Case Study: TheSmokies.com achieves organic traffic growth and revenue scaling with Semrush

How a family run blog about exploring the Great Smoky Mountains turned into a $200,000 a year business

TheSmokies.com, a travel and tourism blog founded by Morgan Overholt, grew quickly from a side hustle but faced a major challenge: its early traffic came almost entirely from social media, which was not a sustainable source. With little initial SEO knowledge, the team needed help turning short-term Facebook-driven growth into lasting organic search traffic, and they turned to Semrush for guidance and tools.

Using Semrush’s Backlink Audit, Site Audit, Keyword Gap, Keyword Overview, Keyword Magic Tool, SEO Writing Assistant, and Position Tracking, the team cleaned up toxic links, fixed technical issues, found keyword opportunities, optimized old content, and monitored rankings. The results were strong: organic search became the leading traffic source, pageviews for optimized articles increased by 2.5x on average, and TheSmokies.com generated more than $200,000 in annual revenue in 2021, with projected revenue of $500,000 across four blogs by the end of 2022.

TheSmokies.com

Morgan Overholt

Co-Founder