Making Your Site Bloom: From 0 to 50K Organic Visits Monthly in One Year – The Plan, the Tactics, and the GPTs by Katarina Dahlin

At SEO Vibes on Tour Helsinki 2024, organized by WhitePress, Katarina Dahlin presented "Making Your Site Bloom: From 0 to 50K Organic Visits Monthly in One Year – The Plan, the Tactics, and the GPTs", where she shared the SEO tactics she used to increase the organic traffic for her flower site. Her approach included keyword research, internal linking, stealing Featured Snippets, creating a dictionary, creating custom GPTs for product optimization, developing SEO tools to speed up SEO tasks, and working with backlinks. Get inspired and learn her SEO process step-by-step in this educational talk.

Transcript

1. Making Your Site Bloom: From 0 to 50K Organic Visits Monthly in One Year – The Plan, the Tactics, and the GPTs Katarina Dahlin
2. 2 The first year, I reached 49,295 in monthly organic traffic = 1% of the finnish population. Finland has 5.6 million people.
3. 3 I got 760 words in the top 3 positions on Google … and 1,600 words to positions 4-10 on Google.
4. 4 Senior Growth Hacker @ Genero Working with SEO since 2019 Genero is a leading growth marketing agency in the Nordics – we create growth stories Katarina Dahlin
5. 5 It all started… In the summer 2022, I started a new hobby to grow cut flowers. But then the summer and flower season ended…
6. 6 In the autumn 2022, I started the blog Slow Flower Garden. I wanted to learn how to code. I wanted my own site where I could test my SEO ideas on and try out new things.
7. 7 In february 2023, I started to work with SEO for real: I created my first articles with ChatGPT. I got into affiliate marketing. I started to optimize for flower delivery words.
8. 8 During my 1 week of winter vacation: I kickstarted by creating 170 flower delivery pages for affiliate marketing. On the same week I got my first affiliate sale.
9. 9 What did I do to reach 50 K in organic traffic?
10. Keyword Research & Mapping
11. 11 I collected all the keywords and search volumes related to flower delivery to a list. Tools: Semrush, Ahrefs, Keywordtool.io People seemed to be searching for flower delivery + city. Keyword Research
12. 12 Keyword Research But also other words like: send flowers order flowers happy birthday flowers etc. The total search volume for all flower delivery words was 33,000 / month. That was enough to start the project.
13. 13 Keyword Mapping Mapped the keywords together that I wanted on the same page. Created urls, titles and descriptions for each flower delivery page. This is now my “base document” for my SEO work.
14. 14 Content Plan for Articles Words with an informational intent and where articles are ranking, I add to my content plan for articles.
15. 15 Time to Start Creating Pages from the Plan Flower delivery page Article
16. Internal Linking & Content Hubs
17. 17 Link Similar Content Together to Content Hubs Flower delivery Flower delivery Turku Flower delivery Tampere Flower stores Flower store Turku Flower store Helsinki Flower store Tampere Flower bouquets White flower bouquet Pink flower bouquet Flower delivery Helsinki Flower delivery Töölö Flower delivery Kallio Top 5 gardens in Helsinki Flower Bouquet for Woman Flower Bouquet for Mother
18. 18 Why? I want to make sure that Google and users can reach all content from anywhere with as few clicks as possible, ideally no more than 4-5 clicks. This way Google can find all the pages on my site, helps in getting them indexed. Linking with the right keyword helps Google better understand what each page is about. Improves topical authority.
19. Stealing Featured Snippets
20. 20 How to Steal Featured Snippets? Go to Semrush and filter out all the keywords for which the featured snippet is available, and where my site ranks between positions 3 and 12.
21. 21 How to Steal Featured Snippets? Look at the format (paragraph, list, table, video) and the content in the featured snippet.
22. 22 Then I Optimize My Content 1. Add a “What is xxx” H2-heading, or another question, e.g. What is a flower bouquet? 2. Write a straight and simple answer “xxxx is …” e.g. “A flower bouquet is…” 3. Fully define the topic in 2-3 sentences. 4. Match the featured snippet format (paragraph, list, table, video) 5. Avoid brand names. 6. Avoid first-person language like “us”, “we” and “I” language. 7. Prioritize when you rank in top five positions.
23. 23 Average Success Rate on Featured Snippet Projects 41%
24. Dictionary
25. 25 Dictionary Relevant, but not so important words, I add to my garden dictionary. Every word gets their own page. Ranks well because the intent is often right → Users want to know what the word means. Fast and easy to do. Link to own page
26. Custom GPTs for Content Creation
27. 27 Custom GPTs for Content Creation I created an own GPT for each brand. Custom GPTs can be trained with own data to write better and automate SEO tasks and workflows. What are custom GPTs? See Bastian Grimm’s presentation: https://speakerdeck.com/bastiangrimm/the-ai-tech-seo-compendium-aug menting-technical-seo-tasks-using-ml-and-ai-smx-munich-2024?slide=86
28. 28 Why create custom GPTs? Custom GPTs can write better content, when they know about the products and the brand, less hallucinations. I get the right tone of voice. I can automate SEO tasks and workflows, less copy pasting! Fiskars GPT Iittala GPT Marimekko GPT
29. 29 How I Create My GPTs 1. I Scrape product texts, category texts and about us pages with Screaming Frog, and upload the data as a CSV file to the GPT. 2. Code interpreter needs to be marked, to be able to upload CSV files. 3. I always tell the GPT to never hallucinate and always ask for more info, if needed. More on how to build your own custom GPT, see Bastian Grimm’s presentation: https://speakerdeck.com/bastiangrimm/the-ai-tech-seo-compendium-aug menting-technical-seo-tasks-using-ml-and-ai-smx-munich-2024?slide=96
30. 30 Prompt for Product Descriptions Product name: [paste you product name here] You are now Fiskars SEO-copywriter GPT. You write in finnish. Info: See database. Rewrite the text. Make it about 500 words long. Start with info about the product. Then, create a short text with the subheading: "For what work is [product name] good for?". Then, create a short text with the subheading "For who is [product name] suitable for?". Then, create a short text with the subheading: "Why we like the [product name]?". Subheadings are formatted as H2. Format everything as html. SEO-optimize the texts and subheadings for the product name. Fiskars GPT
31. 31 Product Description Example Before After
32. 32 Results from Optimizing 400 Products with ChatGPT in 5 Weeks 115 more words in position 1 in Google 156% more organic clicks after 5 Weeks Max 5 mins per product → Good ROI Amount of words in position 1-10 in Google for optimized products
33. Build Tools with ChatGPT
34. I Built a Tool with ChatGPT to Speed up My SEO Work What? This tool checks, if I already optimized product pages. Why? To save time working in spreadsheet. How does it work? I do the filtering in the Search Console. I copy paste the pages to the tool. It checks what products I have and haven’t optimized yet.
35. 35 Now I Automate Everything with Make I automated the product description writing with make.com, so I don’t have to copy paste and write one by one anymore, but write all of them at once. → Same process, just moved it to Make to automate the writing.
36. Backlinks
37. 37 Some Ways I Have Built Backlinks → Expired domains → Guest posts → Wikipedia → Sponsorships → Natural backlinks I love backlinks 🌺
38. 38 But, Whatever Way I Get the Backlinks from Flower delivery Helsinki Slow Flower Garden SEO Slow Flower Garden Front page Important page on slowflowergarden.fi for getting affiliate sales Article on generogrowth.com External link Internal link … I always add internal links to my most important pages, from the page i get the backlink to. I want the “link power” to go to my important pages, making them stronger → easier to rank higher. slowflowergarden.fi
39. 39 The Front Page Gets the Most Links → Optimize the front page! I make sure to add internal links from my front page to my most important pages! Flower delivery Helsinki Front page Flower delivery Turku Flower delivery Tampere Links from external sites Internal links
40. 40 If You Already Are a Brand… …you might already have enough backlinks. Then work with your internal linking structure and make sure your backlinks don’t go to 302 or 404 pages!
41. 41 SEO Process 1 Keyword research & mapping 2 Link content together to content hubs 3 Steal Featured Snippets 4 Dictionary 5 Build custom GPTs & optimize products 6 Build tools 7 Backlinks
42. 42 This is the Slow Flower Garden growth story
43. 43 Katarina Dahlin katarinadahlin1@gmail.com katarina.dahlin@genero.fi 0503773639 www.linkedin.com/in/katarina-dahlin www.slowflowergarden.fi Download my presentation: www.slowflowergarden.fi /katarina-seo-vibes-2024
44. 44 Ready to Get Started with SEO? Do not just think about it, talk to us and we’ll show you the SEO possibilities for your business for free in the first potential report (Normally 1 200 €, minimum revenue 3 m €). No strings attached. Book your free discovery call with Genero and get your SEO potential-report. Limited offer! www.generogrowth.com/seo Katarina Dahlin Senior Growth Hacker & SEO Consultant, Genero katarina.dahlin@genero.fi