Sukhpal Saini's 3-Step SEO Strategy to 100x your traffic

When was the last time you Googled something? Chances are, it was just a few minutes ago—maybe even how you landed on this blog. We all rely on search engines for everything, from finding the best pizza place in town to learning random facts at 3 a.m.

And that’s exactly why SEO is so important: To make sure your content shows up when people are searching. For most of us, SEO can feel confusing and complicated. But here’s the good news: it doesn’t have to be that way. 

In our Growclass workshop with SEO expert Sukhpal Saini, he shares his secret sauce to boosting his client’s monthly web traffic by 100x. This session covers everything from finding content ideas and keyword research to building backlinks—all in 3 simple steps.

Watch back the full recording:

Three Steps for building a scalable SEO machine

When it comes to SEO, everyone wants the secret sauce—the magic formula that can 100x your site traffic. Luckily you’re in the right place! Today we’re covering Sukh’s three-ingredient recipe for building an SEO strategy that scales: 

1. Content: How to come up with content ideas (+ the secret to turning them into click-worthy titles)
2. Conversion: How to convert people into customers
3. Backlinks: How to improve your site’s search ranking

Before we dive straight into each step—let’s rewind a bit.

The SEO blueprint: What are we trying to do with SEO?

It’s easy to get in the weeds with SEO, especially when there are so many moving parts:

• Backlinking: Building authority for your website and domain by having other high-authority and reputable websites link to your pages.
• Keyword research: Finding search opportunities that are not only attainable to rank for, but also will drive the right people to your website.
• Content creation: What type of content should you be creating? What topics should you be covering? 

The list goes on.

Let’s begin by visualizing what exactly we’re trying to achieve with SEO. 

Meet Tommy—he’s a marketer trying to figure out how he can track who’s visiting his website. Just like everybody else he’s goes to good ol’ trusty Google in hopes for a solution to his problem.

From his search, he lands on an article from an analytics tool titled “The Ultimate Guide to Tracking User Activity on your Site (Step-by-step)” and finds exactly what he’s looking for. At this point, Tommy starts browsing their site and is now brand-aware of the tool. Fast forward in time, on his eighth site visit, he signs up for a free trial and becomes a customer.

“The ultimate goal of SEO is to drive more customers. A lot of people try to shortcut this process by ranking their content but not actually providing value to their customers. The issue with this approach is that you won’t reap any long-term gains and it’s unlikely that you’d convert a new customer.”
- Sukh Saini

How to come up with content ideas (+ the secret to turning them into good titles)

Every content marketer's nightmare is being stuck staring at a blank page, wondering: what on earth should I write? After all, figuring out how to source good ideas is half the battle. Most of us jump right into keyword research, but Sukh has a three-step idea-sourcing process that turns this approach on its head.

1. Interview your existing users

Write for humans first, Google later. Knowing who you’re writing it for is the key to writing good content. Be able to answer questions like:

• Job to be done (JTBD): What are your target customer’s jobs to be done? (ie. they are a marketer looking to set up a CRM)
• Daily struggles and pain points: What do they wish was different? Why?
• Why they use your solution: What was their life before vs. after you.

Consolidate everything that you find from this research and turn them into content ideas. This list alone could probably set you off to the races with a good content strategy for the next 3-6 months.

“Starting with keyword research first is a common mistake as even though you have identified trending keywords, you don’t have the context around it. It makes it harder to craft relevant content that your customers would actually search up. So a good rule of thumb is to always start with your customers.”
- Sukh Saini

2. Competitor research

The next thing you’ll want to figure out is what others in your industry have already written about. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel, your competitors have already done the legwork so it’s a great source of inspiration for your content ideas. Head over to your competitor’s blogs and start cherry-picking which content ideas resonate the most with your customers.Here are some quick tips:

1. Head over to Ahrefs, search up your competitor, and dive into the highest-traffic pages
2. Search through their entire blog and find the highest-traffic pages
3. Assess what keywords it’s ranking for and use them for content inspiration

3. Keyword research

Last but certainly not least you want to do your keyword research. Hop onto SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush and take a look at the Keyword Difficulty (KD) and Search Volume (SV) of your topics. This can help you prioritize your content list and find opportunities where your content can rank. 

‍What does this look like in practice?

Once you open up your SEO tool, look for the keyword explorer feature. From there, add in your target keyword and take note of:

• A high search volume and low keyword difficulty. Does your keyword meet this criteria?
• Similar keywords and if there are other ways of saying the same thing

From there, reverse search the keyword in Google to make sure that the results are relevant to the audience you're hoping to create the content for.

Example: Generating content ideas for an analytics app

Let’s walk through this three-step process with a real example to see it in action.

Imagine you're brainstorming content ideas for that same analytics app. Here are some ways this process could help spark inspiration for content that resonates with your audience.

Step 1: Interview your existing users

After interviewing your customers you learn:

• User #1 JTBD: “I am an e-commerce store owner and I want to know who’s buying my products”
• User #2 JTBD: “I am a founder and I want to know which country is converting the most?”
• User #3 JTBD: “I am a writer and I want to know how long people read my essays for?”
• User #4 Pain points: “I am a marketer and I don’t know how to code an analytics software”

Step 2: Competitor research

You browse your competitor’s content and find these promising titles:

1. “10 things to check before you launch your eCommerce store”
2. “What is Privacy-Friendly analytics”
3. “How to generate leads for your business”

Step 3: Keyword research

You finish off your research and find that these keywords have high SV and low KD:

• “Conversion optimization”
• “Sales funnel”

The secret to turning ideas into titles people want to read

Even the best ideas are only as good as the title they’re wrapped in. So the next step is turning your list of ideas into irresistible titles your customers will love. There’s a simple copywriting formula to help you get it right every time.

The title generator formula:

1. Idea (without the difficulty)
2. Idea (Promise of benefit)

I promise that this will all make more sense with an example.

“If you just take out the bracket part of the formula, it suggests to only read the article for informational purposes. Nobody wants to read things just to read things. They want to get something done. You can get people to click through by calling out exactly what they need to do or the challenge they’re looking to solve."
- Sukh Saini

How to convert people into customers (most marketers miss this!)

You now have ideas turned into content which means you’re a third of the way there. Give yourself a pat yourself on the back! The next challenge is figuring out how to get users who consume your content and land on your website to convert.

Optimizing your conversion rate on your blog is a lot simpler than it sounds. Sukh shares these three must-have conversion points:

1. Top right: Add a “Sign up/Start for Free” call-to-action (CTA)
2. Sticky sidebar: Keep an offer CTA sticky in the sidebar
3. In the content: Embed relevant CTAs in between sections in the blog

“At some point when someone thinks: 'I’ve gotten enough value from this blog post, I wish I could pay them'—make it easy for them!

I commonly hear: “Once I have people look at the pages, then I’ll think about converting them later.” But the buying process isn’t linear and you should think about how doing both at the same time. Once they are in your blog post, figure out how you can convert them right away, then you can always iterate later.”
- Sukh Saini

Pro tip: Take it a step further and add tracking on your CTAs to see the conversion results on your content. This can help you evaluate what content topics are resonating with your buyers. Double pro tip: We have a Google Analytics course that might help with all this. 😏

Backlinks: How to Move Up in Search Results

How often do you make it to page six of your Google search results? Probably rarely, if ever. This is why for every piece of content that you create, you want to appear on the first page to drive more traffic. 

To achieve this, the last piece of the puzzle we’ll need is backlinks.

How do backlinks work?

Back in the day, Google used to determine your page ranking based on the number of times a user referenced a topic in their blog. As you can imagine, this drove creators to spam keywords all over their content, which ended in disaster. 

To fix this, Google developed a new Pagerank algorithm which ranks your page higher if other people on the internet think you’re great. 

This is where backlinks come in handy: The more other websites mention and backlink to yours, the higher your pages rank.

How do you get backlinks: Laying the foundation

A great way to get more backlinks is by checking how many you currently have on SEO tools like Ahrefs. If the number is less than 50, don’t fret—here are some scrappy but effective strategies to try out:

1. Post on Reddit: Create a post on Reddit that links back to your business. It’s a great way to drive traffic and build visibility.
2. Set up Social Media accounts: Establish profiles on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn to create linkbacks to your website.
3. Submit to directories: List your business in startup directories such as Crunchbase, EggGradients, and IndieHackers. These platforms offer valuable backlinks and help attract a broader audience.
4.  Write guest content: Offer to write for complementary brands in your industry. Include a backlink in the article to drive traffic and boost credibility.
5. Appear on podcasts: Join a podcast as a guest to share your expertise while getting a link back to your profiles.

How to get high-quality backlinks

Once you’ve gotten the hang of backlinks and have a handful under your belt. Let’s turn up the heat and start getting high-quality backlinks from reputable sites. Buckle in as Sukh shares his secret tips and tricks:

1. Featured.com

Featured.com has a massive list of writers from big-name sites (ie. Forbes, HubSpot, etc…) and the content topics that they’re writing about. These writers are looking to crowdsource opinions and insights. In other words, if you find a topic that’s relevant to your business, you can be the expert to jump in, and contribute to their question or topic. Although this process is time-intensive, it’s an incredible way to build backlinks from high-quality reputable sites.

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2. Help a B2B Writer

Similar to Featured.com Help a B2B Writer is a directory of requests from reputable sites looking to find answers from experts. You can browse topics from “Top Product Management tools” to “Looking for customer service professionals to share some call tips”. After you submit your answer pitch, you wait to get approved and voila—you get a high quality backlink!

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“I landed my Hubspot backlink from Help a B2B writer and found the success rate pretty high. For every 10-20 pitches I submitted, 4-5 writers got back to me. A good practice is to submit pitches every week and just wait to see what comes back.”
- Sukh Saini

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3. Tool pages

If you want to build backlinks at scale, look into building free tool pages. Think PNG to JPEG Converters, or the nostalgic YouTube to MP4 Converter.

"For my company Engyne, I created a tool where you put in your website link and it will output your site’s Meta Tags. It’s a tool with tons of traffic and link backs because it’s genuinely useful and free. You can immediately imagine getting this tool linked in an SEO blog because it’s valuable to readers and easy to access.
- Sukh Saini

But the really tricky part with this strategy is figuring out what to build that’s relevant for your business. Lucky for us, Sukh shares his go-to process for finding inspiration:

1. Head over to Ahrefs and run a general search on the keyword explorer
2. Add a filter for any word that includes: builder, generator, tool
3. Lower the keyword difficult filter to be between 0-40 to see a list of lower search volume topics
4. Browse through and find relevant tool topics

Three steps away from building an SEO machine

By nailing your content ideas, converting traffic, and building backlinks, you’ll be in an optimal spot to transform your SEO performance and grow your website’s reach. 

If you’re curious to go deeper, Growclass’s SEO Strategy Course is here for you. This self-paced course covers everything from foundational tactics to advanced strategies, all in an accessible, no-jargon format. Equip yourself with SEO skills that set-top marketers apart.