At Summerley Digital our mission is to power businesses forward with their online presence. Whether it’s building a stylish new website, providing social media support or writing content, we add value to all of your digital touchpoints.
One way we can grow your business is by helping to increase visitors to your website. This can be achieved in a number of ways, but the main two channels that we focus on are SEO (search engine optimisation) for organic search traffic and social media marketing.
We do this by auditing your website and social media accounts and making recommendations which will improve traffic. We can work with you to implement our advice and monitor the results.
Here we showcase one of our recent successes, the phenomenal growth of Screen Idle who increased their monthly pageviews from just 2,326 to over 60,000 in just four months!
The Screen Idle project
Neil Tollfree writes the satirical blog Screen Idle and has been growing his audience since the website was launched ten years ago, but it wasn’t achieving its full potential. He was getting a regular 5,000 pageviews each month but this had dipped in early 2020 and needed a boost. He contacted Summerley Digital in January because he wanted to super charge his traffic and needed help identifying how best to achieve this.
Neil’s goal was to achieve enough pageviews to qualify for an advertising network which would earn him an income from the website. Partnering with an advert management company is a common goal for bloggers, whereas traditional businesses who sell a service or physical product usually want more website visitors to gain new customers and sales.
How we helped Screen Idle
To analyse the best ways to increase the volume of Screen Idle traffic we conducted social media and SEO audits. These reviews are a service we offer and many of our clients have used them to boost pageviews. The audits cover a number of areas in depth and we make recommendations based on the findings which are presented in a report. We are available to support any follow-up work, either taking on the work ourselves or helping the client if assistance is needed.
SEO audit
For our SEO audits we analyse a wide range of factors which impact how a website is measured by search engines such as Google. This includes technical SEO as well as reviewing website content. We make recommendations for improvements to push the site up in search results which in turn should attract more visitors. Implementing our advice takes time to do but makes a big difference to search rankings and pageviews.
Increasing organic SEO traffic
Organic traffic is triggered when users type keywords into search engines such as Google, which then delivers the results which it thinks provides the best answer to the search request. Whether you want to check the weather forecast, or find out which is the best mobile phone, Google has to sift through millions of websites to work out which ones offer the right answer.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps Google work out what your content is about, and why it should push you up the rankings onto page one.
As you can see from the results below, Screen Idle appears top for the search term ‘James Bond cameraman’ for an article which has received over 20,000 visits since February.
Note: search algorithms change all the time so Screen Idle may not always be top for this keyword
This chart shows how organic sessions increased from February to May for Screen Idle. Although it’s likely that some of the increase is due to the coronavirus pandemic with more people sitting at home and looking for entertainment news, the changes that Neil implemented have had a significant impact.
Social media audit
Our social media audits include analysis of each social media account held by the client. We offer suggestions for improving engagement and recommend joining other platforms if they could drive more traffic. We may also advise creating and/or promoting an email newsletter or other way of engaging with your audience.
Increasing social media traffic
Social media marketing can be extremely powerful in driving traffic to your website. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and many more have millions of users every day. Marketing to these users is a great way of directing visitors to your website and can be very successful if done in the right way. The chart below shows how successful Facebook marketing achieved dramatic improvements in pageviews for Screen Idle.
Although you can achieve a lot with free social media marketing, you can also boost posts by spending small amounts, such as £1 or £2/day, which is often worthwhile for a business. Screen Idle does this occasionally for specific posts to appear in the timeline of people who like the page. Neil also invests £2 per day boosting the page itself, which has helped achieve these impressive results.
Website ad networks
Many websites, particularly blogs, use advertising networks to earn an income from their visitors. Ads are placed in various parts of the page and revenue is earned based on how many people see them. There are many different ad networks, the most basic being Google ads which doesn’t earn a significant income for many website owners. To achieve higher earnings most bloggers want to join networks such as Mediavine and Adthrive, but these premium networks require traffic of 25,000 or 100,000 sessions per month respectively.
The starter networks include Monumetric and Ezoic which have lower entry criteria of just 10,000 pageviews per month. These are the networks we were targeting for Neil, and the aim was to increase his traffic from a starting point of around 5,000 per month to meet the Monumetric threshold.
Income from ads varies and depends on your audience, including where they live (US traffic is the most lucrative) and your niche. Food blogs can be very successful, as can travel and parenting websites. Earnings can typically achieve $10-20rpm (revenue per 1,000 pageviews per month). As an example, if you have 30,000 pageviews at $15 rpm then you’ll earn $450/month.
Next steps
Once a client is presented with the results, they can make all the necessary changes or we can help. In Neil’s case he outsourced some changes to Summerley Digital and actioned others himself. It was great teamwork and we kept in close contact to monitor results.
Pageviews increased almost immediately, from both organic traffic and social media, mainly Facebook. However, in May things went slightly crazy and increased exponentially.
Neil passed the 10,000 mark in early May so we applied to Monumetric, having achieved our target in just three months. But then within a few days one of his posts went viral and scored over 25,000 sessions so we pivoted our plan and applied to Mediavine instead.
You can see how impressive the increase in pageviews was in the chart below, achieving over 60,000 during May.
By the end of May Screen Idle had achieved a total of 62,566 pageviews, which was way beyond Neil’s expectations. It has increased further still since the start of June and stands at 74,841 at the time of writing! He had worked really hard to improve the website, increasing its exposure on social media as well as keeping up his writing schedule to create fresh content.
“I’m really, really pleased with how Ali helped me. Loads of really smart, easily implementable ideas that I can see working every day.”
Neil, Screen Idle
Another significant change which Neil initiated was to switch his hosting to Lyrical Host. You can read why I’m such a fan of Lyrical in this article but making this simple change improved his site speed, which is one factor used by Google to decide where to rank your site in their results. A speedy website is also great for your visitors as nobody likes waiting for a page to load.
Which posts went viral?
You might be curious about which of Neil’s posts went viral… The main winner was the news that Elder Scrolls 6 will be ready ‘before the end of time’ and my personal favourite – the real reason that the new James Bond film has been delayed – because the cameraman forgot to press record.
It’s hard to predict what kinds of post will catch people’s imagination, but solid SEO foundations and digital marketing efforts provide the basis for long term success.
Work with us to power your business forward
If you’d like Summerley Digital to audit your SEO or social media then you can contact us below. We can’t promise you’ll get the same success as Neil but we can build the foundations for growing your audience and will work with you to implement our recommendations.
We can install Google Analytics to track visitors and provide monthly reports to show how your website is performing.
Contact us today...
...and see how we can help supercharge your business
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This is great advice and I love that you introduced both SEO and social media. They each offer great opportunities for bloggers and business owners. While social media generally shows a faster turnaround on time invested, SEO is a long term game that is truly worth every second that you put into it. Congratulations to Neil for achieving the traffic necessary to apply for the ad network that he was aiming for!
Thanks so much Britt! Social media can deliver great results in the short term, and SEO is a longer term strategy as you say. What’s so great is that we targeted both, and the results were brilliant for Neil.