How We Grew Traffic to Ahrefs Blog by 1136 and Got Thousands of Paying Customers
Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2025 10:43 am
ition from Copyblogger :
A content marketing strategy is a plan designed to turn strangers into fans, and fans into customers, by publishing, maintaining, and distributing frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires.
This is a rather general explanation, so let's condense it.
Content marketing is the continuous creation of high-quality content designed to turn strangers into customers.
Note the second point: “Aim to convert strangers into customers”, this is where the marketing strategy comes in.
Don’t worry: you don’t need a ton of resources to make this happen. You can even be successful at content marketing as an individual or with a small team.
We’re not saying this to brag, we know this from experience — our own Ahrefs is a case in point!
Over the past four years, our 8-person marketing team has grown our blog traffic exponentially and beat most of our competitors.
As evidence, notice how our blog has grown in lockstep with the company’s ARR: This shows that content marketing really works:
How We Grew Traffic to Ahrefs Blog by 1136 and Got Thousands of Paying Customers 2
Our strategy is simple.
Since we are a small team, we only create educational blog posts and YouTube videos to tell you how our optimization tool works and why it is so important.
During the content creation process, we focused on SEO (just using our own optimization tools) so that our content would show up whenever a search engine searches for a topic related to it. This is shown in the image below:
seo tutorial results
In this way, whenever strangers search for information in our niche and become interested, they will naturally become interested in our tools and become our customers.
sounds good?
Below is our step-by-step process to achieve our goal.
Step One: Keyword Research
Remember the screenshot above? Since we’re an SEO tool, it makes sense for us (Ahrefs) to rank for a keyword like “ SEO tutorial .” This way, we can naturally place our product as a solution in our content.
I would be very surprised if we could win clients if we ranked for a term like “wooden sculpture”.
So: how do we know which topics and phrases to create content around?
We do keyword research .
Although this isn’t the sexiest part of content creation, it is the most crucial step.
Before we do anything else, we need to figure out which information keywords and questions will interest our target customers. This step will lead all content construction forward.
For us, it is keywords such as " what is SEO ", " how to get backlinks ", etc. So how do we create content for these keywords?
Now it’s time to find out the keywords you need.
Start by thinking about keywords that are relevant to your niche.
Enter the keyword in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and click on Questions or Phrase Match (you can also use a free tool like Answer the Public ).
keywords explorer pound cake
You will get tons of keyword ideas.
Expert Tip
If you’re creating videos, you can also use Keyword greece telegram data Explorer for YouTube research: just set the search engine to “ YouTube ” before generating results .
youtube keywords explorer
Another way to get a list of keyword ideas is to see what keywords your competitors are using.
Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer > enter your competitor’s URL > go to the Top Pages report
(Ahrefs’ Site Explorer > plug in your competitor’s URL > go to Top Pages report)
marthastewart toppages
This report ranks your site's pages based on the amount of organic search traffic they receive.
In other words, you now have a list of your competitors’ top performing articles, along with the keywords that bring them the most traffic.
A content marketing strategy is a plan designed to turn strangers into fans, and fans into customers, by publishing, maintaining, and distributing frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires.
This is a rather general explanation, so let's condense it.
Content marketing is the continuous creation of high-quality content designed to turn strangers into customers.
Note the second point: “Aim to convert strangers into customers”, this is where the marketing strategy comes in.
Don’t worry: you don’t need a ton of resources to make this happen. You can even be successful at content marketing as an individual or with a small team.
We’re not saying this to brag, we know this from experience — our own Ahrefs is a case in point!
Over the past four years, our 8-person marketing team has grown our blog traffic exponentially and beat most of our competitors.
As evidence, notice how our blog has grown in lockstep with the company’s ARR: This shows that content marketing really works:
How We Grew Traffic to Ahrefs Blog by 1136 and Got Thousands of Paying Customers 2
Our strategy is simple.
Since we are a small team, we only create educational blog posts and YouTube videos to tell you how our optimization tool works and why it is so important.
During the content creation process, we focused on SEO (just using our own optimization tools) so that our content would show up whenever a search engine searches for a topic related to it. This is shown in the image below:
seo tutorial results
In this way, whenever strangers search for information in our niche and become interested, they will naturally become interested in our tools and become our customers.
sounds good?
Below is our step-by-step process to achieve our goal.
Step One: Keyword Research
Remember the screenshot above? Since we’re an SEO tool, it makes sense for us (Ahrefs) to rank for a keyword like “ SEO tutorial .” This way, we can naturally place our product as a solution in our content.
I would be very surprised if we could win clients if we ranked for a term like “wooden sculpture”.
So: how do we know which topics and phrases to create content around?
We do keyword research .
Although this isn’t the sexiest part of content creation, it is the most crucial step.
Before we do anything else, we need to figure out which information keywords and questions will interest our target customers. This step will lead all content construction forward.
For us, it is keywords such as " what is SEO ", " how to get backlinks ", etc. So how do we create content for these keywords?
Now it’s time to find out the keywords you need.
Start by thinking about keywords that are relevant to your niche.
Enter the keyword in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and click on Questions or Phrase Match (you can also use a free tool like Answer the Public ).
keywords explorer pound cake
You will get tons of keyword ideas.
Expert Tip
If you’re creating videos, you can also use Keyword greece telegram data Explorer for YouTube research: just set the search engine to “ YouTube ” before generating results .
youtube keywords explorer
Another way to get a list of keyword ideas is to see what keywords your competitors are using.
Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer > enter your competitor’s URL > go to the Top Pages report
(Ahrefs’ Site Explorer > plug in your competitor’s URL > go to Top Pages report)
marthastewart toppages
This report ranks your site's pages based on the amount of organic search traffic they receive.
In other words, you now have a list of your competitors’ top performing articles, along with the keywords that bring them the most traffic.