant results. It does this by:

1. Reading the content on a webpage.

2. Evaluating whether the content on the page is relevant to the person’s search intent – e.g., are they trying to learn something? Are they trying to buy something?

3. Determining whether the page and website are trustworthy.

This means that if you want your pages to show on Google, you must:

1. Allow Google to read the content on your page, a.k.a, on-page SEO

2. Show Google why you're relevant to the search query. This means not only having content on the page related to the query but also having other pages on your site that feature topics similar topics (also known as Topical SEO)

3. Show Google that you are trustworthy. This is usually done by “link building”, i.e., getting other websites to link to your own. The more sites that link to yours, the more trustworthy you appear (especially if those sites are trustworthy themselves). These are also known as “backlinks”.

   1. It’s worth mentioning that most SEO tools have a “Domain Rating (DR)” concept, which is their calculated guess of how trustworthy you are.

When you hear the term “site authority” or “topical authority”, it’s usually referring to the combination of 2 and 3 above.

1b. Keyword difficulty

Keyword difficulty (KD) is a metric used in SEO to estimate how difficult it would be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword. It’s all good having great content on your site, but if there are other sites with higher authority on the topic, it’s not likely that you’ll rank on the top page of Google.

An important thing to mention is that keyword difficulty is based solely on the number of referring domains linking to the top-ranking pages and is not affected by the domain ratings of the websites in the list!

That said, some people in SEO advise staying away from keywords where the KD may be low but where sites in the top 10 search results all have high domain ratings, as they claim it will be challenging to break into the top 10.

1c. Good resources to learn more about the basics

• Ahrefs has an excellent beginner’s SEO course. They also have great videos on YouTube.

• How the Fxck is a great SEO podcast where they interview experts from the industry and dive into real case studies.

• Grow and Convert’s blog.

• Ahref’s free backlink checker for seeing domain ratings and backlinks.

• Keywords Everywhere is a handy Chrome extension that shows you metrics (such as volume and authority) in your Google search results.

2. How to apply the basics

Ahrefs teach in their courses that the approach to getting into the first page of Google is to find high volume, low difficulty keywords. Phil McParlane from SEO Indie shared a great example of how to apply this to get people to land on your site from Google, especially for new websites. A summary is:

1. Brainstorm ideas for what your target audience might be searching for on Google.

2. Use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs to filter the list to keywords with a low difficulty score, e.g., 20. Don’t worry too much about search volume for now.

3. Write content on this topic (and once you’ve created your content, request indexing for the page on Google Search Console.)

3. How to write great content

Sammie Ellard-King shares his approach to writing great content:

• Conduct in-depth research and competitor article analysis.

• Write a list of what each article in the top 10 discusses and identify gaps and keyword variation.

• Find up-to-date information that’s not included (this makes your article unique).

• Identify 3-5 FAQ questions from people.

4. How to do keyword research

Since you’re usually filtering out high-difficulty or low-volume keywords, it can be tough to brainstorm keywords to write about. Here are a few ideas on how to approach it:

• Research what your competitors are targeting.

• Speak to your customers to understand what they’re searching for.

• Use Google’s autocomplete or “people also searched for” box.

An interesting technique I learned from an episode of the How the Fxck podcast is how to raid your competitors’ keywords:

1. Create a very comprehensive list of competitors (hundreds, if possible).

2. Sort them from lowest to highest based on their DR (it’s better to combine DR from multiple sources, although not essential).

3. For each site with a lower DR than yours, use tools like Ahrefs to see which pages and topics are driving an unusual amount of high traffic to their site.

4. Publish content targeting this traffic.

The hypothesis is that since your site has a higher DR, you’ll begin to outrank them. I haven’t tried this method, so I’m curious if it works.

5. Link building

There are a ton of different ways to do this, but the core of link building is to write engaging content and get others to link to it. I haven’t focussed too much on this since it’s a lot of effort for what I see as low impact. I briefly tried writing guest posts for other websites (e.g., here and here), and while I did get some good backlinks, it took a lot of effort to write them.

I’ve also heard that a decent way to build links is Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Essentially, an email is sent out three times a day with journalists looking for sources for their stories. They usually quote you and your site in their story in exchange for providing good information. I briefly tried this but found it to be a lot of effort to sift through these emails (although I’m sure there’s a smarter way to do it).

Lastly, another thing I’ve learned about link building is that it’s better to have a backlink pointing to a specific page on your site rather than your homepage. This will build up your authority on that particular topic and thus increase your rankings for related keywords.

6. Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is when you automate the creation of hundreds or thousands of pages. It enables you to target more keywords by creating pages with content that specifically caters to those keywords. This is best explained with an example:

On Remote Rocketship, my home page is targeting the keyword “remote jobs”. However, what if someone searched for “remote jobs United Kingdom”? Or what if they searched for “remote software engineering jobs United Kingdom”? Programmatic SEO enables me to target all these terms. And in fact, this is what I’ve done. For example:

• Remote jobs by country

• Remote jobs by job title

• Remote jobs for junior employees

This approach is working out fairly decently and is bringing in about 2,000 clicks per month for me.

The drawback of using programmatic SEO is that it can take up to several weeks or months for Google to index all these pages. Fair enough, though!

7. Programmatic SEO + ChatGPT

With the latest wave of generative AI and ChatGPT, it’s now possible to use programmatic SEO to target an even wider variety of keywords – e.g., writing blog posts on a long list of interview questions.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to write all the content for the advice section on the site. So far, I’ve found that ChatGPT writes good (but not great) quality content. Thus I think it’s best to use this approach to target a long tail of low-difficulty keywords.

This approach is providing decent results:

Conclusion

That about sums up everything I’ve learned and tried so far on SEO. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I’m keen to learn more about the space, so please share your thoughts, opinions, and anything else you think would be helpful.