Shane Melaugh & Viola Eva – SEO Sprint

Are You Ready To Get Targeted Traffic Pouring Into Your Website… Without Paying Per Visitor?
Do less work. Get more customers.

Enroll in SEO Sprint: the 10-Day traffic optimization online course for Busy Entrepreneurs.

Learn a step-by-step SEO content strategy designed for small websites to get ahead
Generate more traffic to your website by producing less content and ranking for it
Fine-tune your website to attract Google’s attention and track your results

I’m Shane Melaugh,
the CEO of Thrive Themes,
and I recently made an embarrassing discovery….
I’ve been building and running online businesses for more than 10 years. As it turns out, I was making one huge mistake for far too long. It didn’t seem like much at the time, but I’ve only recently realized the size of that mistake in lost earnings.
It’s haunting.
If you’re a small business, solopreneur, course creator or you’re selling digital products online, then I want to share with you the mistake I wish I avoided years ago.

Stupid question…. Of course you do.
That’s why you build a website. It becomes your sales weapon, converting visitors and growing your business.
But no matter how high-converting your website may or may not be, it’s utterly useless without one key ingredient:
Traffic.
Without a steady flow of visitors arriving at your website – visitors that want what you’re selling – your website is nothing but dead weight on your hosting service.

You can turn to paid ads…
But even with a low cost-per-click, only a small percent of your visitors convert and the ads end up costing more than the product you’re selling.You can try social media marketing…
But you’re on the hamster wheel, pumping out content for a short-lived spike in traffic that gets no attention after Facebook/ Instagram/ Whatever users have scrolled by.
You can share your content on other websites…
But each time you post in a forum or comment thread uninvited, you’re getting called out for ‘spamming’ and you’re hurting your own brand.

No matter what you do, it either costs too much of your time, your money, or your energy.

Now imagine a different scenario:
Imagine your website – the same one you have right now – starts to attract free traffic.Consistently.
Visitors that end up costing you nothing.
$0.00 per visitor.
$0.00 per lead.
$0.00 per customer.
…Leaving 100% of each sale as profit in your pocket.

But it gets better.
This traffic isn’t just free: It’s exactly the people you wish for. People that want to be on your website, and want what you’re offering.
This is traffic that has already filtered out all of the wrong people: the complainers, the trolls, and the uninterested… Leaving just the right people: the attentive, the curious, the purchase-ready.

Wouldn’t that be better for your business than what you’re doing right now?
If you could tap into this magical traffic source, you could start to build some real growth.
You could focus your efforts on serving your customers and making kick-ass products rather than falling down the rabbit hole of ‘flash-in-the-pan’ traffic generation strategies.

You could wake up knowing that you don’t have more marketing work to do… but less. Simply because visitors have been pouring into your website overnight while you slept.
So, what is this source of perfect and magical traffic?
Google.
5.4 billion searches are made here every day
Of course this traffic source is Google and not some well-hidden secret. I mean, you’re using it every day without even thinking, aren’t you?
Google, the multi-hundred-billion dollar empire that grew from a single search bar on a blank white background, is now responsible for 63,000 searches… per second (or 5.4 billion per day).

And there’s a reason we turn to Google whenever we have a question: it delivers.

Google’s empire is built on their ability to serve up the right website in the right searches instantly.
When people search for “productivity course” or “advanced excel training” or “how to grow giant pumpkins” or whatever term relates to your business, Google gives them exactly what they want within milliseconds.
It might not be the sexy answer you were hoping for, but Google single-handedly dominates the world of traffic.
Just look at this graph of all traffic sources to all websites:
Top Traffic Referrers To All Websites:
Data Source – SparkToro
57% of all traffic – ever – comes from Google
That’s literally more than 10x the traffic driven by Facebook. For all the attention that social media marketing gets, it is completely dwarfed by the size and power of Google traffic.
This graph made me realize that I’d been missing out. Big time. I’ve done well enough with my online businesses, but almost everything I’ve done to get traffic in the last 5+ years has been unrelated to Google search. I’ve been scraping together traffic from all those tiny slices of the pie and completely ignoring the Internet’s biggest, baddest traffic source.
Add to that another statistic to put everything in perspective:
91% of all website content receives no organic (unpaid) traffic.
Data Source – ahrefs
That means only 9% of webpages end up getting more than half of all the traffic on the internet.
And the reason that this balance is so skewed is because getting Google traffic is not an accident: it’s a strategy. The way you get that Google traffic is with SEO – Search Engine Optimization.

I got fed up with SEO years ago. It was taking up too much of my time and it felt too technical and complicated. I wanted to focus on my products and my customers, not chasing Google rankings.
What I didn’t realize was that the issue wasn’t SEO – it was just that I was doing it the wrong way.
If I look back, I have a content graveyard of hundreds of awesome posts that were seen by my subscribers within a few days of publishing, but then never seen again.
So much of my time was spent making content that doesn’t get found.
The problem wasn’t that my content was bad, either. Anyone who tells you that Google just magically rewards “good content” with traffic is either ignorant or lying. That’s just not how it works.
If I had invested just a small amount of time into SEO, then my hard work over the years could have been worth tenfold more. I could have built content that gets traffic long after it was published. But I didn’t.
Most successful businesses don’t make that mistake.
Whenever you hear of some massively successful brand that grew from nothing, chances are they got into Google’s good-books and stayed there.

But here’s the thing:
Google traffic is utterly superior to any alternative for 4 important reasons.
Yes, Google refers more traffic than all other sources combined.
But that’s not even the best thing about it. Maybe you’ve discounted SEO because it seems too difficult or time consuming, just like I did years ago. But here are the reasons that made me reconsider…

Part #1:
Google vs. Everything Else
Visitor’s Intent
Think about the last time you used Facebook or Instagram or whatever your preferred social media site is. Think of what happens when you see an ad or a post trying to sell something.
Do you want to see that ad? Do you welcome the ads? Do you go there for the ads?
At best, posts trying to sell are an annoying interruption from what people actually want from social media. Users aren’t actively looking to leave Facebook/ Instagram/ YouTube. That’s not their goal.
But look at what people want when they open Google:
They are literally looking for a new website to visit. They want to click a link, leave Google, open your website and discover a solution to a problem they have.
With almost every other traffic source, you are fighting to pull users away from the platform when they are not actively trying to leave. They want to stay, and you are the interruption.
But with Google, you become the goal, the intended destination that people are looking for.
WINNER: Google.
Part #2:
Google vs. Everything Else
Targeting
In Google search, your website will only show to the people who are specifically looking for it, in that very instant.
That means if they are not the exact kind of person to type that search term into Google, they won’t be given a link to your website.
Instantly filtering out junk visitors.
Compare that to a meager attempt to promote your website in online forums or the comments section on other sites. In those places, you are trying to catch the occasional user that might want what you’ve got.
But you risk the agonizing eye-roll of every other visitor that doesn’t care for your content. Cue the trolls who will call you out for ‘spamming’.
Your traffic generation strategy is only as good as the customers that you get. And with Google, it’s 100% laser targeted.
“But Shane, Facebook/social ads are also highly targeted!” I hear you lament.
Yes, you can precisely target your audience with Facebook ads, but the best you can get is still only to annoy the right kind of person. That’s a far cry from serving exactly what someone is looking for, the instant they’re looking for it.
WINNER: Google.
Part #3:
Google vs. Everything Else
Cost Over Time
Ever tried paid traffic and noticed it’s really easy to lose a lot of money, even if you have a great product and a good sales page?
Here’s why:
Let’s compare how Facebook paid ads stack up against Google organic traffic.
Depending on your niche and target audience, if you’re lucky an ad might cost you $1 per click (that’s being optimistic). Seems low, right?
Driving cold traffic straight to a sales page will rarely get sales, since the visitor has no reason to trust you. So typically, you drive that traffic to a lead generation page (20% conversion rate), get their email address, and sell to the lead from your mailing list over time. Let’s say 2% of your list will buy from you.
For Google traffic, they’ll arrive on your blog rather than a dedicated landing page, and then join from your opt-in forms at a lower 3% – 5% conversion rate. The rest of the steps are the same as above and we’ll assume you turn leads into sales at the same rate.

At first glance, this looks like a worse deal, because your visitor-to-lead conversion is lower. But there’s one killer difference: you didn’t pay for those visitors!
Suddenly that $1 per click for Facebook ads turns into $250+ just to acquire a new customer, and that’s being optimistic. If your product costs anything less than that, you’re going to lose money.
With Google traffic, your website becomes profitable because all it costs you is the upfront effort to prepare an SEO strategy and create content that ranks.
“But ads get me traffic immediately!” – Yes, that’s true.
Paid advertising will get you traffic within hours, but the moment you stop paying, the traffic is gone too.
Ranking in Google takes time, but the difference is that you aren’t paying for every click. You end up with free traffic months or years after you’ve done the work to rank your content.
Done right, Google traffic is just infinitely more profitable over time.
WINNER: Google.
Part #4:
Google vs. Everything Else
Residual Traffic
If you aren’t paying for traffic, you’re almost certainly doing content marketing. Whether that’s publishing on your blog or on social media, you’re churning out content to try and attract visitors to your site.
What’s the marketing strategy for your content? An email to your mailing list, then sharing the post on Facebook, Twitter and… what, maybe Reddit?
Tell me if this looks familiar – every time you publish a new content piece, your traffic looks like this:
Credit to Rand Fishkin and Tim Soulo for this concept
Your website will get a spike of traffic, a surge of people who are interested (for 5 minutes) when they see it on the socials. This is super motivating to see! Look at all these people coming to the website!
But then what?
Nothing.
No residual traffic. You broadcast your new content piece, you reach a portion of your audience (a shrinking portion on social media platforms) and then your content disappears, crowded out by a million other updates in people’s feeds.
This is the hamster wheel approach. Your content gets a quick spike of traffic and then immediately dies, so you desperately run back to start the next piece.
The typical advice is “publish frequently, on a regular schedule.” Turns out, the reason for this is that you need to, in order to create an illusion of traffic.
You basically need to stack as many “spikes of hope” next to each other as you can.
Compare that to SEO traffic:
If you publish a post that is strategically designed to rank in Google, then you’ll see the exact opposite. A few weeks or months after you post, organic traffic starts trickling in. It takes time, but once you’re ranking, that traffic doesn’t stop.

Within a year, that one post is still driving targeted traffic every week with zero extra effort from you. So you can finally step out of the hamster wheel and focus on your business.
With the content marketing approach, you’re putting in time and effort just to keep the hamster wheel spinning. With SEO, you can spend the same time and effort on fewer content pieces and create a compounding effect: you get more and more and more traffic over time, for the same amount of work.
WINNER: Google.