Cup & Leaf is a blog that the Growth Machine started to test a few ideas they had about creating content that does well online.
Growth Machine was already working with a lot of clients and brought good results for them too. But, this time they wanted to have a project of their own, solely dependent on what they do. This way, they’d get something that they made successful on the Internet with the help of their in-house team.
This tiny blog was then scaled to over 150,000 hits a month from scratch!
And, This is an overview of how they did it:
Choosing a Niche
Choosing a niche should happen early on in the process so that when you come up with an idea for an article, it makes sense within the niche. Consider the following three essential criteria while choosing:
- Choose a topic area that is large enough to write about for the foreseeable future and provides many angles to write about.
- People should search for the topic on Google. Aim to create a page that solves their problem.
- How competitive is that topic? Remember, you may have a great story and amazing content for that story, but your rankings will go nowhere if there are competing sites with more links or pages.
So, they chose ‘Tea’ as their perfect niche.
Setting The Blog Up- The First Step
If you’re wondering how to set up a blog to perform well in Google search results, then you’re not alone. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the most crucial aspect of a blog, so this should be your first step.
Growth Machine set up their blogging platform on Webflow, which already had some SEO plugins. By setting up your blog for SEO success, you’re already halfway to gaining a large, loyal following that will drive traffic back to your company website.
Researching for Keywords
Target Keywords are the keyword phrases you would like to rank for in the search engines. Finding them is a whole different story than picking them out of thin air. Here we’ll go over techniques they used to find target keywords and optimize them for their blog.
Wiki Strategy
It includes brainstorming a category that provides for many related words or ideas, then listing down how a searcher would use it as a search term.
“Also Rank For,” Keywords
After you’ve got a list of keywords for your niche with the Wiki Strategy, try going into “also rank for” in the Ahrefs tool and see what other keywords are in the top 10 results.
Competitor Mining Strategy
Learn from your competitors. You can either use a competitor research tool like ahrefs or can manually go through their websites to find a lot of hidden gems. By replicating good deeds from your competitors, you can manage to rank easily and effectively.
Creating High-Quality Content
Your goal in this stage is to get people to read your content. Your focus is to create an article that serves as an educational resource. That means adding more information and more value than you find in an average blog.
It should be well-researched and up-to-date. If you create high-quality articles that are engaging to users, people will link to them. Naturally, you’ll rank on top, and your site will get HUGE traffic.
Off-Page SEO
Sharing Content on Efficient Channels
Don’t depend on a single source of traffic. Create spreads out and safety nets. That’s why Growth Machine relied on channels such as Reddit, Facebook groups, and Pinterest for traffic spikes.
Backlinks from Owned Assets
They started the promotion of Cup and Leaf by building links from their own network of already live sites. This would have helped the blog get an early boost.
Focusing On Interviews and Guest Posts
Podcast and text interviews have substantial reach. Listeners would often share their thoughts on various social media sites, which helps to establish relationships. Cup and Leaf saw good growth with the help of both of these activities in terms of reach, engagement, and authority.
Backlink Building From Broken Links
When a link is broken, there is an opportunity to create similar content and have others link to it. Using this strategy, a marketer can improve the current search ranking of his or her web pages and replace a competitor’s page as Google’s number one hit for that search result.
Our Say:
Every company struggles to get traction in its early days. This is because SEO, unlike ads, is a deep-rooted process, and you need to wait patiently for the results.
This case study from a Content Marketing Agency for their blog Cup and Leaf shows you the importance of thinking long-term when using SEO to find your way to success.
This was an overview of their process and you can click the button below to go through the official and complete case study.