🚀 How we will grow Google impressions for our niche site

TLDR:

By improving backlinks, keywords and auto-generated blogs, Google impressions skyrocketed

TLDR (we explain in detail how you can do it yourself)

A couple of years ago, we started devguide.dev, a niche site about developer guides. It has been quite successful, and we are continuously improving it.

The idea is to create helpful content for developers, and by doing so, we get a lot of traffic from Google.

So we created a lot of content.

Steadily we started getting more impressions.

How we improved SEO

Two weeks ago, we decided to start improving our SEO. We had always focused on great content but hadn’t focused too much on making it easily discoverable for Google.

We improved three aspects of our site:

  1. Backlinks
  2. Keywords
  3. Blogs

We realized we didn’t have great backlinks.

We needed more high-quality backlinks. We used Ahref’s free “backlink checker” tool (https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker) to find out where our competitors were getting backlinks from. Then, we emailed these site owners to ask whether they could also add us to their page.

Some refused, but others added us directly to the page, improving our domain authority score.

This is not only great because we got a backlink, but we got a backlink on the same page where our competitors are mentioned. This means that it becomes easier for Google to associate us with the niche we are active in.

To increase this even further, we also made a blog post where we wrote comparisons between all the players in the market and linked to their pages as well. Of course, this means people could click from our page to our competitors, but this way, we also tell Google that we are in the same niche.

Keywords

We wrote great content, but we didn’t focus too much on mentioning keywords that people use in Google. We improved this by mentioning “tutorials” or “guides”. We added these keywords to our H1 and H2 tags on our home page (and other pages).

Using Google Ads (https://ads.google.com/), you can see how many monthly searches a keyword gets. Looking for “dev guides or tutorials”, we noticed quite a few people are searching for it.

Blogs

In the past, we had experimented with writing blogs with ChatGPT, but the results were never great. The articles were superficial, without depth and not helpful for visitors.

So we decided to experiment a bit. Instead of asking ChatGPT to write an article, we first asked ChatGPT to write an outline of the article. After we were satisfied with the outline, we asked ChatGPT to write an article based on the outline.

This considerably improved the blog posts. But we could do better.

Therefore, we wrote a simple script that first generates an outline based on our keyword. After the outline, we ask GPT to just write a paragraph based on the first item in the outline. After GPT has written that, we give it its previous paragraph, and ask it to write the next paragraph based on the outline, etc.

Now, we get long paragraphs with in-depth information. The articles aren’t perfect and still require some manual editing (including adding links to other pages on our site), but it saves us 95%+ time compared to writing the articles from scratch.

Normally, you have to wait a couple of weeks before Google indexes your sites. But we make use of this clever tool: Google Indexing Script. It sends all your URLs to Google’s indexing API, and instead of waiting for days/weeks, links are indexed within hours.

The results are great. We can quickly write articles tailored to niche keywords and easily rank high.