A branch falls from a tree on the side of a snow-laden mountain. As it hits the powder below, it dislodges a couple of shovel-loads, and snow begins to slide down the slope. That snow moves more snow, which moves even more snow. Soon there’s literal tonnes of the white stuff, careening at a hundred kilometres an hour down the side of the mountain, all because a small branch snapped at the top.

The butterfly effect: when conditions are just right, a small event can domino into something far larger. And while this concept might have its origins in chaos theory, there’s one area in which this effect might be well within your control: website traffic.

In this article we’re going to talk about the SEO avalanche technique – a way to strategically improve your Google ranking in order to exponentially grow your website traffic.

What is the avalanche SEO strategy? And how can you use it to increase your website visitor numbers? Read on to find out.

What is the SEO Avalanche theory?

A strategy first described by a mysterious message board contributor named BoFu, the SEO avalanche technique is a way to increase your website visitor numbers by initially focusing on small wins within your Google daily organic traffic tier. Each small win moves you up a tier and builds your SEO momentum. Eventually you establish yourself as a trusted authority with Google, attracting thousands of visitors, without the help of any fancy tools or techniques. SEO avalanche theory can be applied by anyone with a decent level of SEO knowledge.

Let’s get into the meat to understand exactly what we’re talking about.

Google organic traffic tiers (simplified)

Here is a basic list of Google organic tier levels. If your website earns 0-10 organic visitors per day, you’re at level 0. If your website earns average daily user traffic of 1000-1500, you’re at level 1000.

When creating SEO content, it’s tempting to target high volume keywords. The more people searching, the better, right? But when you target higher volume search terms, you place yourself in direct competition with larger, more authoritative and more trusted websites. Your chances of ranking well for these high volume terms is low.

SEO avalanche theory states that you should look to dominate your natural tier. Your keyword research should focus on identifying terms with search volumes that align with your tier, making it far more likely that you’ll rank well and earn traffic. Once you master the level you’re at, you’ll grow your traffic and organically move into the next tier, where you’ll begin the process again: create content for search terms with volumes that align with your tier, dominate and move up.

An important note: when we say ‘align with your tier’, you should target keywords with MONTHLY search volumes that are similar to your DAILY traffic volumes – e.g. If you get an average of 200 website visitors per day, target keywords that attract ~200 visitors per month.

How to find your natural tier

In order to work within your tier, you must first understand your tier. And while your daily traffic can give you a sense of which tier you’re at, there are other factors at play, such as on-page SEO, backlinks and the expertise, authority and trust (E-A-T) that Google believes your site has.

The best way to identify your organic traffic tier is through trial and error, using your organic traffic numbers as a starting point. If you get 150 daily website visitors on average over the course of 30 days, you’re probably around level 100. But begin your test by attempting to rank in Google’s top 10 for a level 500 search term – one that attracts 500 visitors per month. If a piece of your content doesn’t make it onto page one for that term, try to rank for a level 200 term.

Continue moving down through the levels until a piece of content ranks in the top 10 (and ideally in the top three). If your natural tier is far below what your average daily visitor numbers suggest it should be, you may have far larger SEO issues than normal keyword research.

Moving up through the levels

Once you’ve identified your natural tier, you have your SEO avalanche strategy starting point. Your task now is to trigger the avalanche, to drop the metaphorical branch in the snow, by dominating your level and the levels below.

Let’s say your natural level is 20. Begin by conducting keyword research: identify relevant keywords with monthly search volumes of 20-50 visitors, and for the levels below: 0-10 and 10-20. Aim to find 30 relevant keywords, allowing you to publish one piece of SEO content per day for the entire month. In our case we’ll be looking for ten keywords/pieces of content for each level.

Create and publish the search engine optimised content, remembering to interlink to the more valuable pages of your site – the ones that generate leads or sales. This ‘link juice’ is critical for pushing your content into the top 10, and for driving new visitors to the right areas of your site once they arrive. Backlinks are important too, as they have an outsized effect on how much Google trusts your site, and can be three times as valuable as interlinks.

Having published one keyword-focused, tier-relevant piece of content every day for a month, check how each ranks. At absolute minimum, a handful of your articles should be ranking in the top 10 and driving traffic to your site – if none are found on page one, you have some big SEO issues on your plate, and should seek the help of a  team of SEO experts.

More likely, however, is that a good number of your content pieces are ranking well and driving traffic to your site. In the process it is likely that they have pushed you into the next tier up – in our case from 20-50 daily visitors to 50-100 daily visitors.

So, for the next month, you tweak your approach. Again target 30 keywords, but this time choose seven or eight of each with monthly search volumes of 0-10, 10-20, 20-50 and 50-100. Publish an article a day, check that a good amount rank on page one of Google, and continue to grow your website traffic. As soon as you move up another tier, you include it in your content strategy for the next month.

This system ensures that you’re always competing for attention at or below your level, rather than wasting time on super high volume keywords that you’ll never have a realistic chance of ranking for. You start small, you grow at that level, you organically creep into the next tier up, you begin the process again.

At its best, the avalanche SEO theory can see you move up a tier, perhaps even multiple tiers, every single month. The result can be exponential website traffic growth. When done by the book, it is an almost foolproof way to build website traffic. In essence, the only way it fails is if you don’t follow the instructions.

The importance of topical authority

The ultimate goal of the SEO avalanche technique is to attract more of the most relevant visitors to your website, and the means by which it does this is through building topical authority.

Topical authority is an SEO technique designed to make your website the go-to authority on a given topic. Sites with topical authority are seen by Google as the experts on a subject, and therefore don’t have as heavy a reliance on backlinks to demonstrate their expertise, authority and trustworthiness.

Topical authority is earned when you publish content that covers a given subject in its entirety. Take an online store that sells clogs. Publishing a single article titled ‘What are clogs?’ doesn’t show a deep knowledge of or authority in the subject matter, so won’t be enough to earn topical authority. But what if the site published dozens of articles on clogs?:

  • “What are clogs made of?”
  • “Where did clogs originate?”
  • “Are clogs good for your feet?”
  • “Why clogs are coming back”
  • “Are all clogs wooden?”
  • “Do Dutch people still wear clogs?”

When you use the SEO avalanche technique, you’ll organically build up a large library of keyword-rich content that focuses on your niche subject. In the process Google will begin to view you as a topical authority, reducing your need to earn backlinks from other sites, and allowing you to further accelerate your website traffic growth.

Trigger your SEO avalanche

Google pits your website against every other site on earth. There’s no shortcut to the top of the rankings, but if you are willing to invest in SEO, you can eventually generate an incredible return on your investment. Sure, it takes time, but when done well, it’s oh so worth it.

This is particularly the case for the SEO avalanche strategy. By using this technique you can improve your search result ranking with no resources, you can land in the top 10 consistently, and you can grow your daily Google organic traffic consistently.

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