Pin me, please 😉
We all love successful people — many of them are our heroes.
We love hearing about how they achieved their amazing results.
Now and then, we can use their success for our own purposes. And this post is going to be all about that.
I’m going to teach you the secrets of search traffic, specifically in terms of popular blogs in the areas of marketing and blogging.
Thanks to the analysis of 106 of the best blogs, you’ll be able to:
- find keywords with lower competition and create better content
- find out what kinds of posts bring more traffic and why
- understand the strategies of link building and use this knowledge for yourself
- get the data on how many words you need to write
- see a lot of other statistical data you’ll need to achieve success
I’m giving you the opportunity to download your reports now — for free! You don’t even need to become my subscriber to do so. Since this traffic is not mine, I feel a bit guilty about showing you the inner workings of other people’s blogs.
Get Access to the Google Sheet with the secrets surrounding 106 of the best blogs!
BLOG / ORGANIC SEARCH TRAFFIC * data by Ahrefs
Note: Click here if you want to skip my blog post and go directly to data and statistics on the search traffic of 106 blogs in the area of marketing and blogging.
A Small Prequel — Why This Blog Post Was Brought to Life
I’m a regular person.
Sometimes I’m a marketer. Sometimes I’m a blogger. And sometimes, I’m an SEO specialist.
I’m not a guru, nor am I an influencer.
You’re a regular person too. (I know it!)
And we need help.
My biggest passion is helping other people by sharing my knowledge and experience.
To be honest, it’s quite difficult.
You need to know how to teach. How to write. How to communicate.
I’m far from perfect, as I’m only at the beginning of this road.
My first post on the SEO tricks of 5 online marketing experts was published on November 12, 2015. So I’m just 11 months old. 🙂 Sorry, but I haven’t had much time to learn how to help.
That’s why I decided to analyze the search traffic of the blogs I respect the most.
The basis of search engine traffic is keyword research verified by real data.
In the beginning, I only ever thought about myself.
Understanding what to write about in your posts is as important as the air we breathe. This knowledge should be supported by keyword research.
After many years of experience, I’ve found that keyword research based on real data is best.
Not on the numbers indicated by Google Keyword Planner (which has been experiencing some problems lately)…
…but on the real data based on the traffic you can get.
If you already have search engine traffic of more than 1,000 visitors a month, you definitely need to conduct an SEO audit and use Google Search Console.
If you don’t, then you may need to use tools. In fact, you probably should.
Initially, Ahrefs was my favorite tool. (Yes, it’s pricey, but it’s worth the cost! + You can always use the free options.)
To estimate my probable traffic, I type a search query in Google. And then I attach some pages for analysis in Ahrefs:
This way I can see roughly how much traffic I can expect (for example, for the post you’re reading right now).
Pin me, please 😉
Don’t fall victim to a widespread problem of many bloggers and sites.
My research will help you avoid the most widespread problem that bloggers face:
Lack of traffic.
The basis of getting search traffic is keyword research, content and links.
Those of us who lack organic search traffic tend to make this mistake:
For example:
Sure, it’s cool that I know SEO.
But we already have Brian Dean, who has 7,000 unique referring domains!
It doesn’t matter how good of a specialist I am — I won’t be able (at least for now 🙂 ) to win the war of collecting the links to my blog.
So what do I do?
Be realistic about estimating the SEO possibilities of your blog.
Here’s what you need to pay attention to:
- What rating your domain has (DR – Domain Rating by Ahrefs; DA – Domain Authority by MOZ)
- The average amount of backlinks that your blog posts get (or are able to get)
- Always evaluate the strength of your competitors based on the selected keyword:
- What ratings your competitors have (domain and page)
- How many unique referring domains they have
- What type of content they create
- How many words they include in their articles
- If you see that the sites in the Top 10 search results have hundreds of backlinks, and you only get 5 on average, go searching for another keyword.
- If their DA/DR is way higher than yours, go searching for another keyword.
Sure, there are many factors that might affect the rankings, but this basic evaluation will help you save a lot of time and act strategically.
Make sure to install at least one of these Chrome extensions:
They will help you make the right decisions.
For example, I can’t defeat Brian Dean by this query [keyword research]:
Even though I know that this query brings him a huge amount of traffic.
That’s because it’s doubtful that 500 unique domains will be linking to my article.
The ratings of my domain and page aren’t as high as of those who are already in the TOP 10.
Try to find dependencies in SERP and use them for your own purposes.
You can’t have too much search traffic.
It’s a constant rush for visitors who come from search engines.
Even though I have a great deal of experience in SEO, search traffic is still not the #1 source of traffic to my new blog.
I assume the same applies to you and your blog?
You’re not alone. There are a lot of us.
Even such experts as Bryan Harris and Mariah Coz get some miserable search traffic.
However, they still earn hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars every year! (But trust me, they spend a lot too!)
The point is that I’m conducting an experiment.
I don’t do link building.
I don’t use any of the most popular tactics. All the backlinks that I have so far, I’ve gotten thanks to my friends and the interviews. I don’t have a lot of them. (To be precise, I have 88.)
To be honest, I feel ashamed that as an SEO specialist, I still have such a small amount of traffic. (I need a bit more time to overcome my insecurities.)
But because I love analysis, it’s time to find out why everything is the way it is.
Here’s what you’ll need to get the search traffic:
First. SEO takes time. A huge amount of time. On average, it takes a link 10 weeks after it’s been created to take effect (data by MOZ).
Second. Correct keyword research. It’s really necessary nowadays. In my opinion, the main mistake of many bloggers is the wrong choice of topics for their posts and articles.
Make sure you can rank for your keywords.
Third. Estimation of competition.
It’s really not that hard to estimate whether you can get into Google TOP. The fundamentals of ranking will help you do this:
- Authority of your domain. It’s influenced by quality inbound links.
- Authority of your post, article, or page. (Links again — both internal and external)
- Relevant content that answers the users’ questions
- Social signals (Social shares)
- Engagement (Comments, amount of time that a user spends on your page)
There are hundreds of different factors that affect your ranking. But these are the key indexes!
When choosing your keywords, look not only at their monthly search volume, but at your competitors’ too.
Fourth. Only create awesome content.
As you can see below, my research shows that high-traffic pages all have amazing content. (In most cases, they almost always have some long-form content!)
Experiment, and share your research and cases. Try to fully explore your topic.
Not sure what to blog about? Read the Semrush 14-Day Free Trial Guide to get guaranteed reader and Google love.
Your readers will be grateful, and search engines will appreciate it too!
What do you do if you have something to say on a topic that interests you, but your competitors are too strong?
You have two options:
- Have a plan on who will link to your content (and how).
- Create some useful content in spite of high competition.
If you choose the first option, know that it involves a great deal of work.
Link building.
Many bloggers don’t do this because it requires a substantial amount of time and connections. All the techniques have been around for a long time and haven’t changed in years.
The problem is that link building should be worth the time you spend on it.
If you have your own product or an affiliate business, then these expenses will probably pay for themselves.
But chances are, you don’t have your own online course that you are selling for thousands of dollars just yet. (If you do, then you’re already doing link building.)
With enough search traffic, the only thing that these articles won’t bring you is internal links to other pages that are important to you (and we’re only talking about search engine traffic here, not traffic from social media). Isn’t that cool?
Many people tend to forget about the power of internal links.
My recent research has proven it.
On one of my niche blogs, I created 10 basic articles and 15-30 other posts that linked to those 10 articles.
As a result, I got the Holy Grail: search traffic for keywords with tens of thousands of queries.
To be absolutely honest with you, I saw a small amount of competition and decided to seize the opportunity.
And this is in spite of the fact that I wasn’t doing any link building, and my pages got only 10-15 external links that were created naturally.
Always conduct experiments like these.
SEO is a wonderful area that requires some analytical abilities, patience, and impertinence.
Here’s the data that I got from my research:
Interesting data and statistics on the search traffic of 106 blogs in the area of marketing and blogging
First, I wanted to know how quickly these blogs load (as this gets a lot of attention nowadays).
Using GTMetrix, I measured their page load time.
The average load speed of these 106 blogs was 2.17 seconds!
A lot of people also talk about switching to https, so I also wanted to know how many blogs followed this recommendation.
Only 30.47% of the 106 blogs had https.
Do you need to consider switching? No, not if you don’t sell online courses or other products directly from your blog (when safety should be your first priority!).
For each of the blogs, I picked three pages that get the most of the traffic. (I was mainly interested in blog posts).
So I had 315 pages for further analysis.
The average blog post contained 4,772 words.
I wasn’t surprised at all, even though other research (by serpIQ and Brian Dean) showed data where the average successful content was approximately 2,000-2,400 words long.
They conducted their research in many different areas, whereas my results are based only on the niches of blogging and marketing.
It’s hard to admit, but if you have a blog devoted to these topics, you need to focus on creating longer content. (I’ve started doing this with all of my recent posts.)
The average Title Tag length – 60 characters.
Everybody follows this advice on on-page SEO. You should try to abide by this habitual rule too.
But here’s what’s become the most interesting to me:
- The average referring domains – 71
- The average backlinks – 269
- The average domain rating – 59 (*data by Ahrefs)
This makes the average traffic – 3,317 visits.
Note: to measure the word count, I used a tool called Bulk Web page Word Count checker. To extract the Title Tags, I used Meta Tag Extractor by Buzzstream. I highly recommend that you use these tools to quickly evaluate your competitors.
The web hosting industry is changing rapidly
According to web hosting statistics compiled by Mark Berka, the website hosting market is growing rapidly. Some key insights:
- The web hosting market is expected to grow to $216.6 billion by the year 2025, translating to a growth rate of approximately 15% per year
- Shared hosting is the leader by market share (31.7%), but cloud hosting services are growing at a much faster pace.
- GoDaddy is the most popular web hosting provider overall, followed by Amazon AWS and Google Cloud.
Why I gave away 40 hours of work, just like that:
The main task for me was to find golden keywords to write my articles.
The easiest ones, with low competition and high traffic.
In the process of analyzing Brian Dean’s traffic statistics…
…I realized how silly it would be not to share the results. Anyway, I still can’t write as many articles as he can. 🙂
I had a long list of 106 blogs! (My list is based on the blogs that I always read, and the updates I’m subscribed to).
The main topics of these blogs are Blogging and Marketing.
Download these reports to find easy keywords with high traffic.
For each of the blogs, you’ll get three reports. (The entire analysis was done using Ahrefs.):
- Top pages
- Organic keywords
- Backlinks
Top pages. Here are listed the main pages that receive the most search engine traffic.
Organic keywords. Here you’ll find the keywords where the target website ranks for the top 100 organic search results, along with its current ranking and the amount of traffic each query brings every month.
Backlinks. Using this report, you can study the strategy of getting the backlinks. You can contact any of the owners and offer your resources. But I’d recommend that you just make friends with the most interesting owners of these resources. In my opinion, the future of link building lies in friendly relationships, blogger outreach, and networking.
Note: Each of the reports has up to 1,000 rows. I limited the selection by keywords (at least 90 monthly searches); Dofollow links. Also, please know that those aren’t precise traffic numbers, and that this is the data provided by Ahrefs rather than Google Analytics. In my experience, these numbers can be multiplied by 3-5 for the blogging and marketing niche.
Access your reports here! (No opt-in needed.)
How to use search traffic statistics to find your easy keywords:
The main index that will let you filter the keywords is called KD (Keyword Difficulty Score by Ahrefs).
Here’s what Ahrefs says about it:
Let’s open the reports.
For example, you opened the Organic Keywords Report for the blog Writtent.com.
By default, the data in this report will be sorted by the amount of traffic that the specific keyword brings.
I was interested in one keyword — newsletter ideas, its difficulty index = 8.
While the post is occupying the 3rd position, this keyword brings it approximately 170 visitors.
Let me check who else is in Google’s TOP 10 with this query:
If I see that the competitors are at approximately my level, and that other pages also have a small amount of referring domains, I move on to the next stage.
I look at another report (Top Pages) and see how much organic search traffic flows to this target URL.
1,530. Awesome!
I get back to the Organic Keywords Report and locate all the keywords that this post is ranked with (filtering the data by URL).
Many of them can be employed in your content, but if they’re used organically, they will be helpful to the user in terms of understanding the topic better.
Don’t forget that this is not the precise traffic data, but only what is estimated by Ahrefs.
After that, I’m interested in the backlinks to this page.
Here’s where the report with the pages linking to this target URL comes in handy.
This is how I created a list of more than 60 easy keywords I can use to write new blog posts. I will share them with you too!
To access this list, open the common spreadsheet with all the reports. (The sheet’s called Easy Keywords.)
Conclusion
In the results of the analysis, we can clearly see the dependency of search traffic on the amount of received links and long-form content.
When we speak of high-frequency queries, chances are that you’ll have competitors you won’t be able to defeat in that domain.
You need to understand one thing:
To get more organic search traffic to your blog, you need to be at the same approximate link level as your competitors.
It doesn’t mean that everything is lost!
Newbies and semi-experienced bloggers can still achieve amazing results. Don’t forget to be scrupulous in analyzing your competitors and conducting keyword research!
I hope that you’ll find your golden keywords in my reports (no opt-in required!). That you’ll create your content and get some decent positions in the TOP search results.
I’m really looking forward to hearing your opinion on my research. Please write your comment and share this post with your friends.
Thanks for your help!
Hi Mike,
Another masterpiece. I would say you have done an amazing job. If I would have to wrote this post, it would take me at least 4-5 days.
It takes so much of the time to find the data and statistics to create such a long and detailed blog post.
I haven’t completed reading this post, yet, it will take me another 15 mins to complete. I will compete that half part later.
Right now, I would like to say thank Mike for this awesome piece of content.
Regards,
Umesh Singh
You’re welcome, Umesh!
It’s my first blog post that’s that short (only 3,000 words) 🙂
I spent lots of time analyzing and preparing everything, but it was worth it!
Yeah, I know mike your every post always cross 3000 words and comparison of those this one is shorter. But still, you steal the show.
One points that I can relate is: I too don’t focus on link building and I feel ashamed because of it. But now, I am thinking that I should start building some links for my blog.
Anyway keep doing the good job like this.
Good luck! 🙂
Good luck to you!
Soon I’ll try to focus on building some links too. Without them, it’s impossible to get search traffic these days.
Great insights. I used Moz bar to analyze a lot of results. In most of the results PA outranks DA higher domain. Ahrefs is super fast, and they are crawling faster than any other backlink analyzes tools. Sometimes Moz and Ahrefs conflicts in DR and DA. Tracking competitors domain reveals a lot of opportunities especially keyword opportunities. Using SSL improves site speed and gives very little SEO boost up.
Thanks for your observations. I use MozBar and Ahrefs Toolbar together so as to evaluate the competition better too.
I didn’t know that using SSL can help to improve the loading speed.
Here is the article and do you remember once I worked with hosting company. They also said this info to me.
Mike? This is super work, you’ve just blown my jaw. Thanks for starting my Monday with an engaging post.
Great Job.
Cheers
Bill
I hope everything’s alright with your jaw 🙂
I’m glad that you like my work, Bill.
Hi Michael,
You are really expert in analysis and research, moreover you always try to help others with your research which is really helpful.
Thank you for creating best blogs report, really it would be helpful.
No doubt that you are expert in SEO and blogging, I think the only reason you don’t have more backlinks because you were in different business.
Otherwise I am sure you would have equal number of backlinks like other experts.
Keep doing the great work.
You always support me, thank you very much for that!
Getting backlinks in my niche is a tough task, so I didn’t even expect that I’d need so many of them. All that’s left for me to do is to come up with a strategy of getting the links 🙂
You are most welcome. I can’t believe that expert is looking for new strategies 🙂
Great data, Well Written and Displayed, i do agree long post around 2000 words appear more in organic results.I saved google drive posts that is great collection.
Thanks for writing a great post.
I hope you’ll find your easy keywords in my reports, Sachin.
AMAZINGLY awesome post! 😉
I haven’t seen any report THAT detailed before, actually! 😛
Thanks for it and keep up the work! ^_^
I try very hard to do my job well. And I’m very glad that you like my post, Umar.
All I can say is Legendary! Your articles are super-awesome and with just around 4-5 blog posts on your website, I’ve learned a lot.
This article had some really great insights. Will be checking the traffic stats report. I can’t believe you give it away for free without any opt-in. That’s so generous of you. 🙂
Please keep publishing more regularly because waiting for your blog posts is like waiting for the next episode of a TV series. 😀 🙂
Thanks for your comparison with ‘the next episode of a TV series’ 🙂
Unfortunately, for now, it takes me a lot of time to write a new post, because I always do a lot of research and I want to share with my readers only something both interesting and helpful.
Good one! Helpful content
Thank you for sharing!
It’s my pleasure to inform you about BetaPage it is a startup directory where you can discover, hunt and upvote on various innovative startups as per your choice.
Thank you.
You’re welcome, Richa. Nice promotion strategy
Amazing article and so informative and well laid out with all the necessary information. I have so many take aways from this piece, and I will certainly be coming back for second read.
Keep up the amaing work!!
Corinne, thanks for your comment. Be sure to be back 🙂
There are not many easy keywords left in the area of blogging, so I hope my reports will help you.
You always seem to surprise me.
Great little tutorial on the process and amazing resources.
Thanks Mike
I was trying hard to surprise you 🙂 I dream that these resources will help a lot of people!
Thank you, Matt, for your kind words.
Hello Mike,
Really Great Analysis. I haven’t seen such kind of detailed reports earlier.
Great Job,
Keep Rocking 🙂
Thanks, Divakara! Appreciate you stopping by and your feedback.
Love it! Great nugget of information, once again.
Keep up the great work, Michael 🙂
You’re my true friend, Raul!
Thank you for always helping me. Don’t forget that you may ask me for anything 🙂
Hi Michael,
Wow, great in-depth & actionable advice. Really useful.
We actually ran a similar exercise on local B2B websites recently where we analysed over 540 websites in five B2B sectors.
The data showed that the best in class businesses were getting the basics right in 4 main areas:
Location & Industry in Title Tag
Number of referring domains
Number of pages
Number of Google Reviews
The thing is that when you have the data like you’ve shown it gives you a game plan. In our case we showed that not much separates best in class from mediocre. You just need to commit to narrowing the gap on the competition.
Like you, one area we also found did not have a big effect was HTTPS – very few local B2B business are using HTTPS (2% to 3% range we found).
There’s a lot of ground you’ve covered here so I’ll need to keep referring to it.
Again, many thanks Michael. Great work.
You’ve done an awesome analysis, Tony!
Many years ago I used to promote local B2B websites too, and I fully agree with the results of your research. Back in those days, it was still important to get backlinks from local directories and websites. I don’t think it’s a thing now.
A correct analysis is crucial when you’re entering a new market or launching a new project, or promoting another website. This way you can see the whole picture and understand what you should focus on.
Bloggers need to do some analysis too! But many just skip this step.
Hi Mike,
This is another monster post from you!
Great resource, and great insight.
And they’re all for free!
Currently in transit, will come back to digest this later.
Thanks Mike.
Yes, it was very important to me to give away this information for free.
Everybody has focused on getting new subscribers through content upgrades. But many are already getting irritated by that. It’s very important to earn the trust of your reader, and he/she will want to become your subscriber.
Hello Michael,
You were done great analysis of popular blogs. Thank you for sharing. 🙂
Thank you, Harshil, for your comment!
Epic post with a ton of analysis, Michael!
Great work.
Sues
I hope that my analysis will help other bloggers with their search traffic. I am truly honored by your comment, Sue.
Hey Michael,
Great work sir. You are following the methodical research process of the likes of your Brian Deans and Niel Patels of the world and it will serve you well.
Off to share!
Thank you, I love your articles too. They’re very helpful!
Wow, what a great article Mike! Thanks for the mention, it’s an honor 🙂
I love your blog, John! I couldn’t even imagine that you’d leave your comment and share my post with your followers. Thank you for supporting me!
I like your style. Your tone and writing is superb. So easy to follow. Glad I stumbled upon your site! I had you in my saved articles on Feedly and I am sending this to my clients 🙂
Thanks, Matthew, for your kind words and help!
Awesome Post,
This is my first time on your blog and I really loved your each aritlce.
However as I seo guys I always has some cofusion:-
#1:-I want to rank my one of my site only in uk so what are the best link building practise to ranking in particler country?[I think this is not local SEO]
Waiting for reply.
Cheers Nekraj
P.S: Just bookmarked your blog.
P.P.S:Just subscribed in your email list.[wating for free knowledge is coming in my inbox]
Yes, you need local links. The more the better.
Thanks for reply.
DUDE, this is an INSANELY valuable resource!! Bookmarking it now.
Thanks a ton, Michael! 🙂
Thank you, Nino! Your opinion is very important for me. I actually believe that my analysis will be able to help other bloggers.
By the way, some people from Inbound.org think the opposite 🙁 They deleted my post and told me that the reason was in the poor quality of it.
Aw man, that’s a huge bummer 🙁 they can be a little mean sometimes. I think it’s an excellent post!
Hi
What a great article and huge information. I love the way you deliver you post. Really a great post.
Thanks Mike for sharing this post with us.
No problem 🙂 Thanks for stopping by!
Good Analysis. i love your writing style the way of expression.
I am far from perfect 🙂 Thanks, Rajum.
Hello Mike,
What a stellar post! I like your analysis and writing skills.
It will take me some time to digest all this information. Thanks for the spreadsheets.
Off to share your article to my social outlets.
-steve
Thanks for the kind comment, Steve.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for linking in to my blog among these SEO Titans! So happy 1.8K folks mistakenly stumbled upon BFP through Google LOL 😉 Thanks again!
Ryan
My pleasure, Ryan!
Usually, the traffic is 3-5 times higher than indicated by Ahrefs.
As a Graphic Designer who also helps customers with lead generation I found this article riveting. Very well written with common sense approaches and truly helpful resource links. Well done Michael.
Thank you, Chris! Glad you liked it 🙂
Thanks for sharing so detailed post… and good to see some blogs from Indian bloggers.
Just a question, Do you think that SEO will be replaced by AI in coming future?
This myth has been in existence for the last decade, but because people write search algorithms, I believe SEO will always be done by people as well.
Wow. You’ve done a ton of work, Michael!
I feel honored to be include here among such inspirational blogs.
I’m very pleased that you left your comment, Henneke! You always write awesome articles!
Interesting post.
However, I will not recommend your tip of running away from keywords and competition who have more links and DA then you.
The game is easy, but of course you need to do it. If you have pieces of 10 good articles written by you or someone else, you can publish them as guest post on high DA sites and get backlink to your page whic will give you chance to be on page 1 for desired keyword.
The problem is that in the niche of online marketing 10 links are not enough, even if they’re from quality websites.
As my analysis shows, you need more than 70 backlinks to be able to compete. Moreover, many bloggers simply can’t write 10 guest posts or buy them as it takes a lot of time and money.
Thanks for sharing your opinion, Stefan!
Hi Michael,
I loved your analysis. Keep up the great work.
And, thanks for the mention, much appreciated.
Regards,
Ankit
Thanks, Ankit. You’re welcome.
I love your blog 🙂
Hi Michael,
Thanks for putting so much effort into your research for this one… I love the deep analytical approach you take to your content.
The most interesting piece for me is the KW difficulty score and how that relates to link acquisition.
It’d be awesome to see a case study of a new page created, competing for KD 20 for example…. Gets 25 links and is ranking 1. Of course there are multiple other important factors that would play a part as you said. But it’d be interesting none the less.
Oh and by the way, ahrefs is a seriously powerful tool and continues to get better!
Thanks again.
Sure you can’t judge only by KD in the amount of necessary links. There are many other parameters that matter: domain authority, page authority, links quality, relevant content, and users on-page behavior.
But this index can really simplify things for you when you do your keyword research. Especially now when Ahrefs has updated its Keywords Explorer.
About case study… Thank you for the idea!
Actually, I am already able to see my results with the previous post. As my main keyword, I chose “first blog post”. KD=14. And, according to the recommendations from Ahrefs, I needed to get about 16 backlinks to rank in top 10 for this keyword. To this moment I’ve got 30 links and … after 3 months my post is in Google TOP 10 search results for this query.
This is really super awesome guide to boost search traffic. I really learned a lot from your amazing guide. I need to bookmark it as I can`t go through it all.
I will keep reading it in parts.
Thank you for sharing.
That’s great to hear, Sona! Let me know if you have any questions.
Hi Michael,
You have done a great job. I am going to share and read it once more to grab it fully.
thanks for the share man.
Thanks so much, Robin!
Really great analysis Michael, will definitely apply this knowledge to improve my blogging.
Thanks, Rahul! Glad you liked it.
Great analysis Michael. Keep going. Thanks for the resources.
Thanks, Zia
Great article, It will gonna help me very much to boost some traffic. I started blogging just before 1 month.
Thanks for sharing
Thanks, Rajiv! I sincerely wish you luck.
Wow thank yew so much for a great article <3
i am going to follow you
Hey, such a nice post. I started blogging as a passion, I hope it will help me to settle my carrier.
Another great post. Keep posting such posts.
Hey Michael,
You’re well on your way to becoming the next Brian Dean with these super-sized posts. I’ve been thinking for a while, and I’m going to switch to highly relevant long-form content and make them big hits like yours, instead of just publishing one smaller blog post per week.
Keep up the good work man!
Thank you SO MUCH, Ayodeji! I’m honored to be your friend.
Let me know about your results.
really very informative roundup of sites that get high search traffic in the niche.
I have to say that Ahref really is a great help to many.
Thanks for sharing. I will reach it thorough.
You’re welcome, Vashishtha. Definitely!
Very informative round up post mate. I am sure that this post is gonna helping me lot to generate some organic traffic. Thanks for this awesome write up.
Hi Vipin, thanks, much appreciated.
Hi Michael,
Awesome post……. your article is really informative and helpful for me and other bloggers too because providing such a huge list is not as easy as a cup of tea. Really you have described everything in descriptive, simply yet effective too. You’ve done a great job with this.
Thanks for sharing this massive list.
Thanks, Gaurav! It was time-consuming. 🙂
Thats an awesome and helpful post by you for the people like me. you really made my day. The tips you have shared will surely help the bloggers in generating good number of traffic on their blogs..
Do you know what i like the most about your blog? Its the easy language and well explained content. i really love visiting your blog.
Thanks again
Hey, you really shared awesome tips to gain more traffic. actually i am looking for some tips like this for my blog and i found yours. I am soon going to try these out.
Thanks a lot
Let me know how it goes, Sourabh!
you are only 11 month old in SEO.Really?
You have too much knowledge then
No 🙂 I’m more than 15 years in SEO.
great post….you have really listed the best blogs in blogging and SEO…one more informative post for me…thanks buddy…!!
You’re welcome, Arvind!
Wow Mike,
This is my first visit on your blog and I am already subscribing to you. This is not just long but very much insightful post. you have put lot of time, efforts and energy into this. I couldn’t even imagine writing such stuff or analysis.
Awesome job.
Hello there,
This article is really enthralling and fascinating. I was looking for something like that. Thank you for such a detail article with nicely explained.
Thank You
Can’t believe I only discovered you now Michael! Thank you for this super article and the incredibly helpful reports. 🙂
Pleased to meet you, Yolanda!
Glad you liked it and thanks for the kind words.
Great researched, Michael!
I am following similar things to reach top at Google and it works for me.
Ahrefs really play big role to achieve my target and makes easier my task.
I wish Ahrefs was less expensive 🙂 But for marketing specialists and SEO specialists, it’s the best tool whatsoever!
Thanks, Sarfraj!
Any other tool do you know similar Ahrefs?
Serpstat.
Awesome post. your article is really informative and helpful for bloggers Thanks for sharing this post
I’m trying to do my best. Thanks, Arif!
Hi Mike,
What an excellent stuff! This will be a useful reference content for the bloggers. You have explained everything in simple and detail.
Thanks a lot for free reports.
Have a nice week ahead.
Wow Michael,
Amazing post to learn & discover how to bring targeted traffic to a site.
Much appreciate this easy to understand post.
Great Resource! Thanks buddy. Keep writing.
Hello Michael,
Wonderful article you made for us here is search traffic secrets. I bookmarked it for reading several of time cause I will follow it for my new blog to make success for traffic. Thanks for sharing this and hope in future nice one like this.
Today morning I’m thinking about this..
and somehow I reached to this post because of your catchy heading..
thanks for this awesome content …
also going to read more content from your blog..
-Abhishek
hey Micheal, thank you for sharing this article
keep writing 🙂
Hi, I am waiting for your upcoming blog posts. Thanks for the email templates
Hi @Michael,
Thank you for sharing this detailed article, I also use ahrefs but as you mentioned above it should be a little bit cheaper, probably around 60 or 70 dollars per month. By the way, nice post with insightful details.
So I’m using SerpStat now.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Muhammad!
By the way, don’t you think SerpStat is far behind the ahrefs? Luckily, I also have a subscription with them 🙂
In my experience, ahrefs is better than MOZ, Majestic, and SemRush when it comes to backlink analyzing.
I fell in love with SerpStat. And I am sure that over time they will become even better.
Amazing! This gives a full insight to a traffic research.
Unfortunately, most of the bloggers (especially new ones) runs on a tight budget or no budget at all. Tools like Ahrefs, MOZ, Agora etc are a bit too much expensive for my taste. I’m using few free ones but they are more and more hard to find nowdays.
For a keyword research and topics to write I suggest: Googe trends, AdWords Keyword planner, Twitter trending and BuzzSumo. They give a starting point (the Idea), all other (content, promotion and SEO) is up to you.
I Normally to learn & discover how to bring targeted traffic to a site.
Much appreciate this easy to understand post.
Thanks for your comment, Colen!
I agree with you. These tools are costly. But there are also cheaper ones. SerpStat and KWFinder for example. I use them now and are very pleased with the results.
Hi Michael, thanks for sharing this article. ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools personally i like this tool
Amazing article and so informative and well laid out with all the necessary information. I have so many take away from this piece, and I will certainly be coming back for second read.
Keep up the amazing work!
Thanks, Dave, for your kind comment!
I follow your procedure but can tell me when we will see the result
Did not understand what exactly you mean. Please clarify
Hi Michael,
Thanks for sharing this article.I think ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools personally I like this tool more than Moz.
Hi Michael,
It’s a great resource you made for us. Thanks for sharing this and hope for future nice one like this.
Some interesting stats! Arefs is a great tool, although a little too pricey these days for me. Great rundown Michael.
Yes, it is an expensive tool. Now I’m using a free trial version and also happy with the results.
Wonderful and detailed analysis of leading blogs. Thank you for providing good resource to get some idea.
You’re welcome, Rakesh. Do not forget to turn ideas into actions!
Hello Michael,
Your Blog is such a Wonderful, educative, detailed and no doubt it is among the leading blogs on the internet. Thank you for providing it to us and please keep it up.
Thank you for such kind words! I will definitely continue to write useful articles.
I used to use Semrush where as aherf is really much better as I came to know from this article. I could see lot more keywords and more backlinks too. Thanks great article.
Yes, Akhrefs is the best tool for search engine optimization. I can also recommend KWFinder and SerpStat. They cost several times cheaper.
Awesome information Michael, With this statics it is clear, The better article with quality content, It will rank good, Even I have personally experienced my some of the articles above 2500+ words ranked higher on even high competition KW.
Thanks again for such great info and statics and also for directly providing the google sheets for these blogs…
Just an off topic question, Why haven’t you put SSL on your Blog Brother?
even i am confused to install SSL on my high traffic blogs, Is it true after installing SSL rankings get fluctuated?
Thanks, Murtaza!
When I started this blog, there was not so much fuss with the SSL. Yes, this one of the ranking factors is on par with the hundreds of others. From what I know, your rankings can indeed fluctuate for several months.
Great article! We are training some of our clients using a few of these traffic secrets. Works well! Thanks!
Wow! Nice to hear!
Hi,
All these tools and statistics tool and using all the data and analyzing and coming up with good actions on a website seems so overwhelming.
Thank you for this article.
Hi Christina,
Yes, when you are at the beginning of the path, this process seems overwhelming. But without analysis you can not understand the whole picture, it’s like going blindfolded. These tools help to remove this bandage and identify patterns, strategies that can be used for your growth.
Hi Mike,
This is a great piece (just like the other posts). I love how much work you put into these. The stats you have come up with are pretty revealing. I read a lot of top blogs in the marketing niche and their content is usually pretty long. At least, the content that gets the most traffic and most backlinks tend to be the kind of “ultimate guide” of something. But these blogs usually have teams doing the job. A regular blogger should not always try to go head-to-head against them. The competition is just not fair, especially in the marketing niches. I mean, everyone knows exactly how things are done.
Thanks again for sharing this!
PS: you may want to redo the stats since Ahrefs have updated their tool. The results will be probably the same more or less, but just a thought.
Thanks for your comment, Stefan!
It’s really very difficult to create such complete guidelines when you are alone. But it’s very easy to do when your goal is to help your reader.
It does not matter how long it takes.
It’s important to reveal your topic as best as possible, to try to give exhaustive answers to the reader’s questions and to satisfy his intentions.
When competition is particularly strong, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to create useful guidelines. I believe in this, and this is my approach 🙂
I will try to update the statistics, but since I don’t have a paid account right now, it’s quite tricky to do with free Ahrefs.
Thanks Michael
Valuable content about the search traffic secrets. i am newbie in digital marketing, and i am learning the seo basic. i think this post will help me to learn some more about the seo.
Do you have seo Guide?
You’re welcome, Maria!
I hope that you will apply the knowledge from this article. I have another article on basic SEO, you can read it here https://www.meerakothand.com/seo-tips-for-bloggers/
Cool! Thanks for sharing this secrets. Thanks for giving some tips on how to get search traffic. I do also believe that correct keyword search matters same with the back links.
I salute what you have done here. It takes too much time to find data or statistics for this post. You truly have an interest for numbers and for search traffic.
You truly did an awesome job.
Yes you are right, April. To understand how to be the best, you need to research the best 🙂
Thanks for sharing this secrets. Thanks for giving some tips on how to get search traffic.
You’re welcome, Lalit! The ability to explore why and how something works for more successful bloggers is essential to get organic search traffic.
I am also using the ahrefs. this is very beneficial for everyone. I am also working to build backlinks. backlinks is a big factor to improve your site. I also want quality sites just like our site. thank and keep it up rock:)
Thanks, Ankit! Ahrefs is definitely the best SEO tool for link building.
Amazing Stats. I hope that one day my blog will be among the most popular blogs. I can also see that Neil Patel blog is doing good. I am one of his blog readers.
Thanks, Emma! It will happen. Help every day. I also started my way from reading Neal’s articles, but as soon as he started writing not from the heart, I stopped reading his blog.
You’ve got a well-detailed content here, Michael.
Brian Dean is guru in this SEO thing. His high quality content and SEO strategy is amazing.
Keep up with the good work.
Emenike
I agree, Brian, awesome! But everyone can be like him 🙂 Therefore, you need to find your way to do SEO.
Hello Mike,
You’ve got an amazing analysis here.
Each time I look at the kind of heavy search traffic some of these guys you mentioned above are getting, I feel intimidated. But when I remember that SEO takes time and some of them aren’t committed to it for a long while, I feel consoled.
I’m putting more energy to my SEO strategy in the coming year.
Thanks for sharing.
Emenike
Yes, I also feel the same when looking at other professionals. But do not doubt yourself.
SEO is like education. You need to start from the first class and move forward to the university.
Thanks to many blog posts, this process may not be as long as traditional education, but it still requires an ongoing commitment for several years.
Wow, I wonder how much do they earn with that much traffic. However, I believe in quality traffic a.k.a targeted traffic. Today, there are “n” number of ways to drive more traffic to website. But only traffic from Google & FB posts are worth considering.
They earn well enough 🙂 Yes, targeted traffic is very important. You can also get great results from Pinterest although I prefer Google more.
Hi Michael,
Wow. This is a great list for those want to get inspired and work harder to achieve these kind of results. I wonder how much time and efforts they placed into the SEO of their blogs or websites to get such kind of organic traffic from search engines. No wonder these blogs have remained as authority sites.
Thanks for sharing this.
Regards
Vineet Saxena
Most of these bloggers are marketers. They know how to do the SEO right. But they do not spend a lot of time on it. In the beginning, they choose a strategy and stick to it. For many, these are guest posts. For some, this is building links through outreach. But for most, it’s just following the basic SEO rules when writing new posts.
Personally, I spend a lot of time researching. At least 10-20 hours for one blog post. And then I inform my old and new friends about the release of a new post (about 2 hours).
Yup, link building takes time. But so does all the white hat SEO tactics. The key is to know if what I am doing is right or wrong.
I have not tried social media for driving traffic. But it can be used to keep on top of the reader’s mind.