1M visitors in one year (by Gaetano DiNardi)

Growth marketing isn’t about deploying sleazy tricks. It’s about making calculated, data-driven moves for fast growth.

Today, we're unveiling the moves that Gaetano DiNardi followed to unlock insane growth at Aura.

We're also sharing our latest course to teach you how to make Facebook Ads work in 2023.

TODAY'S HOST

Gaetano DiNardi, Growth Advisor

Working with Aura, we started with zero content and reached almost 1M monthly organic visitors in 1 year – writing 20 articles a month.

The secret recipe for this growth was a strategy focused on:

• Creating content closely aligned with what Aura customers were saying on sales calls
• Leveraging an introductionless content model
• Chasing new topics that other brands were sleeping on
• And crafting a long-tail, question-based keyword strategy.

Here’s how we did it:

1. We performed user research to uncover keyword ideas.

We didn’t start by interviewing customers. Instead, we simply listened to customer support calls and pulled insights that then turned into actionable long-tail keyword ideas. 

If someone would call and say, “I think my social security number is on the dark web”, then we combined that with autosuggest and commonly asked questions to formulate keywords like “social security number found on the dark web”.

2. We looked at trends and created content around them, building backlink moats.

This meant analyzing trending tools, performing original industry research, crafting our own case studies, or designing infographics.

These ‘buzzy topics’ were often backlink moats when created by our competitors. We replicated this with our own studies on the most common scams related to platforms like PayPal, Venmo, or Airbnb.

By building our own backlink moats, we increased our referring domains by 4000 in less than a year.

3. We connected those backlink moats with the right pages to help customers solve their problems.

Those backlink magnets we created had a growing authority thanks to the referring domains linking to them. We sent that link juice to the real ‘money pages’ we wanted to rank for.

4. We avoided the typical wrong criteria most sites follow for keyword research.

Too many sites prioritize keywords to build content around depending on their volume, creating the longest possible articles, and just following what the top competitors are doing.

Instead, we prioritized content that was either related to how our product solved our customers’ problems, or tied to other purely informational queries that delivered topical authority or served as backlink moats.

5. We used a formula to build quality content.

This means we didn’t simply try to cover what the top-3 competitors for a search term were doing.

Instead, we:

• Tried to bring unique insights, fresh perspectives, and new research on every topic we covered, weaving our product into the content
• Used an introductionless content model that went right into the meat of the article avoiding fluff and filler paragraphs (check an example).
• Added how-to and step-by-step structures to make our guides more actionable.
• Added a floating CTA that was clickable at any time in the page, and a final CTA offering a free trial
• Added videos to increase the time spent on the page

6. We switched from cold email outreach to leveraging our own personal profiles for link-building

Instead of reaching out to sites via mail, I reached out to people on LinkedIn, where they could immediately check my past experiences, and offered them opportunities for link building or guest posting.

SEO was key to educating Aura’s target audience on digital safety, a topic where information-seeking queries are very frequent. 

Combining that with our unique insights and angles to cover topics in a way that sets our content apart from the competition, we pulled deep levers to bring insane organic growth.

Connect with Gaetano on LinkedIn.

New course: Advanced Facebook Ads

How can you be effective in Facebook Ads after the massive privacy updates in the last years?

Marketers who outperform their competitors are not relying on hyper-targeting anymore. Instead, they are switching to hyper-creating and using the most advanced techniques. 

We just launched a course to help you do that.

It gives you the tools you need to create Ads that resonate with your audience at scale.

Get the course here.

Is social proof really that important? Here’s how to use it

We love testing the tried and true to see how, well, true it really is.

First up? Social proof.

Does it really work as well as we all assume? Why? And more importantly, what’s the best way to implement it?

Read the entire article.

Customer Stories: Boosting an agency’s capability and capacity with CXL

Here's how a growth marketing agency was able to go beyond their area of expertise towards CRO and experimentation while growing their team’s capabilities with the help of CXL.

Read the story here.

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