There is ONE common belief shared by people across the spectrum – those involved in the digital marketing space.
That high-quality content, which has been optimized to use SEO keywords, is ENOUGH to uptick traffic and push their organic growth.
Is it?
Well, feeding this (mis)conception are innumerable articles on the internet which claim that “content is the key”, and an ultimate solution to all your woes. However, the question is, are these claims true?
Sadly, the reality is much more complex.
Here is what clients do expect,
And this is what the real picture shows,
According to a post by Nick Eubanks, “At the present time there is (on average) over 2 million new blog posts published every day.” Add to that the highly elusive Google’s ranking algorithm, and you would be in a fix.
Eubanks adds (and rightly so) that “content published in a vacuum will never get indexed.” Here are some quick pointers on how SEO heavy content can generate maximum ROI,
What Happens when we Promote Content
While high-quality content is an important element that Google and Bing seek while indexing, it is only one of the many factors. Even with content optimization, the ROI on SEO often fails to meet expectations.
According to an article, “Organic traffic may be unpredictable, the search engines may alter their ranking procedures, rending up to months of work useless, and the time it takes to draw in a decent level of traffic may be a long while.”
So what can supplement content to drive the desired traffic? According Eubanks, it is promotion. He uses the example of Richard Baxter’s “Never Fail” model, where Baxter discusses the importance of mass appeal and suggests steps covering the purpose (who is it for?), target audience (what content resonates with that audience and what sites are engaging people), outreach and so on. If the appeal of the idea itself is not good enough, despite all the effort, the reach would tantamount to zero.
A campaign that conflated the aforementioned tips seamlessly in a roaring campaign was the travel company, Expedia. As “the travel industry and visual imagery go hand in hand, with over 400 million active Instagram users, Expedia ran a contest on Instagram offering a trip to Rio de Janeiro using lovely pictures to pique the interest of Instagrammers. The social media campaign did not disappoint. The travel photos evoked excitement and a sense of adventure leading to the campaign’s whopping 999 scores in engagement on Unmetric’s platform.”
Image Courtesy: Expedia
Should we Re-purpose Content?
It’s a fact that no matter how many blog posts you publish, the maximum traffic on your site will be generated by the top 3-5 posts. Matthew Barby gives the example of a study his colleague did on HubSpot blog which confirmed that “46 percent of all of our blog leads came from 0.5 percent of our blog posts (just 30 posts out of nearly 6,000)
Image Courtesy: Hubspot
As the above findings imply, to generate traffic what is more crucial that generating high-quality content every time is a wasted endeavor. What is likely to catch more attention is one kind of content, the top rated content on your site.
Hence, the trick would be to re-purpose your content. According to Yael Kochman, marketing manager at a leading content marketing platform, “Re-purposing is recycling your hard work and is the key to productive production. Re-purposed content is a reminder of the VALUE of your past ideas and the FUEL for your present ones, which is why it’s so powerful…”
Dive into the power of Backlinking
Debunking the idea that websites which wield a certain authority can do without backlink, Barby writes, “Backlinks are probably the single most important factor toward ranking for competitive search terms, and they matter just as much to the established websites as to brand-new ones.”
In June 2015, Moz published the results of a backlink study they did to correlate the importance of backlinks and Google ranking. The study examined the top 50 Google search results for approximately 15,000 competitive keywords. Unsurprisingly, the results did find a strong correlation.
Of the websites and pages that Moz examined, they found that an impressive 99.2% of all websites that ranked among the top results had at least one external link. Most sites had significantly more links than just one. Of individual pages that ranked, 77.8% of them had at least one link pointing to the individual page.
In conclusion, high-quality, optimized content can be a great way to build organic traffic that, in the long run, can be a foundation for a “revenue stream”. However, creating the right kind of content is only the first step and must be adequately supported and supplemented by promotion and optimal utilization by SEO experts. If you’re looking to boost your website’s SEO, hire our SEO experts in India, who can provide the necessary strategies and expertise to help you succeed. Contact us today to learn more about how we can unlock your website’s full potential.
