How I grew our traffic by 230% in less than 6 months?
Let me introduce to you the Frappe method!
☕ All it took was showing up every day at a local beach-side cafe and ordering my usual Frappe coffee, with full milk, and 2 spoons of sugar.
Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about:
📈 misleading graphs,
💪 SEO-flexing, and
🎯 how to focus on what really matters.
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📈 Misleading graphs
It’s very easy to manipulate results, take the best possible screenshot, or show short-term results & spikes as super wins.
Where you get your data matters.
The below example is based on an Ahrefs’ database update that shows a spike in many websites, along with some real wins over time.
Sharing this graph, it looks like something incredible happened, and I’m gonna share this secret now.
Graphs from SEO tools are a proxy-metric, it gives you a comparative, calculative look at the data you don’t have access to. But, it’s not a real outlook of a website’s performance.
Google analytics, Search Console, Matomo, and other analytics tools show the true traffic of a website.
Here is a similar period graph from Google’s Search Console, and adding a trend line to illustrate the traffic growth, with seasonal peaks & weekend lows.
💪 SEO Flexing
There are many great SEOs out there growing websites and delivering great results. It usually takes time and focus, and it’s easy to manipulate a graph to show growth.
By using a specific timeframe, I can tell you the story of how I doubled growth in less than 6 months.
Be wary of anyone promising to double, triple, or quadruple your traffic in X period. It’s the “new pitch” of “getting 1st page on Google”.
The reality is that if you have 100 organic visits per month, it’s easy to double and triple in just a month or two, for an established site, incremental gains are what you should be expecting.
🤖 AI-Generated, High Velocity Growth
Many SEOs now boast their results by posting hundreds or thousands of AI content. There will be an initial spike of course, due to the new content.
I have seen this happen for both new & older domains. It can help you rank or it can help you double & triple traffic, but what will that do for your business’ bottom line?
A suggested read about this from Ross Hudgens, showing the case of AI-generated content spike and then subsequent drop, but not a real impact in conversions.
🎯 Focus on what matters
The reality is that SEOs will only succeed if they focus on the most important KPIs.
Don’t fantasise based on other people’s imaginary results.
Focus on business KPIs → Revenue, MRR / ARR first (if you can attribute it), or leads, trials, demos, sales calls, mqls, sqls.
Write great, in-depth, expertly led content.
Build authority with link-building.
Improve your site’s technical foundation.
And, if you have time to experiment on how AI-generated content can increase your productivity, do it.
Learn to read your data, graphs, and learn to recognize well-chosen graphs that manipulate your perceptions. Don’t believe anyone selling you a candy-filled story, be sceptical, they are probably trying to sell you a service or something else.
☕ P.S.: I only drink the darkest cold-brew coffee I can make at home!
P.S.2: Read how much do backlinks cost, and the most efficient way to build links the ABC exchange.
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I am Nick, a B2B & SaaS marketer with a focus on SEO, content, and techstack marketing
I created the Marketing Experts Hub to simply explain marketing, cover business topics, and software for marketers with a pinch of opinion.
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