A short tutorial on getting more traffic and never running out of ideas

SEO is not dead. Far from it. Sure, it’s not the fastest way to increase your blog visitors, but if you play the long game, the results are great.

I’ve been blogging for about two years. I started my blog writing short stories. I posted one short story every month. Naturally, my website visitors were low.

I needed to seek out other blogs who were willing to backlink to my stories. Sometimes I succeeded, and I had visitor peaks of a couple thousand.

Over time, however, these stats didn’t stick. It wasn’t until I started blogging about my writing journey that these numbers slowly rose. Add in publishing my stories on Medium, and I was on my way to building something.

Now I gain about 50,000 visitors to both my blog and Medium posts every month. About 60% of these visitors come through organic search results. I “only” write about ten posts per month on average.

A few months ago, when I was at about 10,000–15,000 monthly visits, I started to reverse engineer my blog posts. Now, I see my stats still increasing daily.

I’ve written about 150 blog posts in these two years. About ten of them attract 80% of my website visits. For those articles, I applied this one simple SEO trick.

This technique has another benefit: It allows me to find more topics to write about related to the subject at hand. This way I never run out of ideas.

What do people want to know?

Say you have an idea for a topic you’d like to write about. You write the article, and you can’t wait to share your knowledge with the world. You thought of a catchy title, and you’re good to go.

Stop right there. First head over to Google and do some research about your topic.

I’ve written an article series about how to write a short story from scratch. I wrote 17 articles about the entire process from coming up with ideas to publishing and marketing your stories.

Three of these stories now rank on page one of the Google search results.

Why? Because I googled these subjects first.

One article performs particularly well, and I will dissect how I got there in this post. This post is about the structure of a short story. If you search for “how to structure a short story,” my article will pop up. This is just because I found the right keywords via Google first. Initially, I wanted the title to be “The 3-Act Structure for Writing Your Short Story.”

Find subject inspiration and answer the question

I googled “short story,” and I let Google auto-suggest keywords. Then, I scrolled to the bottom of the search result where Google makes suggestions with other, similar keywords. I clicked on them, dived in and followed the rabbit down the hole.

Because of this simple technique, I picked the subjects to my ‘how to write a short story’ series and knew what people searched for exactly.

Then, I made sure to answer the questions people had to the best of my ability. Because that’s even more important than finding the right title and learning what people want to know: to provide the best possible answer to the question people have. Google rewards you for that. How? No idea, it’s just how their algorithm works.

So what’s the best process to do this?

If you have an idea for a blog post and want to make sure it finds as many readers as possible, I suggest you go through the following steps.

In this example, I will use an article I wrote in March about how you can structure a short story. This single post brings me hundreds of visitors to my website. Per day.

For my series of articles about how to write a short story, I first checked what the most common search phrases were. Make use of Google’s auto-fill option. If you type “short story,” for instance, you’ll see the most searched for keywords connected to it. Here you’ll find possible topics to dive into.

Screenshot taken by the author. I wrote separate posts based on these results about “ideas,” “length,” and “structure.”

Perhaps needless to say, but please only write a post if you have something to contribute about that topic.

Now, I’ll zoom in on “short story structure.” When you search for your topic on Google, it’s important to find out how people phrase their question. This will give you clues as to what to include in your article.

Screenshot taken by the author. Here I included something about structure elements, examples, and diagrams.

When you include these phrases and talk about them in your introduction, this will help your SEO ranking substantially.

Another tip is to scroll to the bottom of the search results and view the “Searches related to” suggestions by Google. Now you have more elements to consider writing about, plus more content for your article to zoom into.

Screenshot taken by the author. With this result, I considered writing another post about planning a short story as well.

Now that you know how people phrase their queries about your topic, you can form a title. Put “How to” in front of it, and you’re good to go.

Another thing you can do is go on Quora and type in the question you’re trying to answer. You can see how popular the thread is by how many people follow it. You can also find related questions and find inspiration to write related articles.

Another suggestion is to use Ubersuggest, made by internet marketing guru Neil Patel. With this tool, you can play around with phrases and topics as well to find keyword ideas or an overview of the search volume for those keywords. It even gives you content ideas.

Screenshot taken by the author. I talk about plotting in terms of structure as well.

Conclusion

This trick is simple, effective, and only takes a few minutes. Over time, Google will index your article higher and higher. I’ve seen it happen to articles on my own blog and on Medium.

It starts with a few visits a day; months later, I’m looking at a couple of hundred visits per day for a handful of articles. And it keeps growing every month!

Take the time to do this before you start writing your articles, and not only will you attract more readers, you’ll find more content topics to write about, so you’ll never run out of ideas.

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