It’s one thing to study Search Engine Optimization in theory and another thing when you apply those theories into practice.

To grow your website traffic to over 400,000 unique monthly visitors after just four months of marketing campaigns, you need more than just a good SEO. Putting a website on the top page of Google takes a combination of marketing strategies, SaaS tools, promotional platforms, sleepless nights, and caffeine-pumped mornings.

Is it difficult? Yes. Is it impossible to do? Absolutely not.

In this process, I have personally learned and unlearned a lot of things. I hope the insights from this post will help you finally send traffic to your website and eventually grow your business.

In this case study, we will:

• Discuss how we increased our website traffic from 0 to more than 400,000 unique monthly visits;
• Reveal our best practices; and
• Provide learnings after our four-month marketing campaign.

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How We Started…

Let me tell you our story from the very beginning.

Our website, Removal.AI, was launched around August last year.

As any SEO specialist would attest, ranking a website from scratch nowadays is extremely challenging. There are many factors that can affect ranking results now. The SEO playing field is ever changing.

But even though we are an up and coming brand, we were ready to overcome the drawbacks because we believed in our product and in our team even more.

Before launching the Removal.AI website late last year, we initially struggled with improving image editing services. We dabbled in this industry because digital marketing and e-commerce is a growing market and is projected to make 22% of all retail sales worldwide by 2023. The popularity of online selling was further propelled when the global pandemic halted traditional business transactions.

As more enterprises shift to the world wide web, the demand for a reliable image editing tool for online product displays also increased.

We anticipated this trend and so our team has been developing this AI technology for years. We developed our tool and incorporated advanced image processing techniques so that it can produce outstanding quality outputs.

We did research about our industry, discovered our primary competitors — the main players — in the niche, and formed a trusted local SEO team that we can collaborate with.

Before we started our own SEO and marketing campaigns, I was already monitoring rankings for target keywords everyday and I observed websites come to the first page or get lost every time Google made changes to their algorithms.

All the information about our product and industry and our combined working knowledge in SEO helped create a concrete plan for Removal.AI. The plan proved to be working — a successful one and our website is raking more than 400k visits per month as of this writing.

We started from the bottom.

Now, Removal.AI is the fastest growing online image background remover and photo editor software company.

How We Did It?

1. Starting With the Right Domain Name.

The right domain name must reflect what we are — our brand, our values, and our identity. We intendedly pick the domain name Removal.AI because of the following reasons:

It establishes brand visibility to users.

Our domain name is short but spot on. Ideally, keep the domain name between 6–10 characters only. This removes the common confusion problem of users brought about by having different or unrelated domain names and services and by having really long ones. Our product is primarily a background remover tool, and what better way to showcase what we do than by getting a domain that screams our brand. Any user can relate our domain name to what we do.

It is SEO-friendly.

Why should you pick the right domain name? Going with the wrong one may cost you search traffic or your earnings. The worst thing that can happen is if it will be flagged as spam by Google. The domain name removal.ai is SEO-friendly because it not only hits our keyword need, it also reflects our service. Our brand and domain name do not confuse both users and the search engines.

It is essentially who we are.

Since we are an AI company, we did away with the top-level generic domains (.com) and opted for a niche-specific one (.ai). Normally, domains ending in .com are most trusted by internet surfers. But nowadays, domain name extensions which are niche-specific are gaining popularity. Since we are a company using AI solutions, the new top-level domain ending .ai became a perfect name extension.

2. Creating an Actionable Content Plan.

In making our content plan, we visualized it so that there will be real structure and it can be implementable by your team. We perfected our content strategy with the introduction of the following crucial concepts: search intent and SaaS marketing.

Search intent

We have all heard that content is king, but right now, search intent is redefining what we create as online content. Sure, building links can still help you rank your site, but copies optimized to answer search intent will land you that top spot on the first page of Google. This happened to our site, and it will happen to yours.

Search intent or user intent is the actual goal that a user has in mind when doing a query into Google or other search engines.

For example, if you search “background remover” on Google, you notice that the top ten websites on the first page of the search engine results are all about image editing tools.

That means when a user types in “background remover”, he or she is looking for a tool to erase image background — not articles about background removal.

That is search intent.

Before you even write a single word on your copy, you must discover the search intent for your target keyword first.

After knowing user intent, we did the following:

1. Edit the content for maximum user experience. We thought of taking our readers on a journey. How can we make them stick around and not bail out seconds after arriving at your page? Here’s what we did:

• Minimized or completely removed pop ups. If we did use them, we made sure that the exit tab is clear.
• Used font sizes. The article must not only be quality content — it must also be an eye-candy. Having bigger fonts signals to users that they are reading a blog post, not a dissertation. Size 14px and up will do.
• Make subheadings pop. We used subheadings on our posts and put in bold letters and bigger font sizes. Make sure to indicate the subheading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, and H5) in the code too.
• Let images do the trick. Since we are offering an image editing tool, before/after images are crucial elements when explaining to our users. Just make sure all images are well-optimized to load fast.

2. Monitor the bounce rate. We studied our Analytics and determined the bounce rates and average session durations on the pages that we were optimizing. If the bounce rate if we notice that the bounce rate is anything below 20%, we then…

3. Improve existing web copy. For problematic pages, we always ask ourselves if there is room for improvement or if there are elements we could add or remove to make the users stay.

4. Add a Featured Snippet Box. Once we are aware of the intention of our users, we get ahead of the competition by displaying what they are looking for in a Featured Snippet Box. This is to draw the search engine user’s attention to what he or she needs.

SaaS marketing

We developed content which is user-focused. We created an outline that took us to the whole thought process of our users.

As a Software as a Service tool, this approach led us to understanding our user’s journey.

How did SaaS marketing work for us? Our very own marketing funnel included the following phases:

1. Awareness. The first goal is to help people understand that our tool can solve their problem. We made sure our content had the three E’s — educational, entertaining, and engaging. This is to draw and retain the attention of readers in the market, to introduce them to our product, and to let them know that our tool might be the best answer to their needs.
2. Lead Generation. Once we got users showing interest in our product, we then used Middle of the Funnel (MOFu) marketing to gain their trust. We did this by offering them useful content on background removal and image editing through emails, videos, guides, and free application.
3. Sign-Ups for Credits. In this phase, the aim is to let the users try the tool by offering them free credits and even manual background removal service. Our free background remover tool is placed at the top page of our homepage so visitors can immediately try it out.This can help them decide if our tool is indeed the right fit.
4. Conversion. Once they are satisfied with the free background remover tool, we encourage users to subscribe or to try the paid version with an even better output. The pricing depends on the number of images.
5. Customer Retention. Our user’s journey must not end after the first purchase. We retained our users by offering a free account with a credit earning system through new user referrals and by posting consistent content about our tool and the service that we provide.

3. Offering Free Tool Service With High-quality Output to Retain Repeating Visitors.

Your site must offer your visitors something worth returning to. In our case, we have a free tool to remove background from an image. This is a useful resource for everyone and it gave us sustained website traffic from both new users and returning ones. But we did not stop there.

The free account service I earlier mentioned also made our users stay while giving us new leads. Each user starts with one free credit. That means the user can edit one image with higher-resolution after signing up. What can get them hooked is the credit earning system. The free account holder can refer a new user to get one credit. The more you invite to sign-up, the more images you can edit.

Aside from giving our visitors a free solution for background removal, we made sure that the quality of our output is better than the rest of the other tools offering a similar service. This ensured us a good bounce rate (25 %) in google analytics.

4. Making Use of Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and Rankings to Track Our data and Our competitors.

Google itself has provided us tools to navigate the ins and outs of search engine rankings. If there is one thing that can offer valuable information as the basis for our marketing efforts, it’s Google Webmaster Tools. It is a free service so we made sure that we are maximizing this Holy Grail of Google guides.

When it comes to studying data, Google Analytics is our main tool. Through Analytics, we keep track of our website information and focus on what appeals to our users. Set up your analytics once your website is ready to launch.

Besides using website data, it is also important to track your competitors. We used Ahrefs.com for this. We streamlined our search engine optimization and content strategies by knowing how other background removal sites are faring and by studying how they do their own link building campaigns and outreach.

5. Building Linkages: Maximize Guest Blogging and Invest on Expert Authorship

We have collaborated with few authoritative sites with DA 40+ and organic traffic of 10K plus.

Here are examples of our published articles:

• 10 Best Prototyping Tools For UX Designers in 2021
• 12 Principles of Design To Help You Create Effective Graphics
• 10 of the Best Studio Management Apps for Photographers
• 7 Tools to Improve Web Development Workflow
• Essential SaaS Tools For Your eCommerce Business
• eCommerce SEO Strategy: How to drive your website traffic
• 10 Digital Marketing Trends: What’s in Store for 2021
• Effective Co-Marketing Strategies for SaaS Companies

With that said, invest in guest blogging and making quality content — we cannot stress this enough. To collaborate with other authoritative sites:

Research for reputable blog sites or publishing sites that are related to your product or service.

Find ones with DA 40 or more or those with 10k or more monthly organic traffic. These benchmarks can assure site authority.

Reputation is contagious.

Blogs and online magazine sites with good reputation can give an authoritative pat-on-the-back to your site. As much as possible, do not associate with websites that are below your quality standard. It will not do well with both the readers and search engines.

Contact the editor of the site and make your pitch.

Introduce yourself and your company. Ask for permission if you can submit a guest post. If the editor replies and agrees, submit a pitch that outlines the content and intent of your article.

Wait for the editor’s approval for a collaboration.

If the editor does not reply after three days, don’t fret. Some blog site editors handle many requests for guest posting so it is natural to wait for a week or two before you can get a reply. After two weeks of not hearing from the editor, send a follow-up letter. But if the request is ignored for a month, try looking for other blog sites.

Follow the editor’s submission format and posting guidelines.

This is a crucial thing to do. Study and adhere to the posting guidelines of the website that you are submitting to. The editor might require changes to your post, so be open to corrections so that you can meet the requirements.

6. Utilizing Social Media To Drive In Traffic: Facebook Advertising

If you want to get the top spot, utilize everything — this includes promotions on social media platforms. In our case, Facebook Advertising gave us the additional website traffic which further propelled our dominance in our keyword categories. We tried these actionable Facebook marketing steps:

Choose the right Facebook Ad Type for your campaign. Nowadays, there are a lot of Facebook ad types that can be used for marketing campaigns — from mobile-exclusive Facebook Canvas ads to simple GIF ads. Our company relied on the more popular and effective video advertisements. Consumer Tech tweeted that over 500 billion people watch videos on Facebook on a daily basis and this year, over 80% of consumer internet traffic comes from internet video traffic. If everyone’s doing it, we should too, right? And we reaped the benefits.

Measure results with Facebook Analytics. Since Facebook is our main social media platform, it only makes sense that we utilize Facebook Analytics to further understand our audience. We set-up Facebook Pixel to track if there is actual conversion. Tracked conversions are logged in the Facebook Analytics interface and Facebook Ads Managers. By doing this, you can measure the effectiveness of your ads and your website funnels.

Target the right audience. We learned how to do Facebook Remarketing. Remarketing means tracking your leads and following up with related offers. That means when someone visits your site, you can “remember” that person through a code and when they open his or her Facebook newsfeed, your ad will show up. We did this by creating our custom audience on Facebook. According to Wordstream, Facebook remarketing ads have 3x more engagement than normal Facebook ads. This is too good to pass!

Make your ads count. The worst thing that can happen is running your ads and discovering that your image is cut off at the bottom because of wrong specifications. We took note of the following ad specifications when running our campaigns on Facebook:

Image ads

• Size for image only post: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Size for link post: 1,200×628 pixels
• Size for Facebook story: 1080×1920 pixels
• Ratio: 1.91:1
• Headline: 25 char.
• Text: 90 char.
• Post description: 30 char.

Video ads

• Format: .mp4 or .mov
• Video Ratio: 16:9
• Resolution: 720p
• Thumbnail image size: 1,200×675 pixels
• File size: 2.3 GB max
• Headline: 25 char.
• Text: 90 char.
• Link description: 30 char.

We also gauged the engagement level of our ads before even running them through the Facebook Ad Relevance score. We strived to get between 8–10 relevance scores before we proceed with our ad campaigns. Since each campaign can cost us a significant amount of money, we make sure that our advertisements count.

7. Introducing Removal.ai to the Community: ProductHunt Exposure

ProductHunt is a hub where new tech products are curated. It is a community-based website where marketers and makers introduce their products to users who can post feedback and vote. Popular products that receive the most upvotes get acknowledged in the platform.

We launched our product on January 27. And we got recognized as #5 Product of the Month despite launching three days before the month ended!

RESULTS: Organic traffic increased to from 0 to 1K… 17K… 63K… 87K… 240K… and now over 300K monthly visits! — Actually, 440,000 to be exact.

What I Learned on this Journey…

It’s true that ranking a website takes time. And even if we did it in three months’ time, we cannot deny the amount of hard work and team effort that we put in to pull off this feat. What happened was an eye-opener for the Removal.AI team and as I have said at the start, all of us learned a lot from this experience.

Here are our best practices after the successful campaign:

1. Nothing beats a quality product or service. Please. If you are selling something, make sure it is something that your customer or user would not regret buying. A quality product or service is not only easy to sell — it will also make your buyers or users stay.
2. Content will take you the extra mile. Make sure that you can produce consistently good quality content for your target audience. This is important to make them understand your product more and to change their purchasing perspectives. People will invest in something if they can get something from it. A constant flow of engaging and educational content can establish not only buyer interest but also buyer loyalty.
3. Prepare to spend some money. This is an investment that can give you long-term ROI later on. Hire some writers. Purchase some themes. If you are in the SaaS industry, invest in your developers. If you are unfamiliar with certain aspects of your campaign, hire experts. With a great marketing campaign comes great financial responsibility.
4. Respect your site visitors and give them something to look forward to. By respecting site visitors, we mean not bombarding them with ads and a barrage of desperate marketing ploys. Give back to your users and send or offer freebies.
5. Maintain your brand integrity and interact with users. Be honest. If there are glitches on your product, service, or web, be humble enough to recognize those mistakes and improve what you are offering. Respond to comments and feedback but do not engage spammy posts, comments, or reviews.
6. Do not limit efforts to SEO alone. There are other platforms that can send traffic to your site too. Explore those platforms.
7. Maximize social media as early as possible. Remember #6? Social media is one of those platforms that can direct more traffic and engagement to your site. We are singling this out because the earlier you use social media channels for promotion, the better your chances are for getting more site visitors.
8. Adhere to Google guidelines. Stick to the rules and avoid blackhat techniques. You do not want to mess with Google. Do not even try.
9. Focus on mobile optimization too. More and more people are accessing the internet through their mobile phones. Optimize your site so that it can be mobile-friendly. Do this with your social media channels too.
10. Be choosy with where you are putting your links. Remember the practice of submitting links to multiple low-level sites? Well, you can forget about that now and focus on building links with authoritative sites instead.
11. Soldier through the first two months of zero or very few website traffic. Be patient with your progress. Do not get discouraged easily.
12. Consistency is key. You are wooing your users and you are wooing the search engines. Be consistent with your efforts and at least put everything on a schedule until you build up a work rhythm. Last but not the least…
13. Collaborate for success and business sustainability. When it comes to marketing any product, service or business online… there is always a room for everyone. Most marketers and companies are hesitant to share their success stories online because they are afraid that their competitors might learn their strategies, then apply it against them to be ahead on the market. However…,
14. Good partnerships. Right now, it is not about being competitive that made most of the top companies successful but it’s about collaboration and good partnerships. If you want your business to stay-for-long, start supporting and helping each other. That makes a sustainable business.

As American author Brian Herbert said, the willingness to learn is a choice. Make that decision to learn today and start your own campaign to grow your traffic!

Curious about what we’ll uncover next? Stay ahead of the curve by subscribing to our newsletter and be the first to know. 👇👇👇