Why is content marketing important?
Why is Content Marketing Important?
April 13, 2016
Your Website Redesign Could Be an SEO Disaster
May 3, 2016
Show all

A Case Study on How Creating Content Really Does Increase Website Traffic

It started early last year with “I want to talk about my SEO.” Many conversations I have in my business start that way, so this wasn’t a surprise. However, in this case, it was a current client that I already had done onsite optimization. So I was a bit surprised but not to be deterred, I said I would look more closely at it.

I knew that this particular client does a ton of writing about their field, and much of it was posted to LinkedIn, which wasn’t a bad thing. I also noticed that all of the original content on the site was in PDF form. I knew it was done this way so their clients could print them out quickly and read them.

As I dug a bit deeper, the eNewsletter that was sent out monthly had links to the LinkedIn articles and to the pdfs. With the LinkedIn articles, the reader could at least be lead to other articles by this author, but the pdfs were just a dead-end path to click them and close them. OK, I think I have a solution! First, a bit of SEO background.

Once a page is optimized for a search term, there isn’t much more you can do to a page, particularly a page with static content like, for example, an About Us page. You will probably see a boost in ranking, but more than likely you may never think about it again. Which could lead to the page dropping in rank as it gets old. What boosts ranking is traffic to the site. Particularly to pages other than the homepage. A good strategy is to post content and drive readers to your site, anyway, back to the client.

I sat down with the client and asked why are you creating all this content and posting it to other places? Why aren’t you linking readers back to the site? Have you ever seen a lightbulb go off in someone’s head? It is quite amazing to watch. So we started reworking the website.

We reposted the original content that was on LinkedIn back on the site, and this client committed to creating new content weekly. The new content (and some of the older content) was then promoted through social media channels like LinkedIn and Twitter. Additionally, we started creating podcasts from this content and distributing them as well.

So, how did we do? I think we did pretty darn good.

Traffic is up 37% year over year, and social media accounted for nearly 10% of overall traffic, which was an 87% increase from the prior year. Organic search (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) showed us a 58% increase as well.

Here’s a stat that no one talks about when it comes to SEO, returning visitors increased by nearly 63%! The ratio of new to returning visitors is 1.5 to 1. We gave visitors a reason to come back, and they did.

The moral of the story is that SEO has become an active process. Creating content regularly and driving visitors to the site will increase traffic and ranking and, in the end, business. Recently this client has been receiving requests for consultation from around the country and the world. This is, in no small part, the result of creating content and using distribution channels like social media to their advantage. This also goes to show that the more effort you put into your site, the more your site will work for you.