SEO to Rank and Build Authority for a Quiz Website

Ellen
Hey there guys! I've been running a quiz website for about six months. I first started with blog posts in the entertainment niche (celebrities, movies, tv shows & Netflix related). At the same time, I began posting quizzes in the same niche (tv shows, some personality quizzes). After a while, I decided to go full with quizzes. Non-indexed the blog posts because they were not well written, yet I was getting some organic traffic.
Now I have more than 50 quizzes published—no organic traffic at the moment. (lost all the organic traffic I had from the blog posts). I also have a ton of other quizzes on the draft list.
I started to pay attention to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), signup for Ahrefs. I noticed that I should write meta descriptions, fix and use power words on the titles, and write 200-300 word articles for each quiz. I did it all, and now I score 98 on SEO health, according to Ahrefs.
I also ran the Google Speed Insights/Google Search Console (GSC) and saw that I should fix all the pages with bad Web Core Vitals, so I did. Here's what I have now on Desktop: https://gyazo.com/cf927c65bc96f21647f736bc00cdde32 and then Mobile: https://gyazo.com/8f1ea96ad4518391ca81d34f50a3edf7 (I still have some work to do on mobile). I know scoring 98 on Ahrefs means nothing. That's why I'm here. 🙂
Here's my analytics stats for January so far: https://gyazo.com/f4a03bc8802fd48b1859515e721b0e01 (60-70% of this traffic was due Fb ads).
I wanted to get some advice at this point. And as you can see, I'm pretty beginning to SEO. So, what should I do to create Authority? Should I focus on content alone and hope the site grows or try some SEO strategy?
I don't know how hard it is to rank and build Authority for a quiz website, but I'm down to try, even if I need to hire some experts. I don't want to use Facebook Ads ads forever. Any feedback is appreciated! Thanks 😄
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seo to rank and build authority for a quiz website
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Matt
Well, you mention "organic" a lot so I assume you want organic visitors. But celebrity quizzes? Is there any search volume for that? I can't imagine people searching "My compatibility with Beyoncé quiz". What keyword are you trying to rank?
I don't know the field but with a quiz website, I would figure you need to draw in visitors some other ways and then funnel them to the quizzes. What other ways? Lots of ways exist, you just need to pick a path.

Ellen » Matt
Not only celebrity quizzes. I think you didn't get it. But there are many topics you can cover in a quiz, such as TV Shows, Personality Quizzes, General Trivia, Politics, IQ Tests, etc. Of course, there's enough keyword volume; otherwise, I wouldn't bother with organic traffic. Mostly keyword I'm figuring out are 6000+ (one, for example, is Friends Quiz, Harry Potter Quiz) monthly search, and the big ones are 20-30k+
Matt
Awesome! So you know your stuff and are targeting actual keyword with actual volume. So I assume you want organic traffic, right? If that's the case, the first step is making sure your on page is in line with what Google expects. I would recommend using Market Muse (LTD on AppSumo now) or something similar (e.g., Frase, Topic, Clearscope) to verify that your quiz pages have the correct keyword for the search terms. After editing your pages, it could take a few months to see results. While you're doing that, you can try to boost your overall DA through the obvious outreach. Check the backlink profile for the top 10 SERP results. Who is linking to them? What type of sites? As an example, https://brainfall.com/category/movies/harry-potter-quizzes/ is a result for "Harry Potter Quiz" and they have a backlink from https://staging2.filmdaily.co/news/harry-potter-success/ I doubt you'd get a backlink from the same site, but you could probably scour the Internet for a moderate DA site with a page about Harry Potter and score your own. Fortunately, there are probably thousands of those pages so scoring a backlink shouldn't be hard. The difficulty will be scaling the outreach process… maybe if you find a site that has hundreds of film/tv/celeb reviews/bios/etc., you can work some kind of exchange (backlink for a backlink). Those are some things I'd start with. I hope that helped?
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Ellen
Thank You. Well, in the backlink process, I'll have to spend on someone's knowledge. There's so much work to do alone, lol. I'll DM you. again, thanks a ton. One Idea I think is to do blog posts on the same niches. Things like: "The Best New TV Shows Coming In 2021", "What to watch on Netflix right now". Sounds good?
Matt » Ellen
Well, that Brainfall page I posted would be considered a content "hub" – i.e., a pillar page and they have a bunch of other Harry Potter pages linking off it. That's an excellent way to structure your site if you want extra Google points. Create a page for a topic and then link off to different things like your said. Harry Potter page links to surveys, quizzes, reviews of each movie, etc. All articles on your site that you wrote yourself.
Matt
Send me a message if you need any help or have further questions.

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Bruce
So, firstly, you allude to the fact that you more or less committed an SEO cardinal sin which was deleting blog posts that were driving organic traffic. It appears you did so because you thought the content wasn't the best. Your sentiments toward content quality are the right ones to have, but you should have evolved the content and enriched it for better results, opposed to deleting it. I would recommend reinstating your previous assets, do more in-depth keyword research and add additional headings to the content to capture more traffic. There are a couple tricks you can use. One I would suggest is looking at the queries report in the search console to see some of the terms you are already ranking for, but haven't written content about. Add relevant content that corresponds to that query, and 9/10 times your rankings will go up for that query, and you'll increase traffic. When you do it a bunch of times, it's a really powerful way of driving more traffic.
For the long-term strategy, I would recommend scaling out related, but low-competition content. This type of content inherently has lower conversions, but the amount of traffic you'll drive makes that a moot point. From those pages, you'll want to use solution-based anchor text to drive people to your money pages. How you write your Call-To-Action (CTA)s really matters, avoid sales-oriented text. Most clicks will come from anchor text users read and perceive as a solution to their problem or related to what they are reading. I'm not sure if this is transferable to what you are trying to do, but it's a powerful funnel that works and you may want to consider it.
When you're doing your research, pay hommage to competition metrics as well, not just search volume metrics. Competition metrics give you an insight into how much resources and time will be needed to rank something, if it can even be ranked at all. In many cases, I see SEO professionals make the mistake of targeting competitive terms, and then the end result is a website that ranks on page 3 for a bunch of high-volume queries which is of course not a great end result.
The other thing you may want to consider is getting away from the idea that things like an SEO health score mean anything. It makes you focus on the wrong things and have the wrong expectations. Just keep that in mind as you continue learning SEO.
Hope this helps!
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Ellen » Bruce
Thank you so much! I've noted all the key points you talked about and I'll be sure to work on that. And btw, as I mentioned on OP: I recognize that SEO health score means nothing 🙂 Thanks!!!
Bruce
Oops, I misread, sorry about that! That's good! Best of luck!
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Ellen
Thanks so much!

Morgan
I would suggest focusing on keyword research and content optimization. Most of the keywords you're targeting will have a relatively low competition so you should be good to rank if your content is top-notch.
Important! By content I don't only mean words, but also images, videos, and the quiz itself. If your quiz is the only content you have, make sure Google renders and indexes it correctly.
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Ellen
Thank you Morgan I really appreciate your feedback!

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» How Much Importance Is Page Authority (PA)?
» The Difference Between Trust Flow and Domain Authority
» Define! What Is High-Quality Content?

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