Some of the articles on my niche site, funnywill.com, get thousands of hits a month. Many of my articles get hundreds of views.
Please note that this is a very new site.
How do I do it?
I write high-traffic articles by finding neglected topics, researching, and writing answers better than any other site on the internet.
That is a difficult task. This article is a breakdown of exactly how I write high-traffic articles, step by step.
Case Study: Cartoon Pork
I logged into my favorite keyword research tool, Ahrefs, and typed the keyword “antagonist” into the keyword finder.
I chose “antagonist” because it’s a popular word associated with my niche: writing. I didn’t know what to expect: I am often surprised by the sheer volume of search queries that appear on Ahrefs.
That’s part of the fun.
That day, Ahrefs generated 62,613 keywords with a total monthly search volume of 329,000. That’s a lot of people looking for the bad guys.
As I was scrolling through the possible options, one of the search terms caught my eye.
Let’s see if you guess what I mean:
Antagonist
antagonist definition
agonist vs antagonist
Peppa Pig Antagonist
H2 antagonist
Do I need to go further?
The search term that came up for me was Peppa Pig Antagonist. The monthly search volume for this query is a staggering 7,400. Immediately, I knew I had to explore this search term further.
Why the hell were so many people searching for that term?
For every article I write, I check for search intent, competition, and what kind of article I think will rank highly on Google.
So that’s what I did next.
Chasing Peppa Pig
I jumped on Google and started typing the search term Peppa Pig Antagonist. Sure enough, Google automatically suggested the phrase before you could finish typing.
I clicked on the search term. The first two articles that appeared on Google for the keyword were from a fanfiction site, Fandom.
Fandom has a domain authority of 92, which is pretty hard to beat.
However, when I read the article, I noticed that the word count only reached 392 words. This is nothing. Usually, even a new site like mine can leave such a short article behind.
The article itself sounded interesting, but somehow… strange.
As a parent, I watched some Peppa Pig clips. He didn’t remember anything about Lucina, terrorists, or pig murders. So I searched and clicked on other classified sites for my search term.
I found my answer on Reddit:
So basically gamers, there is a Fandom Wikipedia for Peppa Pig. Someone made a false contribution to the wiki that Peppa Pig’s antagonist is Lucina, a character from Fire Emblem. This means that Google will remove that Wikipedia page when someone searches for Peppa Pig’s antagonist. Keep explaining, players.
Except that Google didn’t remove the page from the search results.
Yes, it’s a completely made-up wiki page for Peppa Pig that went viral. Apparently, it still gets tons of searches a month.
It may not be a perennial topic like “how to write a novel”, but I’ll take anywhere from 7.4k views per month. As a new site, you had me at seven thousand.
Breaking Bad: Peppa Pig Style
To at least test an evergreen article (that will stay relevant for years), I took a slightly skewed approach to the article.
I knew that most people searching for the term “Peppa Pig Antagonist” were looking for the controlled wiki. So, I titled my article, “Peppa Pig Antagonist: 11 Facts You Need To Know.”
I then applied my custom template for high-traffic articles.
Here is my model:
Introduction A brief introduction to the article. I usually include the keyword search term within the first 100 words.
Summary. A short (less than 300 characters) bold summary of the article to hopefully get the code snippet from Google.
Media. A photo or video directly related to the article (to keep readers on the page longer)
Index. It organizes the content and helps Google to index the page.
Table of contents. For my case study article, this is where I list 11 facts about Peppa Pig’s fake antagonist with applications for creating good antagonists for any story.
Content. A brief summary of the findings on how to write a great antagonist.
Conclusion. A “Final Thoughts” section where I thank the reader for reading and suggest other related articles on my website for them to read.
The draft of the Peppa Pig article is already 1,000 words long. In the end, it will be three to four times as long as the top-ranking article for the search phrase.
Even if I don’t get #1, I can still get thousands of page views on my website a month just from this article.
Tools I Use To Write High-Traffic Articles
Ahrefs for keyword search (it’s expensive). A free alternative to finding good keywords is Answer The Public.
Moz Bar Chrome extension. The extension is completely free. It shows you the domain ranking of websites directly in Google search so you can assess whether or not it can top your article. The higher the rank, the harder to win.
Word Counter Plus Chrome extension. This is also a free extension. You can highlight any text (including an entire article) and quickly find out the word count. The higher the number of words, the harder to beat.
Rank Math SEO Plug-In. This is a free plugin for WordPress. While I trust SEO plugins less these days, I really like how they remind me to perform basic SEO tactics on my articles.
Simple TOC Plug-In. A free plugin that automatically adds a table of contents to my blog posts.
Google Analytics. I study my analytics to see which articles on my blog get the most traffic so I can monetize them and write more related content.
Speed is one of the ways that Google ranks articles. I wanted my website to be as fast as possible for a better user experience. I have already seen some good initial results.
Parting Thoughts
I hope you found this article informative and interesting. I know I would love to read someone else’s process when I started blogging.
I keep improving my process. I learn something new every week from other sites, from the Passive Income Geek Program I participated in, or from other bloggers.