Here at Ahrefs we studied nearly a billionpages of content and found that 91% of these pages get no organic traffic from Google.
And to top that off, 4.
5% of these pages get lessthan 10 visits from search each month.
So that means that over 95% of pages are strugglingto get any meaningful search traffic that can really impact their business.
So what can you do to get more organic trafficand be in the top 5% of all pages across the entire internet? You're about to find out in this video.
Stay tuned.
[music] What's up SEOs? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool thathelps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche.
For this SEO tutorial, I want to focus ona couple key mistakes that people make when creating content and I want to show you what you should do instead to increase organic traffic to your pages.
Some of these methods are faster than others, but nonetheless, all of these tactics and techniques are important things to do to havea successful SEO strategy.
Let's get to it.
The first mistake is that most “trafficless”pages don't have any (or many) quality backlinks.
Now, I hate to be clanging the same gong aseveryone else, but I know that there are some link building skeptics out there.
The thing is that quality backlinks do help you rankhigher.
And our research confirms this data alongwith many other credible research studies.
We found that 55.
24% of pages have zero referringdomains pointing at them.
And 29.
79% of pages have links from less thanthree websites.
To paint an even clearer picture, we lookedat how the number of referring domains to a page correlates with its estimated organicsearch traffic.
And there's a linear correlation here.
The more backlinks a page has, the more searchtraffic it gets from Google.
And the same goes with the number of keywordsa page ranks for.
Now rather than going deep into every linkbuilding tactic, I'll leave links to other videos that'll help you build links.
But I will tell you the link building strategiesthat you can focus on specifically to build links to existing content that may not beranking because you don't have enough links.
The first one is to steal links from theTop 10 ranking pages for your target keyword.
Just go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer tooland type in your target keyword.
Next, I highly recommend clicking the “Update”button to refresh the Top 10 SERP and pull the most recent and reliable data.
After the refresh is done, scroll down tothe SERP overview where you can see the top ranking pages as well as the number of backlinkspointing at each page.
Next, click on the backlinks number to openthe page's corresponding backlinks report.
From here, look through the linking pages, analyze the context of the link, and then reach out and try to get a backlink to yourown page.
And it's important to note that you shoulddo this for all of the top ranking pages that are relevant to your page to increase yourchances of gaining a top ranking position.
The second tactic is guest blogging.
And this is a great way to supplement linksto pages that need the extra boost.
Since you're creating the content, to a certainextent, you can control the linking URL, its placement, and the context of the link.
So to find guest-posting opportunities, you cango to Google and type, intitle:your topic and then “guest post by” as a phrase match.
And as you can see, there are a lot of veryrelevant places that you can pitch your guest content to.
But since you don't know anything about thesewebsites from an SEO standpoint, I highly recommend installing Ahrefs SEO toolbar, whichwill give you an inline view of both page level and domain level metrics.
Again, we have a full video on finding guestposting sites, which I'll link up.
Now, correlation doesn't necessarily implycausation.
There are plenty of pages that get trafficwithout any links as you can see in this graph.
This is normally for one of three reasons.
#1.
Some of these websites have PBN links whichthey block from being discovered by web crawlers like ours.
#2.
They're targeting a super-low competitiontopic that likely has very little search demand.
And #3.
They've already built a ton of quality linksto other pages across their website, where they can use internal links to pass Pagerankto the new pages that appear to have little to no backlinks from external websites.
Since these cases are so variable, let's notdig any deeper into these and move on to the second SEO mistake.
Which is that trafficless pages are not targetinga topic with enough search traffic potential.
We took all pages from our Content Explorerdatabase that get no traffic from organic search and divided them into four bucketsbased on the number of linking domains to each page.
And you'll see that around 30, 000 pages havebacklinks from over 200 referring domains, yet they get no traffic whatsoever.
There are two common types of pages that wefound that fall into this bucket.
So type #1 are pages that went a little bit crazywith shady link building tactics, which does more harm than good.
And #2 were news sites.
Take this one for example.
You'll see that they have around 250 referringdomains and get 0 organic search visitors per month.
And if you look at the referring domains report, they have some high-quality followed links from authoritative sites.
The thing is that if no one's searching forwhat you're writing about, then you won't get any traffic from Google.
So there are two things that you need to do.
So first, you need to find out whether you haveany of these high-PR pages that aren't getting as much traffic as they could be.
And you can do that by entering in your domainor a subfolder URL into Ahrefs Site Explorer.
So I'll look up Ahrefs blog URL.
Next, I'll go to the Best by links report.
And right away, you can see that a bunch ofour most linked-to pages are data studies.
Now, the thing with data studies isthat while we have a ton of links, they aren't getting nearly as much search traffic as theycould be.
Take this one on on-page SEO as an example.
You'll see that it has over 300 referringdomains, but if you look at the organic keywords report, you'll see that it ranks in position40 for our target keyword.
And this likely comes down to a search intentissue.
Looking at the top ranking pages in Googlefor the phrase, “on page SEO, ” you'll see that all of the top ranking pages are guides.
So no top ranking data studies at all.
If you have a similar case like this, thenthe best thing you can do is try and update the content to match the searcher's intentthe best, while still targeting a keyword.
Luckily for us, we made a small mistake sono need for changes to the URL structure or adding messy redirects.
In fact, we changed our on-page SEO data studyto a guide just a little while ago, and look how quickly we hit the Top 10 for our targetkeyword.
4 days! Now, if you look at this data study on “howmany keywords can a web page rank for” which has around 250 referring domains, you're leftwith a little bit of a tricky situation.
Since we can't really turn this content intoa keyword-targeted post that has search volume, the best course of action here would be toadd internal links to other pages that we want to rank.
And by doing this, you're effectively passing link equity to other relevant pages and you'll reap the rewards that way.
But best of all, you can link to landing orproduct pages that have commercial value and usually don't get linked to as easily or asfrequently.
And you can see that we've done that here.
Now the data that I've shown you in this videocan be simplified down to build links and do your keyword research.
But the key takeaway here is to first lookat your existing content that isn't getting organic traffic.
Then assess what the cause might be and takethe appropriate actions to start generating more traffic.
And if a page isn't serving any purpose atall and doesn't have any links or traffic from any source, then you might want to considerremoving it from your site.
Now, if you enjoyed this video, then makesure to like, share, and subscribe.
And if you have any questions, feel free to leavea comment and I'd be happy to help.
So keep grinding away, and I'll see you inthe next tutorial.
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