The first accidental experiment I want to tell you about happened completely by chance. I was analyzing Wordstat in search of new trending topics for my personal fitness and bodybuilding website. At the time, I was exploring the fitness bikini niche—a women’s sports category in which participants showcase their physiques on stage in bikinis, similar to Men’s Physique for men.
One of the top queries in this niche was about what female fitness bikini athletes looked like before and what they look like now. The exact query was “fitness bikini girls before and after.” I didn’t think about it for long: I prepared a content brief and created an article featuring a selection of transformation photos. I collected the keywords, the article was indexed, and I checked its rankings and continued monitoring them periodically. The article gradually moved up, with the main group of queries ranking between positions 10 and 15.
While checking the website’s landing pages again, I noticed that traffic from VK had suddenly spiked that day. There were around 300 visits on the first day, 70 the next day, and up to 20 on the third day. After that, the traffic gradually dropped to zero—I traced the full pattern later. All these visitors landed on the same article. I started searching VK posts and mentions for my website and found this post (image 1).
One of the fitness bikini athletes featured in the article shared it on her VK page. The post received a total of 8.9K views. Someone asked for a link to the article in the comments (image 2), which started driving traffic to the website—around 500 visitors over the course of one week.
The average session duration for these visitors was more than 2.5 minutes. This traffic pushed all the queries for which the article had previously ranked in positions 10–15 to the top. After the next ranking check and Yandex update, all the queries moved into the TOP 1–3. They remain there to this day. It’s a shame I didn’t take screenshots of the ranking growth at the time((
This is for everyone who claims that links and traffic from social media don’t affect SEO and rankings. They certainly do when the traffic is relevant and visitors are engaged. Therefore, it makes sense to purchase posts in social media communities that link to the pages you are promoting in order to attract visitors. I’m talking about informational websites here—we won’t discuss commercial websites for now.
What conclusion can we draw? Publish posts in communities that can drive traffic to your website. That’s all from me for now. Thank you, everyone. Did you find this useful?
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