Welcome to our Zero to Hero challenge – where we’re taking our website from scratch and aiming for 100,000 traffic through content alone!
In this case study, we’ll document our progress every week, sharing the strategies we implement, the obstacles we encounter, and how our traffic grows as we push toward our goal.
New updates will be added weekly, so bookmark this page to follow along, learn what works, and watch as we take our website from zero to hero in real time!
Day 100: We Didn’t Hit 100K, But We’re Not Stopping
Can you believe it’s already been 100 days since we set out on this extremely ambitious challenge?
From day one, this challenge has been a roller coaster ride. Some of you cheered us on and rooted for our success. Others were skeptical and said it would be impossible. And then there were those who quietly observed from the sidelines, waiting to see if we could pull it off.
Now, we stand at the finish line of this challenge.
It’s day 100 – the final checkpoint. And the big question remains: Did we hit our goal?
Did we successfully reach 100,000 organic traffic relying purely on content generated by our own AI writing tool?
Keep reading, because we’re about to break it all down for you.
Traffic Performance Summary
Over the course of 100 days, we published a total of 202 blog posts – all generated using our AI writing tool, Vertex.
Here’s how our blog posts performed:
Organic Traffic: 6,100
Impressions: 2,120,000
Average Click-Through Rate (CTR): 0.3%
Average Position: 13.2
Note: The traffic data only includes visits to our blog posts and excludes other pages like our homepage. This ensures we’re measuring the direct impact of content alone, without external factors influencing the results.
We Didn’t Hit 100K Traffic
So, did we manage to get 100,000 traffic in 100 days? No.
But we did gain 6,100 organic traffic.
And given the competitive niche we’re in, the continuous Google updates, and the cold start of this challenge, we believe it is still meaningful progress.
Just look at the trajectory. On day 21, we only managed to get 17 traffic.
But by day 100, that number skyrocketed to 6,100 traffic – a 35,782% increase.
This growth proves that traffic is a long game, and while 100 days may not be enough to reach 100K traffic, it is enough time to prove that consistent content publishing leads to steady, compounding results.
Building off of this, we’re not stopping here. We’re going to keep pushing on.
Goodbye, 100K in 100D – Hello, Zero to Hero
So, our journey to hit 100,000 traffic isn’t over – far from it.
We’re not giving up just because we didn’t hit the mark in 100 days. We realize that if we could reach 6,100 traffic, then 100,000 is absolutely possible.
The real question now is: How fast can we get there? How long will it take?
That’s exactly what we’re setting out to discover in our next challenge: Zero to Hero.
Why the name “Zero to Hero”?
Unlike big websites with high DAs and tons of backlinks, we’re building from the ground up. And that’s the whole point – we want to show that even smaller websites, like yours and ours (“zero”), can grow 100,000 traffic and succeed (“hero”).
And while many gurus and experts out there talk about SEO, how many have actually delivered and shown the process of hitting 100,000 traffic – live, in real time?
That’s why this challenge matters. And that’s why we’re continuing.
We’re going to keep publishing at scale, refining our strategies, and sharing every step of the journey with you – so you can see firsthand what it really takes to reach 100K traffic.
PS: A huge thank you to everyone who followed along, shared feedback, and supported this challenge. We hope you learned something valuable from our insights and experiences. See you in the next challenge!
Day 97: Highest Single-Day Traffic Spike Yet
This week, we hit another milestone in our challenge, recording our highest traffic surge on a single day. And with just days to go until the 100-day mark, our blog’s performance continues to build steadily, showing that our efforts so far are paying off.
What We Did
This week, we continued testing and refining our process for identifying hero pages to make it scalable and more efficient.
More importantly, once we’ve gathered enough data to confirm its consistency in delivering strong results, we’ll share the exact steps so you can replicate this strategy and, hopefully, achieve similar success.
We also started testing content generation with Gemini and will be comparing its performance against OpenAI. We’ll share our findings in the upcoming updates as we evaluate which tool delivers better results.
Traffic Performance
Here’s the performance of our blog posts from November 11, 2024, to February 15, 2025:
Organic Traffic (Clicks): 5,560
Impressions: 1,920,000
Average CTR: 0.3%
Average Position: 13.5
Wins of the Week
Our biggest win this week was hitting our highest single-day traffic peak on February 11.
On that day alone, our blog posts received 570 clicks and 248,657 impressions, making previous peaks look small in comparison.
This surge confirms that our current strategies are driving strong momentum, so we will continue building on these efforts.
We also saw a 53.59% increase in organic traffic, jumping from 3,620 clicks last week to 5,560 this week. Impressions also saw a significant boost, rising 71.43% from 1.12 million to 1.92 million.
And once again, our average position continues to improve, moving up from 17.8 last week to 13.5 this week. This means we’re steadily climbing the ranks and solidifying our presence on search results.
In Our Next Update…
The 100-day mark is just around the corner, so we’ll be sharing an update real soon. Be sure to keep an eye out – this will be an important report you won’t want to miss!
Day 90: #1 Ranking & 1 Million Impressions
This week, just like before, we focused on publishing high-impact hero pages and closely observed their performance.
And the numbers show that we’re on the right track – 1.12 million impressions, a #1 ranking, and 230 keywords on Page 1!
Here’s what went down this week and what’s coming next.
Traffic Performance
Here’s how our blog posts performed from November 11, 2024, to February 8, 2025:
Organic Traffic (Clicks): 3,620
Impressions: 1,120,000
Average CTR: 0.3%
Average Position: 17.8
Key Highlights
1. We Hit 1 Million Impressions!
This week, we hit a major milestone: we crossed over 1.12 million impressions, a 33.65% increase from last week. This is a huge win and shows that our content is gaining visibility in the SERPs.
Our organic traffic also continues to grow, hitting 3,620 clicks this week – a 34.57% increase from last week.
Additionally, although we thought our average position will eventually plateau after consistently going up for a few weeks, but it exceeded our expectations once again.
Our average position is now 17.8, up from 19.7 from last week.
2. Number 1 Ranking for a Query
While analyzing the queries that are driving the most traffic to our website, we discovered something exciting:
We’re now ranking #1 for a query – right above Wikipedia (which has a DA of 93)!
This is a massive win and further proof that our hero pages are dominating the SERPs.
3. Number of Keywords Ranking on the First Page Increased
We’re now ranking for a total of 230 keywords on the first page – a massive jump compared to the start of the challenge, where we barely ranked for 20 keywords.
Our Next Steps
Moving on, we’ll shift our focus to a full-funnel content strategy, targeting each stage of the customer journey (top, middle, and bottom). This approach will allow us to not just drive traffic but also generate leads. Also, for this purpose, we’ll introduce an additional metric for tracking conversions.
However, we’ll need more time to fully flesh out this strategy. Here’s how we plan to do it, primarily by seeding content from the articles we publish:
1. Continue Publishing Content. We’ll continue publishing content generated by our AI writer for efficiency, as it allows us to rank articles in as little as a few days.
2. Collect Data from Published Articles. Data from these articles will inform our next steps, helping us understand what’s working and what’s not.
3. Refine Strategy to Create High-Impact Hero Pages. Based on the insights gathered, we’ll refine our strategy to create hero pages that deliver maximum impact.
An example of this process in action is an article we recently published about DeepSeek, the latest AI tool that’s creating huge waves and quickly catching up to ChatGPT in popularity. Within days of publishing, the article is already ranking on Page 1.
The fact that Google is willing to rank this article (seeing it as related to our website niche) is a strong signal that we’re on the right track.
While the DeepSeek article currently drives little to no traffic (for now), it gives us valuable insights into what to write next. This is far more effective than relying solely on SEO tools and keyword research, as it provides real-world data on what’s working.
Stay tuned to learn more about how we execute this strategy and the results it delivers!
Day 83: New Traffic Peak
For the first part of the challenge, we focused on content velocity, starting with one to two posts per day and then ramping up to five posts per day. While this approach helped establish topical authority and build momentum, we quickly realized that hero pages had the potential to drive significantly greater results.
So instead of prioritizing sheer volume, we made a strategic pivot, shifting our focus toward publishing fewer but more impactful hero pages. This meant investing more time in keyword research, optimizing content, and ensuring each page was designed to rank well.
Over the past week, we published four new hero pages, and as expected, they are already performing well.
Traffic Performance
Here’s how our blog posts performed from November 11, 2024 – February 1, 2025 (data from Google Search Console).
Organic Traffic (Clicks): 2,690
Impressions: 838,000
Average CTR: 0.3%
Average Position: 19.7
While we’re seeing good traffic growth, the most notable improvement this week is in our average position, which jumped from 22.1 to 19.7.
This is largely due to the new hero pages, which quickly ranked in the top 10 for multiple queries and pulled up our overall site average.
Wins of the Week
1. Ranking #4 for a Keyword, Right After Wikipedia
One of our new hero pages, published on January 29, is already ranking on the first page of Google at number 4.
A blog post published 5 days ago is already ranking at position 4 on Google
Remarkably, this page sits just below Wikipedia and a high-authority domain, despite having no backlinks. Its rapid ascent to the first page shows the effectiveness of our keyword selection, content quality, and search intent optimization.
This page has already started driving traffic, proving that the hero page strategy is not only viable but also scalable.
Speaking of hero pages, they continue to be the best-performing content on our site. A quick look at Google Search Console insights confirms that our top queries are all driven by the hero pages, consistently bringing in the highest traffic.
Google Search Console insights showing our top 5 queries driving traffic
2. Secured Another Featured Snippet (Position Zero)
Our first-ever hero page, which has already been a strong traffic driver, has now earned a second featured snippet, also known as position zero.
We gained another featured snippet
This is a strong indicator that Google recognizes our content as authoritative and highly relevant to searchers. Featured snippets significantly improve click-through rates and brand visibility, as they place our content directly at the top of the search results.
3. New Traffic Peak on January 28
Finally, we reached a new traffic peak on January 28, surpassing our previous record. On that day, our average position was 9.4, meaning a significant number of our pages were ranking within the top 10.
We hit a new traffic peak on January 28, 2025Stats of our new peak
Key Takeaways
This week’s results further reinforce the effectiveness of our hero page strategy. The data clearly shows that publishing high-quality, well-optimized pages is far more impactful than simply increasing content volume.
This aligns with our recent decision to revamp our AI writing tool. With the rise of AI-generated content, the web has been flooded with low-quality, mass-produced articles. While this approach worked in the short term, Google responded with multiple algorithm updates that completely wiped out websites relying on low-effort AI content. Many sites that had been publishing bulk AI-generated content disappeared from search results, losing all their traffic and rankings overnight.
Recognizing this shift, we completely revamped SurgeGraph into SurgeGraph Vertex, an AI writing tool designed for quality, not just quantity. We now use the best AI model, with built-in humanization, information gain, brand voice adaptation, and more, to generate high-quality, unique content that can truly rank.
Our success with hero pages is proof that this strategy works. High-quality, humanized content that delivers real value is the future of SEO. Just as our hero pages outperform bulk content, SurgeGraph Vertex empowers users to create ranking content that stands the test of time.
Next Steps
With less than three weeks left in the challenge, we will continue doubling down on hero pages to maximize our traffic growth. Given the strong performance of our most recent pages, our primary focus will be to scale this approach and measure how far we can push our rankings before the challenge concludes.
Day 76: Doubling Down on Hero Pages
This week marks another exciting milestone in our journey toward hitting 100k traffic in 100 days!
Building on last week’s success, we published several more hero pages to further leverage the strategy that’s already driving strong results.
And once again, we’re seeing promising traffic increase this week, proving that this approach continues to pay off.
Traffic Performance
Here’s a snapshot of our blog’s performance from November 11, 2024, to January 25, 2025:
Organic Traffic (Clicks): 1,670
Impressions: 619,000
Average CTR: 0.3%
Average Position: 22.1
Addressing the elephant in the room… yes, you’ll notice that our traffic peaked on January 20 before declining. However, even with the drop, the overall performance over the past two weeks has shown remarkable growth compared to the first 8 weeks of this campaign (as can be seen in the same graph).
What’s more exciting is that traffic from our blog posts has officially hit four digits, up from three digits just last week! This shows that our strategies are gaining traction and delivering results.
Here’s the breakdown of our improvements compared to last week:
Traffic increased by 267%
Impressions went up by 114%
CTR increased from 0.2% → 0.3%
Average Position jumped from 35.7 → 22.1
Addressing Last Week’s Skeptics
Last week, we introduced the “hero pages” strategy, which focused on high-opportunity keywords and resulted in a significant 364% traffic increase. While the results have been impressive, we recognize that some SEOs might question the relevance of the keywords we’ve ranked for – such as “who owns Google” – given they aren’t directly aligned with our niche as an AI writing tool and are better suited for top-of-funnel traffic.
We want to take a moment to clarify why this strategy still helps in the broader sense.
Firstly, ranking high for these terms and driving significant traffic sends good signals to Google about the authority and credibility of our website. And as we build our site’s authority, it makes it easier for us to rank for other, more relevant keywords down the line.
With the success we’ve seen from this strategy, we’re confident that it will pave the way for us to rank for more niche-specific keywords related to AI writing tools.
Additionally, this influx of traffic opens up opportunities for brand discovery. Even if visitors initially land on our site through unrelated queries, they may eventually discover our AI writing tool, explore our content, or convert when their needs align with what we offer.
Essentially, by focusing on driving traffic with high-opportunity keywords, we’re laying the groundwork for long-term SEO success and positioning SurgeGraph to rank higher for more targeted, relevant terms as our authority continues to grow.
This Week, We Continued Publishing More Hero Pages
Building on the momentum of last week’s success, we doubled down on the hero pages strategy by publishing several more in-depth articles targeting high-volume, winnable keywords based on our refined criteria. These pages have proven their value by driving significant traffic and further boosting our overall site performance.
As shown in the screenshot below, the newly published hero pages have quickly become some of the top-performing posts on our website. In just a short period, they’re already ranking in the top 10 and contributing valuable traffic. The early results confirm that this strategy is continuing to pay off and drive tangible growth.
What’s Next?
Next week, we’ll continue refining the hero pages strategy and closely monitor keyword rankings and traffic growth. Stay tuned to see how this approach evolves, how it will contribute to our ultimate goal, and whether we’re on track to hit 100k traffic by Day 100!
Day 69: Hero Pages to the Rescue: 364% Traffic Surge!
As you’ll see very soon, this is the best and most interesting week we’ve had so far.
We tried two new strategies, and we’re happy to share that the early results are incredibly promising!
In the span of only a few days, a single blog post is already driving significant traffic, ranking on page 1, and even outranking bigger websites with much higher Domain Ratings (DR).
And the best part? The strategies are relatively easy to implement, so we’re confident you can try them out too.
So, what exactly did we do to achieve this? (Hint: we’re calling one of them “Hero Pages”).
Keep reading to get the details and learn how to replicate this strategy on your own website!
Traffic Performance
Here’s a snapshot of our blog’s performance from November 11, 2024 to January 18, 2025.
Organic Traffic (Clicks): 455
Impressions: 289,000
Average CTR: 0.2%
Average Position: 35.7
Free Tips on Humanizing AI Content
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Humanizing prompts
In such a short period, our latest strategies are already paying off, with traffic showing a whopping 364.29% increase and impressions climbing by 228.04%.
The average position massively improved to 35.7, up from 49.9 previously, again driven largely by the success of our latest strategy.
Given it’s only been a few days since we implemented the new strategy, we’re confident that we’ll be seeing even bigger growth in the coming weeks.
What We Did
1. Focused on High-Impact “Hero Pages”
We analyzed numerous high-traffic blogs and discovered a consistent pattern: a small number of pages drive the majority of their traffic. This reflects the Pareto principle (often called the 80/20 rule).
Based on this insight, we’re prioritizing a select group of “hero pages.” These pages target high-volume keywords where we have a strong opportunity to rank well using our “winnability criteria.” We’ve developed our internal criteria for assessing “winnability,” which goes beyond simply looking at low competition.
This strategy differs from the traditional pillar-and-cluster model. While pillar pages broadly address a topic and cluster pages delve into subtopics, our hero pages are laser-focused on winnable, high-volume keywords. We then create supporting pages that complement these hero pages.
In the short time since implementing this strategy (just one week), we’ve already seen a rise in traffic to one of our hero pages.
We even appeared in the AI Overview, for “who owns 51% of google.”
Appeared in an AI Overview
And we secured a featured snippet for the same query.
Secured a featured snippet
While the rankings have yet to stabilize, you see us ranking just below Wikipedia for “who owns google” – a keyword with a volume of 33,000 and a keyword difficulty of 50.
Ranking right below WikipediaThe keyword has a volume of 33,000 and a keyword difficulty of 50
2. Crafted Emotion-Driven Titles
Another initiative we implemented last week was the use of more emotional words in our blog titles. These words have the power to resonate with readers on a deeper level, tapping into their desires, fears, or aspirations.
Consider this example: “The REAL Power: Who Owns 51% of Google?”.
The use of “REAL” piques curiosity by hinting at a hidden truth or an underlying power dynamic that’s not immediately obvious. This evokes a sense of intrigue and potentially even a slight suspicion, prompting readers to delve deeper and uncover the information.
While many websites use the plain vanilla title ‘Who Owns Google,’ we took a different approach. Our unique title may have influenced Google to diversify its Top 10 results, demonstrating the importance of fresh perspectives.
As a result of this strategy, we’ve achieved remarkable success. We’ve successfully outranked even higher-authority domains like Fool.com (DR 592) with our own domain (DR 390). We use Domain Rank (DR) from DataForSEO to measure domain authority.
Their (fool.com) title is ‘Who Owns Google? History, Shareholders, & Facts.’
Note: In case you were wondering, we did not build any backlinks to this article.
What We Learned
This week’s experiments taught us two key lessons:
Focus on “hero pages”: We’re prioritizing a select group of in-depth articles called “hero pages.” These pages strategically target high-volume keywords where we have a strong opportunity to rank well using our “winnability criteria”. Early results show this strategy is driving traffic.
Emotion-driven titles work: Adding emotional words to our titles helped us outrank much larger websites, proving that emotional engagement and fresh perspectives are key to attracting readers (and rankings).
In the Next Update…
Given the early success of our “hero pages”, we’ll be doubling down on this strategy!
Hence, over the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing more of these in-depth articles. We’ll continue to refine our “winnability criteria” to identify high-value keywords.
Find out what happens in our next update!
Day 49: Keyword Clustering Method
One of our core strategies going into this challenge is keyword clustering. This process involves grouping related keywords based on search intent, enabling us to create highly targeted content that resonates with what users are searching for. By using keyword clustering, we aim to improve rankings, increase engagement, and ultimately drive more traffic.
In this week’s report, alongside sharing our traffic performance, we’ll dive into the specifics of our keyword clustering methodology. So, read on to learn how we did it so you can replicate it for your website!
Our Keyword Clustering Methodology
We use SERP keyword clustering to group keywords by analyzing their search engine results. Keywords that produce similar search results are considered related and grouped into a cluster. This method aligns with user intent better because it considers how search engines interpret and respond to queries.
Refining Our Keyword Targeting Strategy
Instead of extracting competitor keywords where they rank in the top 30 SERPs, as we did previously, we narrowed our focus to those ranking in the top 10.
We also expanded our competitive analysis by adding another key competitor to the mix. This refined strategy allows us to hone in on the most relevant and impactful keywords for our content strategy.
A total of 12,979 keywords were extracted from 5 competitors.
Determining Cluster Thresholds
Keywords are clustered together if their top 10 search results share at least 3 common URLs. This strategy allows us to create highly targeted content that addresses specific user needs. While this approach may require creating more content, each piece will be laser-focused on user intent.
A lower threshold (e.g., 3) results in a higher number of clusters: A lower threshold means fewer common URLs are needed for keywords to be clustered together. This leads to more keywords meeting the criteria and being grouped into a cluster.
A higher number of clusters requires creating more content: However, each cluster allows content to be tailored to a specific topic. This results in highly targeted content.
A higher threshold (e.g., 5+) results in a lower number of clusters: A higher threshold means more common URLs are needed for keywords to be clustered together. This leads to fewer keywords meeting the criteria for a cluster.
Fewer clusters will result in the creation of less content: With fewer clusters, there will be fewer distinct content pieces to create. Consequently, each piece of content would need to address a wider range of user intents.
A total of 895 clusters were created by using a threshold of 3.
Why SERP Keyword Clustering?
SERP keyword clustering offers a more accurate understanding of search intent than semantic clustering (grouping keywords by meaning). By analyzing actual search results, we gain insights into how Google interprets and connects keywords.
Prioritizing Keyword Clusters Using Opportunity Scores
Using Opportunity Scores is part of our methodology to prioritize keyword clusters (fun fact: we scored a featured snippet for the keyword “Opportunity Score”. More details below.)
After compiling potential keyword clusters, we prioritize them using SurgeGraph Vertex’s Opportunity Score (OS).
The Opportunity Score tells you how easy it is to rank for a keyword and how much potential traffic that keyword has.
Essentially, the higher the Opportunity Score, the better the keyword’s potential.
Traffic Performance
Here’s a snapshot of our blog’s performance from November 11 to December 29, 2024:
Organic Traffic (Clicks): 98
Impressions: 88,100
Average CTR: 0.1%
Average Position: 49.9
Indexed Posts: 106/108 (98.15%)
Overall, impressions increased by 67.17%, while clicks rose by 40%, which shows steady growth.
Furthermore, newly published blog posts were all successfully indexed, bringing our indexation rate to 98.15%. However, two older posts remain unindexed. We’ll look into why this is happening and try to get them indexed.
10% of Traffic Are Coming From “First Clicks” Content
We’re seeing an increase in “first clicks” to our website. This means more people are discovering our content through Google searches and clicking through to specific pages for the first time. Specifically, 10% of our Google traffic now comes from these visits.
Screenshots below are from Google Search Console.
This increase in first clicks is a positive sign that our newly published blog posts are gaining traction and attracting visitors to our website. Consistently publishing high-quality content is key to maintaining this momentum and growing our traffic even more.
We Secured Another Featured Snippet for Our Blog Post
One of our blog posts has captured another featured snippet, this time for the keyword “surgegraph opportunity score.” Featured snippets are highly coveted as they occupy the top position on Google’s search results, which takes up a huge share of clicks.
This shows the effectiveness of our keyword clustering and content optimization strategies, ensuring our blog content aligns perfectly with search intent. By targeting the right keywords and structuring our content to answer specific queries, we’ve positioned ourselves as a trusted source for relevant information.
We’ll continue refining our strategies to secure even more of these prime spots in the future.
Day 42: Best Week Yet
We approached this week’s progress report with some apprehension due to the recent Google December core update, which impacted rankings and traffic for many websites.
However, it seems that not only did we weather the storm, but we also achieved the best performance of the entire campaign so far!
Traffic Performance
From November 11 to December 22, 2024, here’s how our blog posts have performed:
Organic Traffic (Clicks): 70
Impressions: 52,700
Average CTR: 0.1%
Average Position: 48.5
Indexed/published posts: 73/75 (97.33%)
What We Did, Lessons, and Results So Far
1. Highest Traffic Surge to Date
This week marked a turning point with the highest traffic surge yet.
Clicks: Increased by 125.81% compared to the previous week.
Impressions: Rose by 139.55%.
These are the largest gains we’ve seen so far and validate the importance of our consistent publishing schedule.
2. Indexing
We’ve also made significant strides in getting our posts indexed by Google. When we started this case study, less than 50% of our posts were indexed. Now, with 73 out of 75 posts indexed, our indexing rate stands at an impressive 97.33%.
However, we faced a challenge with Google selecting its own canonical version of pages that are different from our preferred URLs. Despite implementing 301 redirects, updating the sitemap, and using canonical tags, Google continued to index the old URLs instead of the new ones.
Ultimately, what resolved this issue was building more internal links to the new URLs. This led to Google finally indexing them correctly. This success further demonstrates the importance of a strong internal linking strategy for SEO.
3. Internal Linking
As we continue to develop our internal linking strategy, we want to revisit our approach, which involves leveraging both siloing and cross-linking. To recap, we utilize category slugs as thematic anchors to maintain strong topical relevance within each silo while allowing for strategic cross-linking to enhance user experience. Below is a visualization of our topic clusters:
You can see that the SEO Cluster is the largest, followed by the Content Cluster. There is some cross-linking between SEO, Content, Marketing, and Business.
However, the AI cluster appears isolated without cross-linking with other clusters. We plan to address this by bridging gaps and adding internal links, particularly to the AI cluster, while closely monitoring improvements in organic traffic, rankings, and visibility.
4. Content Refresh
Speaking of visibility, we recently saw a significant surge in impressions for one of our pages after a content refresh. Our strategy involved identifying the queries driving clicks to the page and then modifying the H2 headings to better align with those keywords. Specifically, we focused on the query “how to find low competition keywords with high traffic.”
Following this update, impressions for that page jumped from 784 (Previous 7 days) to 3.75K (Last 7 days).
Below is a snapshot of the changes we made to the page https://surgegraph.io/seo/low-competition-keywords, specifically updating the H2 and the content to ensure Google recognizes it as a significant content update.
Google’s algorithms prioritize crawling and indexing pages with significant changes, signaling to them that the page offers fresh or more comprehensive information. This helps ensure our updated page is recrawled and reindexed promptly.
We’ll continue to refresh our content, prioritizing pages based on insights from Google Search Console data such as impressions, click-through rates, and search queries.
What’s Next?
In our next update, we’ll share our approach to keyword clustering and the lessons we’ve learned.
Day 35: Indexing Breakthrough & Internal Linking Kickoff
This week, we continued to publish content while taking a step back to analyze the results of everything we’ve done so far. The goal was to assess the effectiveness of our efforts, monitor progress, and make any necessary adjustments moving forward.
Along with this, we began implementing our internal linking strategy using SurgeGraph Vertex’s internal linking tool to build stronger topical silos, and we’ve been closely monitoring its impact.
We’re also excited to report some significant progress – especially with our biggest challenge since starting this journey: indexing!
What We Did
We used SurgeGraph Vertex’s internal linking tool to build our topical silos.
Topical silos are structured groupings of content organized around a specific theme or subject. This approach serves two main purposes:
Improves the user experience by making related content easy to find
Boosts SEO performance by helping search engines understand the organization and relevance of our content.
By linking related articles together, we are signaling to both users and search engines that our site is an authoritative resource on specific topics.
Now, back to how we implemented internal linking.
SurgeGraph’s internal linking tool intelligently suggests relevant internal links and allows us to add them with a single click.
However, to ensure quality and relevance, we carefully review each suggested link before accepting it.
Here is our benchmark to test which link we should accept:
Does the linked page directly address or expand upon the topic implied by the anchor text?
Will the user find the linked page helpful and relevant in the context of the current article?
If the answer to both questions is “yes,” we will build the link. If not, we will reconsider the link or adjust the anchor text.
Traffic Performance
Here’s how our blog posts have performed from November 11 to December 15, 2024:
Organic Traffic (Clicks): 31
Impressions: 22,000
Average CTR: 0.1%
Average Position: 48.4
Indexed/published posts: 58/67 (86.57%)
Results So Far
1. Huge Increase in Indexing – Fixes Are Paying Off!
The improvements we’ve made to address indexing issues are finally showing results.
Indexing has always been our biggest headache since starting this challenge. We pump out all this content every day, yet Google is taking its sweet time indexing them. It’s a common problem, especially with AI content, and we think you can relate to this, too (BTW, if you have any tips on solving indexing issues, feel free to share them this way).
Last week, only 18 out of 45 published posts were indexed, leaving us with a mere 40% indexation rate. But this week, we’ve seen a massive jump – 58 out of 67 posts are now indexed, giving us an 86.57% indexation rate.
Also, we published four blog posts yesterday, and all were indexed within less than 24 hours. The fact that our content is indexed so quickly suggests Google recognizes its value and relevance.
Here’s our current indexing status of the 5 categories:
Content: 24 published, 19 indexed
AI: 10 published, 8 indexed
Marketing: 9 published, 7 indexed
Business: 6 published, 5 indexed
SEO: 26 published, 12 indexed
Here are also some other things we observed:
Most of the published posts were indexed between December 16–18, with the majority happening on December 16. We will try to look closer at what we did or what happened on this day that triggered Google to index many of our posts.
Of the older posts, only 2 out of 46 remain unindexed.
For this week’s new posts, 7 out of 21 are yet to be indexed.
However, we faced some issues after changing the URLs of our previously published content. It seems like Google continues to index the old URLs, but we hope this will resolve itself once Google recrawls our site.
In the meantime, we’ve implemented 301 redirects, updated the sitemap, and added canonical tags to ensure proper indexing of the new URLs.
2. Traffic is Growing (Slowly But Steadily)
We’re seeing higher traffic growth this week compared to last week. Admittedly, we still have a long way to go to hit 100k traffic, but we’ll persevere and keep pushing till the end.
Our clicks (traffic) this week increased by 52.94%, while our impressions increased by 44.74%.
What We Learned
One of the most important lessons we’ve learned is to avoid changing URLs whenever possible. Modifying URLs can have significant SEO implications, so it should only be done when absolutely necessary. If a URL change is essential, it’s best to make that decision early in the SEO campaign to avoid complications down the road.
In our case, we are confident that the new URL structure will be beneficial in the long run, but we’ve discovered that altering URLs mid-course can complicate the indexing process.
When URL changes are necessary, it is crucial to set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, update the sitemap, and ensure that the canonical tags on the new pages point to themselves instead of the old URLs. We followed these steps, but unfortunately, we missed updating the canonical tags initially, which delayed some indexing.
On the topic of indexing, we’ve come to realize that technical SEO has been a game-changer for improving our indexation rate. It plays a critical role in ensuring that Google can find and index our content. By addressing technical issues like URL structure, redirects, and canonical tags, we’ve seen marked improvements in how quickly and efficiently our content is indexed.
Next Steps
For the coming week, our primary focus will be to analyze the impact of our internal linking strategy on traffic. We’re eager to see how the internal links are influencing user engagement and search engine visibility, particularly with the newly built topical silos.
Additionally, we will continue to maintain the momentum by publishing 3–4 articles daily. Staying consistent with content production is key to driving traffic and ensuring we’re on track to reach our goal of 100k traffic in 100 days.
Day 28: Small Wins, Big Lessons!
This week, we focused on resolving the challenges we faced last week, particularly slow indexing. We also implemented several technical SEO fixes to improve our website’s performance and structure.
We’re also starting to see some small wins – including landing a featured snippet and seeing a significant increase in impressions! Read on to get the full breakdown of our progress this week.
What We Did
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1. CDN Setup for Core Web Vitals and User Experience
While analyzing our Google Search Console data, we noticed areas for improvement in our Core Web Vitals performance metrics (Google uses this to assess user experience).
Specifically, metrics like First Contentful Paint (FCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) indicated that our site’s loading speed and interactivity could be optimized. These factors are crucial for delivering a smooth user experience and meeting search engine performance benchmarks.
To address this, we decided to implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers distributed globally to deliver content more efficiently by reducing the physical distance between the server and the user.
By caching blog posts, the CDN ensures faster load times for readers accessing our content, which directly improves Core Web Vitals.
However, our homepage remains dynamic to ensure users always see the most up-to-date content. By optimizing only the blog section through the CDN, we maintain a balance between performance and real-time functionality.
This implementation is expected to reduce bounce rates, increase engagement, and improve rankings over time, as user experience plays a crucial role in SEO.
2. URL Structure Update for Better Performance Tracking
Because this challenge is focused on measuring the impact of content alone, we wanted to isolate traffic generated solely by our blog posts without interference from other parts of the site.
Initially, we relied on GSC filters, using custom regex to include the slugs of all blog posts, like so:
While this method works for now, it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t a scalable solution. With plans to scale our content to over 300 posts, manually adding URLs to the regex filter would exceed the character limit of 4096. Additionally, the lack of grouping for URLs made it difficult to analyze trends across similar content types effectively.
To cross-reference the data, we also set up content grouping in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). However, after comparing results, we decided to rely on GSC data as our primary source for organic traffic analysis, given its accuracy, trustworthiness, and authority.
The Solution: Category-Based URL Structure
To address these challenges, we updated our URL structure to include categories, aligning with a content hub approach. Previously, our URLs used a flat structure, such as /slug (e.g., https://surgegraph.io/seo-business). Now, we’ve transitioned to a category-based structure, such as /category/slug (e.g., https://surgegraph.io/business/seo-business).
For existing blog posts with the flat URL format, we implemented 301 redirects to ensure no broken links (which will reflect poorly with Google) and maintain a seamless user experience. This also ensures that Google properly recognize and redirect traffic from the old URLs to the updated ones.
While many SEO tool websites utilize a simple /blog/ structure (e.g., Ahrefs), we’ve opted for a category-based approach similar to HubSpot.
Although the URL structure itself isn’t a direct ranking factor, it helps us in three significant ways:
Improved Tracking of Performance
The category-based structure allows for more precise tracking of both blog post and category-level performance. We can now isolate traffic generated specifically by blog posts and track ranking performance for individual posts and entire categories.
Setting the Foundation for Internal Linking
This URL update prepares the groundwork for implementing internal linking using SurgeGraph’s internal linking tool. By grouping related content into silos, we can create stronger contextual connections between posts, enhancing thematic relevance and improving user experience.
Balancing Silos and Cross-Linking
Silos refer to grouping content by closely related topics, while cross-linking involves linking content from different categories.
We recognize the value of both silos and cross-linking. While a strict silo approach can be highly effective for SEO, we also wanted to allow some cross-linking between categories to enhance user experience and knowledge discovery. However, this cross-linking inherently dilutes the silo structure.
Adopting a content hub approach using category slugs helps counterbalance this and ensure strong thematic relevance within each category.
Essentially, the category slugs provide a necessary balance of both silos and cross-linking, ensuring our content remains organized and focused even with the added flexibility of cross-linking.
This approach allows us to reap the benefits of both siloed and cross-linked content, creating a website structure that is both user-friendly and optimized for search engines.
3. Added Noindex Tags to WordPress Backend Pages
To maintain a clean and focused search engine index, we added noindex tags to all WordPress backend pages. These are URLs that are not intended for public viewing. Allowing these pages to be crawled and indexed by search engines could clutter the index and dilute the relevance of the content we want to rank.
If you’re using WordPress or any CMS, we suggest that you check Google Search Console regularly to ensure unintended pages, such as seasonal promotions or testing pages, don’t appear in search results.
By keeping the index clean, search engines can better focus on the most valuable pages of your site.
4. Added Canonical Tags for Homepage and Blog Posts
Canonical tags were added to the homepage and all blog posts as a preventative measure against duplicate content issues.
A canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page is the primary one, ensuring that duplicate or similar pages don’t compete against each other in search rankings.
By specifying the canonical URL for each page, we aim to consolidate link equity and maintain a clear, authoritative structure for search engines to follow.
5. Requested Validation of Fixes via Google Search Console
After implementing these updates, we used Google Search Console to request validation of our fixes. This allows us to directly inform Google of the changes, expediting the process of reevaluating and applying them.
Prompt validation ensures that any previous errors or outdated information are replaced quickly, allowing our improvements to take effect faster.
Traffic Performance
Here’s how our blog posts have performed from November 11 to December 8, 2024:
Organic Traffic (Clicks): 22
Impressions: 15,200
Average CTR: 0.1%
Average Position: 48.6
Average Impressions/Article: 338
Wins of the Week
1. Landed a Featured Snippet
Our content publishing efforts have shown early success. The first article published for this case study earned a featured snippet for the query “what makes a good writer SurgeGraph”.
It suggests that Google recognizes and associates SurgeGraph with the topic of good writing. This means our content marketing efforts and SEO strategy around this topic are working.
Google likely sees SurgeGraph as a relevant and authoritative source of information on writing. This could lead to increased visibility for our brand across other related searches.
However, we didn’t find a featured snippet for the broader query “what makes a good writer,” which indicates a highly competitive landscape where we need to double our efforts to stand out.
2. Significant Momentum in Impressions
We’re seeing promising signs of progress in our traffic performance!
Impressions have increased by 93%, surging from 7,860 to 15,200. Additionally, we’re now ranking for 749 queries, a significant improvement from last week’s 532. Notably, one query saw a whopping 583,050% increase in impressions.
However, while impressions and rankings are improving, clicks haven’t grown as much as we’d hoped. But we’re not discouraged by this because we know traffic growth takes time.
To accelerate this progress, we’ll next focus on improving rankings and creating more compelling metadata to convert impressions into meaningful clicks.
Progress may be gradual, but the upward trend is clear, and we’re determined to build on this momentum.
3. Technical Fixes Are Paying Off
The technical SEO updates implemented last week are starting to show positive results, with noticeable improvements in indexing. We went from 118 indexed pages to 225 indexed pages this week.
Hopefully, this progress sets the foundation for better visibility in search results.
To improve our indexing further, we’ll next focus on reoptimizing underperforming content and implementing strategic internal linking using SurgeGraph to speed up indexing and strengthen our site structure.
What We Learned
This initial phase of our SEO strategy has reinforced a crucial lesson: Just trust the SEO process and publish consistently good content. While optimizations like our category-based structure and content hubs are essential, they are only part of the equation.
Ultimately, consistently creating high-quality, informative content that resonates with our target audience remains paramount. Success in SEO requires patience and consistent effort over time; it’s a long game.
Next Steps
Moving forward, our focus will be on three key initiatives, which will be updated in the next progress report:
Implementing Internal Linking with SurgeGraph We’ll be using our own internal linking tool to optimize our site’s internal link structure. This tool scans the entire website and provides relevant link suggestions, which can be added with a single click. By doing so, we aim to improve the crawlability and indexing efficiency of our content, ultimately boosting its visibility in search results.
Maintaining a Consistent Publishing Frequency We’ll continue publishing 3–4 high-quality blog posts daily. This consistent output will help us expand our keyword coverage, rank for more queries, and steadily drive more organic traffic to the site.
Tracking Individual Blog Post Rankings and Traffic We’ll monitor the performance of individual blog posts and categories closely, using data from Google Search Console. This analysis will allow us to identify what strategies are working, refine our approach, and focus our efforts on areas that deliver the most impact.
Day 21: Slow Start, But We Expected This
Here’s our first ever case study report for this challenge!
The first three weeks have been an exciting mix of achievements, challenges, and valuable insights. While we’re making progress, as expected, we’re also facing some obstacles that require more analysis and experimenting. This is all part of the process as we test our strategy, adapt, and improve along the way.
Keep reading to find out what we’ve been up to so far, our progress on traffic, the technical hurdles we’re facing, and our game plan to turn the tide in the coming weeks.
What We Did and Challenges We Faced
There are two main things we focused on in these first few weeks: content publishing and technical SEO audit.
1. Content Publishing
Content velocity being our main strategy, our number one focus was on publishing high-quality content consistently. We published 1–2 blog posts per day, six days a week, totaling 31 blog posts.
Each blog post was generated and optimized using our very own AI writing tool. While the AI handled the heavy lifting, we applied minor human reviews and edits to refine the output. The blog posts covered topics around SEO, AI, content writing, and marketing.
While content publishing is the cornerstone of this challenge, we know that technical SEO plays a huge role in ensuring our blog posts are crawled, indexed, and ranked by Google.
To ensure everything goes smoothly, we conducted a technical SEO audit with a focus on the following areas:
Indexing
Server Connectivity
Lighthouse Performance
Indexing
To speed up the indexing process, we implemented two things:
Sitemap Optimization
We optimized our sitemap by separating static pages (like core website pages) from dynamic pages (blog posts).
The dynamic sitemap is now designed to load on demand when Google requests it, which improves efficiency.
Manual Indexing Requests
Since this is our first time scaling up content production at this volume, we want to make sure Google notices our new flush of blog posts. For now, we’re submitting manual indexing requests for each blog post via Google Search Console to speed up the process and ensure our content is quickly discovered and ranked.
However, this is a temporary strategy. Once we establish a consistent indexing pattern, we plan to scale back on manual submissions and rely on natural indexing to maintain efficiency.
Since we’ve only just published a total of 31 blog posts, it was possible for us to check the indexing status of each post. We used the URL inspection tool to do this.
Out of 31 published blog posts, 17 were indexed successfully by Google, giving us an indexing rate of 54%.
Despite our efforts, about half of our blog posts remain unindexed. This marks the first obstacle we faced during this challenge.
We analyzed the situation and came up with a few hypotheses.
Time Factor
Initially, we hypothesized that the delay could be due to Google needing more time to discover, crawl, and index our posts.
However, this didn’t align with the data. Some older posts were still unindexed, while some newer posts were indexed quickly.
Although it doesn’t seem like time is the issue here, we’re still open to the possibility that some blog posts may require more time for Google to index them.
Content Quality
Another hypothesis we had is that it could be related to content quality issues.
We observed a pattern where the posts created with an older version of our AI tool (using GPT-4o mini) were less likely to be indexed compared to content generated using the current SurgeGraph Vertex, which uses GPT-4o.
We also found out that part of the indexing problem is due to the next issue.
Server Connectivity Issues
Through Google Search Console, we identified 500 internal server errors for some of our blog posts. These errors prevented the pages from being crawled and indexed.
We investigated and found the root cause to be a technical glitch in how our lead magnets were implemented in the blog posts. Although the pages loaded correctly for visitors, the server incorrectly returned a 500 status code to Google.
Long story short, the developers fixed it, and we don’t see this issue anymore.
Lighthouse Performance
Our Lighthouse audit also showed areas for improvement in performance and optimization.
The developers are actively working on these improvements to enhance the user experience and search engine performance of our blog posts.
Traffic Performance
We measured the organic traffic (clicks) and impressions exclusively for the blog posts published during this challenge rather than the entire website. This is so that we can get a focused view of the impact our content strategy is having on its own.
The data below covers traffic performance from November 11 to December 1, 2024.
Organic traffic (clicks): 17
Impressions: 7860
Average CTR: 0.2%
Average position: 47.8
Key Takeaways
1. We’re off to a slow start, but we’ll persevere
After publishing 31 blog posts, our traffic is still far from hitting our ultimate goal of 100,000. Currently, we’ve only achieved 17 clicks out of 100,000, which means there’s still a long road ahead to reach our goal.
However, we knew from the outset that results wouldn’t come overnight. No one ranks in the top 10 and grows their traffic instantly – especially in a highly competitive niche like SEO.
The good news is, even with just 3 weeks in, we’ve made significant progress. Our impressions have skyrocketed from 0 to 7,860 and our blog posts are ranking with an average position of 47.8.
Additionally, we’re already ranking for 532 different queries, which shows our content is beginning to be recognized by search engines. These early indicators give us confidence about the journey ahead.
Our game plan moving forward is to tackle the indexing issues head-on, identify what’s working to double down on those strategies, and increase our content publishing frequency.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely facing similar challenges. We’d love to hear about your experiences and strategies for traffic growth, so feel free to share!
2. Indexing issues are holding us back
Currently, only about half of our published blog posts have been indexed, and they’re not being indexed as quickly as we’d like. Without proper indexing, we can’t rank and, as a result, we can’t drive the traffic we’re aiming for.
Indexing can be a major issue, especially with AI-generated content, so we’re looking deeper into this to better understand how we can improve our indexing rate.
One way we’ll do this is by reoptimizing non-indexed content using the new SurgeGraph Vertex to boost its quality and hopefully trigger indexing.
We also have a hypothesis that we’ll be testing shortly, and we’re hopeful that we’ll uncover a clear solution.
If you’d like to know about our strategy and the outcome, stay tuned for our next update, where we’ll share our findings and the steps we’re taking to address these challenges.
And if you’re dealing with similar issues, we’d love to hear your thoughts and any strategies that worked for you!
3. It’s a super competitive niche
We knew from the start that SEO is one of the most competitive niches to rank in. With so many established players already competing for top positions, it’s not surprising that progress has been slow.
Gaining visibility in such a saturated space requires persistence, patience, and a strategy that adapts as we go. We’re prepared for the long haul and are continuously optimizing our approach to stay on track.
Next Steps
Given our findings and results so far, here’s the gameplan for what we’re focusing on next:
1. Ramp up publishing
Since traffic has been slower than expected, we’re stepping up our publishing efforts. We’re increasing our output to 3–4 blog posts daily.
By producing more content, we aim to target a wider range of keywords and drive more traffic.
2. Solve indexing issues
We’re actively working on strategies to accelerate the indexing process. We know that without proper indexing, our content won’t rank, and our traffic will remain low.
One of these strategies is to use SurgeGraph Vertex to reoptimize our non-indexed content for better quality. We’ll be tracking how this affects indexing and share our results in future updates.
If our methods prove effective, you’ll be the first to know, so keep an eye out!
3. Optimize high-performing blog posts
We’ve identified a few blog posts that have shown positive increases in impressions and clicks in Google Search Console.
Now, we’ll look closer into these posts, analyzing what’s working and optimizing them further to improve their rankings. This will help us maximize the performance of content that’s already gaining traction, pushing it higher in the SERPs to capture more traffic.
4. Follow Google’s guidelines
As we ramp up our content publishing and tackle technical issues, we’re committed to staying aligned with Google’s best practices and guidelines.
This includes ensuring that our content is not only optimized for SEO but also valuable and user-centric. By focusing on high-quality content that serves the needs of our audience and adheres to Google’s E-E-A-T standards, we aim to build long-term, sustainable traffic growth.
Sneak Peek for Coming Updates
Obviously, this is just the beginning. We’ve got a long way to go, and we’re excited to continue pushing forward, learning, and improving every step of the way.
Stay tuned for our next updates, where we’ll dive into:
Our approach to keyword research and clustering for blog topics, and how we segment content based on top, middle, and bottom-of-the-funnel keywords to target the right audience at each stage
The strategies we’re using to overcome indexing challenges
