The Lean Content Velocity Approach to 60,000 Monthly Visitors

In this Growth Through Content case study, we'll be looking at how Quit Genius used lean content velocity to grow.

You'll discover:

• How thin content can still deliver SEO results.
• What to consider before trying to scale content.
• Why hiring a growth-focused SEO can assist in traffic.
• The content scaling of glossaries and how it works.

Let's dive in.

What's Quit Genius?

Quit Genius is a digital platform that helps people to beat substance addiction.

Targeting organisations and HR managers, the platform helps people quit smoking and other addictive habits by providing tailored advice and support. A 121 coaching system is also available to help patients stay motivated and on track.

I'd describe it as Noom for addictions.

What's Their SEO Data like?

Quit Genius has a UR of 52 and a DR of 54.

With over 5000 backlinks from just over 1000 domains. They rank for 36,300 keywords, and this generates 60,000 plus organic visitors.

Money-wise, according to ahrefs, this generates $43,000 worth of traffic if you were to pay for the same traffic with PPC.

I'd just like to pause for a second and discuss traffic value.

I've had plenty of online discussions where marketing managers try and slate traffic value as a metric worth even looking at.

I disagree.

I believe that understanding the value of your organic traffic is an important part of understanding the impact content can have on a business.

You might not have planned to bid on those keywords, but that doesn't matter. It's just a yardstick that tells you your business is occupying keywords that have some commercial value.

It's far from perfect, but it's a metric that can help you to deploy conversion tactics on pages of higher commercial value, such as adding content upgrades.

Moving swiftly on.

Content Velocity: a proven method for growth

Looking at this chart, the blue line is the number of pages added to the site, and the orange line is the traffic.

We can see that around Feb 2022, there was a huge increase in pages,

They went from 88 pages to 351 pages in just under a month.

What I don't know by looking at this is if the content was gained from the purchase of an old site (a valid tactic) or if they hired a team of writers.

But you can see that over the year, their traffic has steadily increased as the content rised through the rankings.

So what does the traffic breakdown look like?

We can see that:

• 54% of their traffic comes from just 14 pages.
• 65 pages generate 25,000 visitors or 41% of their traffic.
• 140 pages generate just 2779 visitors, just 4.6% of their traffic.

This pattern is something I see almost always in SEO.

The vast majority of your traffic will come from a very small selection of pages.

When you undertake any form of content production for SEO, it's difficult to know where that traffic will come from.

Sure, the tools give you guidance on traffic volume, but you don't really know if your site will rank because of all the other factors, such as authority.

And it might be that their traffic will increase further as the other pages start to rank.

You just don't know.

However, there is a clear link here between content production and ranking.

But as we dig into the content, we something else going on.

They went lean, not laden.

Lean Content Velocity: an approach that goes against the grain.

The top traffic page of the site is thin.

Very thin.

At just 302 words, it's content that just answers a query.

And it doesn't even have a meta description.

But most of the content on the site is like this.

All except one page tends to employ the same approach.

"What is...?"

"What does...?"

How does...?"

You get the idea.

But this actually is a unique approach, and I'll explain why I like it.

Glossary SEO: Turning a single page into a content product.

Creating a glossary isn't exactly revolutionary.

And if you do a bit of research, you usually see A-Z glossaries like this one.

A single page that gives an a-z of terms and a definition.

What Quit Genius did was turn the idea of a glossary into a content product.

And I think that's a great idea.

Why just give a single page when you can expand it to hundreds?

Ahrefs does a pretty good job using a similar approach.

The performance marketers amongst you might be thinking..."why bother, those pages won't convert".

That's not how marketing works (my recent post on how SEO works is well worth reading).

When someone visits a glossary page, they are looking for a definition.

They could be your customer in the future, they could be a blogger looking for a definition to link to.

Both are of value.

And every page does something quite powerful.

They offer you the chance to get closer to the prospects.

Quit Genius has a simple email newsletter offering for HR Professionals.

That gives you the chance to occupy greater marketing real estate by getting into the inbox of prospects.

Regardless, Quit Genius has proven that thin content can rank. Often, just answering the query matters.

Also, you can always expand later.

Content Scaling: DIY or done for you.

OK, so we're all busy.

How are you going to scale content production?

AI?

Partially.

AI takes over the heavy lifting of creating a first draft.

You still need to read it, fact-check it and improve it.

Using AI simply takes over 1 task and gives you others that are less arduous.

But this does open a whole new industry; growth-focused SEO.

If I was to sum myself up, this is where my SEO career and ethos are focused on.

I'm all about moving the needle for customers.

Not every SEO specialist or agency share this view.

Some agencies are geared for 'drip' SEO.

Slow, low-budget retainer SEO that will see little to zero growth.

Others are problem-solving tech SEOs that see issues with a site and want to fix them.

The type of SEO agency or specialist you hire will largely dictate your results.

And also, it depends on what your website problems are.

I'm the person you come to for business changing, traffic growth SEO.

Sadly, if you're busy and want to scale content, you're just going to have to find and hire a growth-focused SEO.

You might drop on and find a good writer or marketing manager that can do this too, but in my experience, you'll need someone with SEO knowledge, project management skills and also knows content.

Because picking the right strategy for content scaling matters.

However, if you want to scale content yourself, you'll have to build a process.

For example, I was able to grow the traffic of a website by 61% by hiring an international team.

We built a 24 hr 'around the clock' content operation.

• Researchers for content and images.
• Content writers
• Content improvers.
• Content editors.
• Content uploaders
• On-page SEO element adding.

It was a small team, but it worked.

If you want to try this yourself, that's what I recommend. Building a small team of freelancers.

But it's tough if you're busy.

In my view, get done for you rather than do it yourself.

Key Takeaways

• As we've seen here, content doesn't always have to be epic. You can create at scale, go lean and then improve/ iterate when traction occurs.
• Adding a lot of content that is SEO focused adds up.
• Growth-focused SEO matters if you want traffic.
• Every page can help to convert a visitor to an email subscriber (and that's hugely important for sales activation).

I hope you enjoyed this breakdown.

Andrew