How New Trader U Grew Traffic 30% in Just Over 2 Months With the Help of Alexa.com

Steve Burn’s fascination with financial markets started early in his career. After 15+ years of learning the market and trading his own accounts, he was determined to share his knowledge with other people who also wanted to build a strong trading foundation. He started on social media, then took to blogging and founded his own website in 2011 called New Trader U, which offers online training courses and educational content on trading strategies.

Steve had been regularly producing new content for New Trader U for eight years when he signed up for an Alexa.com Advanced Plan in the summer of 2019. After just 70 days of using the tool, traffic to New Trader U had increased 30%.

How He Did It: Optimizing for Search

“I initially started finding keyword opportunities for my site using the free [Site Overview] tool,” Steve told us.

He used the keyword gaps (keyword that were driving traffic to his competitors, but not his site), buyer keywords (keywords that indicated a search intent to make a purchase), and easy-to-rank keywords (low-competition keywords that were within reach of his site’s competitive power) in particular.

“I would take the keyword ideas I found and create content on that topic, making sure to include the keyword in the title of my posts and in a tag on the blog post,” says Steve. “Since I was having so much success using the free tool, I finally decided to sign up for the Advanced Plan to see what else I could find.”

One such opportunity he found was the long-tail keyword “how to backtest stock strategies.”

He wrote this post focusing on the phrase, which now ranks on the first search engine results page (SERP) for the focus keyword.

“Whenever I find a popular, full-phrase keyword using Alexa’s keyword tools, it’s like finding gold,” Steve notes. “Those tend to be lower-competition, and perform well on the blog.”

Incorporating Social Media Research

Steve has over 190,000 followers on his personal Twitter profile, where he distributes New Trader U’s content to his followers. He recently started using the new Content Exploration tool to find relevant financial content from other sites that drove high engagement on social media.

“I input websites that also publish content on trading to see their most popular content,” he says. “Usually I find that I have similar content that covers the same subject areas that have high engagement on Twitter for other sites. So, I’ll Tweet out my own content matching those subject areas.” This helps Steve generate more engagement with New Trader U’s content via his Twitter account. “The Content Exploration tool is like a social media optimization tool for me.”

As of November 12th, 2019 one of his most popular recent articles had generated almost 1,600 engagements and over 347 shares on Twitter alone.

The Takeaway

Steve has been able to grow traffic to New Trader U 30% in just over two months thanks to a well-rounded content strategy focusing on finding keywords his site can rank for, optimizing his new content for those keywords, and getting the right content in front of his followers on social media.

“Creating content is really about giving your audience what they’re looking for, not just pulling ideas out of thin air,” says Steve. “Being able to see top content on Twitter along with keywords my audience is searching for saves a lot of time researching niche article ideas.”

The post How New Trader U Grew Traffic 30% in Just Over 2 Months With the Help of Alexa.com appeared first on Alexa Blog.