My SEO traffic collapsed so I built a SaaS (Early 2022 retrospective)

Sometime last year, I decided to turn the French Together course (a self-study French course for English speakers) into a language learning app. This was done in 3 steps: Learning how to code Building the French Together app Launching Here is how I went about each step and what I learned a long the way! Step 1: The decline (or why I learned how to code) After years of growth, my blog French Together started dropping in March 2021. ...

May 9, 2022 · 9 min · 1768 words · Benjamin Houy

A Quick and Easy Win for the New Year (and an Important Check)

2020 is finally over (thank God.) Which means it’s time for some New Year cleaning. You may have articles or copyright notices that reference previous years. Now is the perfect time to update these and make sure they say “2021” and not “2020” or even “2019.” To find pages referencing previous years, head to Google and search: site:example.com intitle:2020 site:example.com inurl: 2020 The first query will give you a list of pages with “2020” in the title such as “The Best Free Software of 2020 - PCMag UK” or “16 Back-to-School Recipes for the Weirdness of 2020”. ...

January 14, 2021 · 2 min · 258 words · Benjamin Houy

A 10-Minute Guide to Finding Low Competition, High Traffic Keywords

You may have heard of unicorn keywords: low competition, high volume keywords. Some say they are extinct. Others say they are so plentiful in some niches that any blog can easily rank without backlinks. As often, the truth lies somewhere in between. One thing is for certain though, finding them isn’t always easy. Let’s discover how to find these mythical creatures no matter what niche you are in! Note: The techniques in this article will help you find potential low competition keywords but not all of the keywords you will find will be low competition. Read my article about keyword difficulty to learn how to find out how competitive a keyword is. ...

July 16, 2020 · 7 min · 1289 words · Benjamin Houy

How to Use Haro to Build Backlinks from the World's Best Websites

You know you need backlinks You may even have tried broken link building, the skyscraper technique, and other link building tactics but they made you feel desperate.You don’t want to send hundreds of emails, you just want to build backlinks. You are in the right place. I love HARO because anyone can use it to build powerful backlinks by being genuinely helpful. No more outreach emails trying to convince other websites that linking to you is good for them.No more time wasted trying to find link building strategies that work. No more hoping that backlinks will magically appear when people finally realize how great your content is. ...

July 14, 2020 · 14 min · 2863 words · Benjamin Houy

Don't Trust Keyword Difficulty Scores (Do This Instead)

Keyword difficulty or SEO difficulty is the likelihood of ranking for a keyword. And the way most bloggers estimate it is dangerous. They use SEO tools like Ahrefs, Keysearch, or SEMrush and rely on their keyword difficulty scores to tell how easy ranking for a keyword should be. The problem is that keyword difficulty scores are guesses and trusting them blindly is more likely to hurt you than help you rank. ...

June 23, 2020 · 6 min · 1249 words · Benjamin Houy