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15 Comments

How to increase organic traffic that converts?

Hello there Indie Hackers,

About a month, ago I've launched Page2API, a Web Scraping API.
I did the usual launch: IndieHackers, HackerNews, ProductHunt.
It generated some organic traffic and created visibility for the product, generated some sign-ups, and even some paying customers.

A few weeks after, I launched a Google Ads Campaign, TLDR: It did not convert.
I had to shut it down and launch another one, but this time based on long-tail keywords only. Fewer but more relevant traffic. Better interaction, but still weak conversion.

At this point, I must start to bring some organic traffic to the website and do whatever it takes to make it convert.

Do you have any pieces of advice on what to do next to make this possible?

  1. 10

    Hi Nyku!

    Let's try to work thru this - i'll respond in this thread.

    Just curious, did you run the ads with a purchase conversion pixel?
    What keywords were you targetting?
    What landing page were you leading your potential customers to?

    As for SEO questions:

    Do you have Google Search Console installed?
    Having it installed is super important so that you know what keywords to iterate on from a content marketing perspective.

    Some things you can try:

    1. Cross-posting and content marketing

    Build a blog on your website, which lives at https://www.page2api.com/blog

    Your first blogpost should be indepth and answers questions that your customers will be searching for

    I'm talking - videos, photos, code samples, all that jazz

    Then do something which I like to call Coattailling:

    After you post that post to your blog, go to Hashnode and Dev.to and post the same exact article but what you need to do is set the canonical link back to your website.

    There's a few reasons why you should do this:

    1. So Google won't penalize you for duplicate content
    2. Coattailling means you get to ride on the popularity of those websites. Google will most likely rank the blog post on those websites since they are already known, but you get to enjoy the traffic from that since you will set canonical links to your blogpost AND you will link to your actual website in the blogpost itself.

    Furthering your Research:

    Enter "website to api" into google search and find those "People Also Ask" sections for more inspiration for what you can answer in your blog post.

    Repeat this over and over again for the keywords you think lead back to your website. Read up on Product Defining Keywords.

    BTW according to Google Ads, Website To Api gets about 50 searches per month, so you have some low hanging fruit there.

    You should also create a video so that you can do Coattailing by using YouTube (aka the second largest search engine in the world). Set the title of the video to the keywords yo uwant to target.

    Then you can post the youtube video on the landing page and the blog post - if people visit your page and watch the video, they will stay on the page longer and something called dwell time will help increase signalling to google that your web page and website is useful to people (and hopefully rank you higher)

    Another thing you can do

    Create pages such as

    https://www.page2api.com/wikipedia
    https://www.page2api.com/zillow
    https://www.page2api.com/

    Similar to how you have it on the homepage already

    and the <h1> should be

    <H1>How To Scrape Zillow Real Estate Listings</h1>

    On these specific landing pages, you should make it short and sweet with the goal of converting the user.

    THEN on a blogpost, create a wayyyyy more indepth post that shows a user How To Scrape Real Estate Websites, and FROM YOUR BLOG POST, you should link back to those landing pages

    This is internal linking and is good for the spider that crawls your website.

    Create a video of you doing this as well.

    Creating both the landing page + the blog post increases your surface area for getting discovered.

    Let's quickly talk about Google Search Console

    If you do all this, you should start to get some traffic. It some time to get that traffic so keep at it, and make sure your keyword research works well

    But where Search Console comes in, is you use it to find the other Queries (AKA keywords) that your web pages are ranking for.

    Use these to your advantage to update your content or to find new keywords you should target.

    Let me know what you think.

    Feel free to respond here. BUT if you want to ask on demand, hit me up via DM on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomzaragoza

    Same goes for anyone else reading. SEO is lyfe.

    1. 2

      @tomzaragoza Thought-provoking read with compelling arguments. Thank you for sharing.

    2. 2

      Some great value in here! Thanks

    3. 2

      Hey Tom,

      First of all - Thank you for such a detailed response!
      I feel very excited about everything I've read in this comment!
      I already see myself starting to implement those ideas in the nearest future.

      Now, regarding your questions:

      Just curious, did you run the ads with a purchase conversion pixel?

      • I've set up the Google Ads+Analytics and then started to monitor the traffic (where did they come from, what did they search for, when did they bounce...etc)

      What keywords were you targeting?

      • The first campaign was targeting pretty generic and broad keywords related to 'web scraping' but the last one is targeting only long-tails such as: "API to scrape web pages" + suggestions from PAA sections.
        I was following this guide

      What landing page were you leading your potential customers to?

      • At the moment, all the traffic is sent to the home page.

      Do you have Google Search Console installed?

      • I've just installed and set it up, as soon as I've read your comment.

      Thank you once again for your response!

      1. 2

        SOrry for the delay in replying!

        Just curious, did you run the ads with a purchase conversion pixel?

        I've set up the Google Ads+Analytics and then started to monitor the traffic (where did they come from, what did they search for, when did they bounce...etc)

        Got it! Did you setup a purchase conversion pixel for your campaign? Doing so might help with finding purchasers:

        What keywords were you targeting?

        The first campaign was targeting pretty generic and broad keywords related to 'web scraping' but the last one is targeting only long-tails such as: "API to scrape web pages" + suggestions from PAA sections.
        I was following this guide

        Got it!

        What landing page were you leading your potential customers to?

        At the moment, all the traffic is sent to the home page.

        I was going to say try to make a dedicated page for the home page, but on first look, it looks like it could work decently as it leads a user to sign up in a not too convoluted way.

        Highly suggest you add Microsoft Clarity so you can observe what your users are doing on the page. See why they bounce, where they click. All that fun stuff:

        RE: Google Search Console

        Once you start to get some organic traffic, it's going to be a valuable source for finding new keywords to rank for + build content / media for!

        Excited to see where that takes you. Remember, hit me up on Twitter if you wanna chat specifics :)

        1. 2

          Yesterday I've started to use Hotjar, looks good for now. I wish I could turn back the time and set it up from day 1. As well as a lot of things like the free trial.
          And, of course, the Blog is the top priority right now.

          Thank you for your ideas!
          I found a lot of useful stuff for me by reading your comment and doing small research afterward ;)

      1. 1

        @mzollinhofer Appreciate it! Feel free to reach out to me if you have any organic traffic questions.

        Dont want to overcrowd this thread haha

  2. 2

    I think there are some really good answers here. You are in quite crowded space so in order to compete in organic / paid search you will need to focus on the very long tail. There are many tools that can help you generate good keywords to target. I think https://seoscout.com/suggest?query=web scraping&lang=en&country=us is one if the better one (searching for "web scraping" yields 572 keyword suggestions). You can just copy these into keyword planner and hopefully you will find some good ones to bid on (or try to rank on organically).

    As mentioned, when sorting through these keywords it is always good to have search intent in mind, here is a good starting guide on this topic https://moz.com/blog/search-intent-and-seo-a-quick-guide.

    In addition, it is always a good idea to install https://www.hotjar.com/ and have a look at what people are actually doing on your page. Good luck :)

  3. 2

    I recently read exactly just a post about this:
    https://growandconvert.com/content-marketing/seo-content-conversions

    The post focuses on purchase intent -- which means low traffic but much better sales conversions.

    1. 1

      Thanks, that was really cool!

    2. 1

      Awesome content!
      Thanks for sharing!

  4. 2

    I wish I could tell you, but marketing remains a weak point for me. I've also wasted a lot on AdWords & Facebook ads, and never got them even close to the break even point. Growing organic traffic has also been an ongoing challenge.

    Looking forward to seeing what advice people share...

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