Great content/news articles - but struggling to drive traffic from them
-
We publish 2-3 great quality news stories/posts on our sites weekly, but are struggling to gain traffic from external sources for them, other than our own blog and socials. We have followings for each of our sites, but want to expand and get our posts found in other relevant blogs, features, releases etc.
The posts are 'Top 10 Tips...', 'How To... in 6 Easy Steps', 'What Makes a Great...' etc. All great things that people want to read about and share. All this of course helps towards the SEO of the sites, but the posts aren't written for that, they are written to guide and inform.
My question is, how are other people getting their great content found online, talked about and shared? I personally think that our posts are awesome; containing useful information that will help people. Isn't that what it's all about?
-
Hopefully the content is good enough that the initial push using this network will expose it to a larger audience and result in more shares. That's the premise behind using this tactic.
-
Im thinking of using this content network. But the thing is that you wouldn t be obtaining new organic traffic, just referral . Yes, Im sure that the engagement would be higher that an adword click, but also the price per click is consideratly higher. Im sure most of the cases you will be paying a higher CPA, so I don´t understand how Outbrain would make things better...
-
We're testing this network Outbrain to promote quality content. Will do a case study on how it works out once we have tested the network.
-
Thank you for being so blunt with #2! There still seems to be a disconnect (of sorts) between publishing great content and "old-fashioned" link building.
-
This is just my personal opinion. Others might disagree.....
I took a quick look at your site and saw content with titles such as...
"The Top Ten Reasons to Go Mobile with Brickweb"
"Need an Upgrade? – The Top 5 Reasons to Work with Brickweb"
OPINION #1: Don't shill or chest-thump
In my opinion these are not articles and are not very linkable. Why? They are marketing pieces in which you promote your own services. I link to eight to ten pages on other websites several days per week and have been doing this for about ten years and paying attention to what my visitors click and write to me about. Based upon that experience I don't link to marketing messages. I link to information. I link to content that teaches basic concepts.
If I linked and sent my visitors to pages that are full of chest-thumping and people shilling their own products I would lose my readers. Honest.
OPINION #2: Share Expertise
If you want to earn links then blog about topics that help people understand the basics of how a responsive website works. Do you make separate pages? Do you use CSS? Do you have a program that reformats? Explain the choices and how they work. Don't promote yourself. Just explain it.
OPINION #3: LOOK AT THE MOZ BLOG
The Moz blog is a pretty good model. Take a look at how the authors have filled it full of diagrams, photos, images, data tables, screenshots. That makes the content 10X more interesting than a page full of text. A well illustrated article is kickass for attracting links.
OPINION #4: YIANNIS IS RIGHT!
Yiannis says... "1) Your content is not optimised for searches thus it is not ranking for anything"... I agree. What keywords are the two posts that I copy/pasted in bold above targeting? They are not going to rank for anything that anybody in your biz niche is searching for. "Go mobile?".... "Top Ten Reasons" .... "Need an Upgrade". They are not going to rank for any of those and the traffic there is not relevant.
-
It can certainly be tough to get traction as a newer content producer. As others have mentioned, you need to engage with the people you want to share your article.
- Tweet at them
- Send them an email, mention a new piece you published and ask for feedback (don't ask them to share)
- Comment on their blogs, like this
Do these things repeatedly and connections will start to be made.
If your topic is relevant to a wide audience, you could consider using a paid service like Taboola or Outbrain to get increased exposure at a relatively affordable price.
-
How do you know it's awesome? I mean the web is full of instances of sites that people thought were awesome but were not so much...
Now, you think it's awesome and that's an important step. But nobody is going to notice it without drumroll marketing! Do you have a Facebook? Twitter? Pinterest? Pirate radio broadcasts? Smoke signals? (I'm just kidding about Pinterest). Do you syndicate your content? Do you guest blog? Do you have Google Plus so people can see your face next to your posts? How about industry related sites where you can discuss the toopics you blog about? You need some social buzz going. FB and Twitter especially are basically what RSS used to be a few years ago. You "follow" or "like" (subscribe) and your content notices are pushed instantly to people who want it.
How about considering a paid route? Do some limited PPC campaigns to catch niche users and send them to your site. You clearly want people to visit it and stand back and marvel at the depth of your content. Bribing Paying Google is a great way to help jumpstart this.
Do a little network to build a following. You should see dividends soon enough.
-
Hi there,
Yiannis makes some great points. Here are some more thoughts:
Are there other news outlets, forums, communities on Facebook, etc. in your space that you regularly communicate with? One reason the SEO community shares posts so often is that many people have been chatting to each other in a range of locations for years. They are not posting in a vacuum where they put up blog post links on their Facebook and Twitter pages and wait for shares - they have been contributing in various ways in a lot of places, Moz included, for so long that their peers share their work.
You will also find that there are a LOT of networks like email lists that deliberately share each other's content. They're all meant to be secret and they realistically are - no one who isn't on an individual mailing list knows about it - but if you watch social media closely enough within a niche like SEO, you can see the same people sharing each other's things. You can determine that they have either a mailing list or a private Facebook / Google group where members ask for shares. These deliberate shares always prompt "natural" shares if the content is good enough.
Getting friendly enough with people that you're included in these sorts of lists, or setting one up yourself, is a longer process that means getting involved with a lot of peers, even competitors, where they're hanging out online - talking to them on Twitter and Facebook.
At my former agency, a post on pagination - one of SEO's most "boring" subjects - got so much attention due to being well-written and shared by a few highly-followed people within SEO (including Rand from here at Moz) that it became the second-most visited page on our site behind the home page over an extended period. If we had simply been tweeting out URLs and titles, few would have read it. However, we shared it with friends and cited it where relevant and it was picked up in a big way.
I hope this helps!
-
In theory yes. Great quality content will pay off in the long run, people will find it and share it and some of them will convert but thats mainly down to your overal marketing mix.
There are many reasons you dont get traffic some of which i can think of right now;
- Your content is not optimised for searches thus it is not ranking for anything
- The content myth - Content is great for marketing but will not rank you for any commercial term (which is why white hat appraisal posts and Matt Cutt's worshippers never have examples of commercial terms ranking without links - cause they cant rank without links). You need to use it as a "sticky marketing" weapon rather a ranking/SEO for primary keywords weapon. People will find it, like it, bookmark it, come back for more, then when decide to buy a service they will remember you and you will be one of the people they get a quote from.
- You have optimised your content but use wordpress with default settings which is an overoptimsied nightmare and need to amend some settings to make it rank higher.
- you have a poor social media presence or not aware of other online properties where people will be looking for this kind of content. Posting it on your site is one thing, distributing it where people are looking for it, another.
- you dont have rel=author set up.
Thats from the top of my head, I need more info to provide a more sufficient answer. In order to check the overoptimisation problem try and google the exact title of your post. If you are not in top 200 3 days after your initial post then you are over-optimised and you need to do more onpage work.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to get readers to engage with content
Hi everyone! Over the last year and a half, we've ramped up our content generation and have now hit our stride with a steady stream of blogs and videos. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, we are seeing great results. The problem is that the qualitative feedback is always passive. When we see clients, partners, etc. in person, they tell us that they love the content, but no one ever leaves comments or uses the call to actions to submit their info. There are some social shares, but now that LinkedIn no longer has a counter, it's hard to tell how much. I'm looking for advice on strategies to get more active engagement with our content. The ideal outcome would be active conversations and lead generation. Thanks everyone!
Content Development | | Enertiv2 -
Duplicate Content & Tags
I've recently added tags to my blog posts so that related blog posts are suggested to visitors. My understanding was that my robot.txt was handling duplicate content so thought it wouldn't be an issue but after Moz crawled by site this week is reported 56 issues of duplicate content in my blog. I'm using Shopify, so I can edit the robot.txt file but is my understanding correct that if there are 2 or more tags then they will be ignored? I've searched the Shopify documents and forum and can't find a straight answer. My understanding of SEO is fairly limited. Disallow: /blogs/+
Content Development | | Tangled
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b0 -
Reposting content.
I have some good articles I wrote for article directories a couple of years ago. I took them down 6 months ago. I am hoping to repost them somewhere better if the content isn't listed on google and passes Copyscape. Would this be safe?
Content Development | | T0BY1 -
Embedded Traffic Stats?
Hi all Wondering if someone could give me a pointer here please..... my client is an information resource on internet safety, it is a non profit website just blogging about internet safety and threats. To cut a long story short, the client has relationships with all the police forces and universities in the UK, they regularly republish content on their sites - with approval (and doesn't have relations with many dozens of sites which do not have approval to republish...) Although the goal of the website is information distribution and not to raise money, the site does have a number of KPIs which it needs to meet to justify its sponsorship by the likes of facebook, google, microsoft etc. We are looking to make the content the site publishes embeddable so rather than just republishing 'our' content and it looking like the third party sites' own work, we at least get the credit. The issue we are trying to work out is down to stats. If site B embeds our article and it gets 1,000 views on their site, do these 1,000 people appear in our stats too? I would guess that it does as the content is being loaded from our site each time the 1,000 people visits. In which case, would these 1,000 hits appear as direct traffic or referral traffic in the stats when they read the content on site B? We have run some tests and not seeing the test site appearing as a referrer in the stats so a little puzzled. Many thanks for any advice
Content Development | | daedriccarl0 -
Get duplicate content error in seomoz even after fixed canonical
http://www.webworld.no - We have been getting error Page Duplicate Content Errors. But we have fixed the canonical. Actually, we have list of portfolio and detailed page for each portfolio But We get error all portfolio pages are having duplicate content. But, i made canonical tag to direct to root page. Please help me to overcome this. Also, i see duplicae webworld.no & www.webworld.no. is there anything i need to fix in redirection? in server?
Content Development | | Webworld_Norway0 -
Any freelance writers with viral content / linkbait experience?
Looking for a great freelance writer to assist in creating linkbait and viral content pieces. Please contact me if you are, or know of, such a person. 🙂
Content Development | | AdamThompson0 -
Stolen Content and a Panda Penalty
Hey Folks Question for those folks that have spent some time helping people with the recent penalties and the like. I have a client who has a clear Panda Penalty, huge drop in traffic on the initial Panda date and a further drop on the second date. Much smaller incremental drops on subsequent recent updates as well. From digging in it seems fairly cut and dry - copyscape shows another 250 or so sites with content from this site and there are nearly 2000 external URLs with duplicate content across these sites. We are talking complete, shameless copies of all of the text, sometimes the images as well. The client claims the content is all 100% unique and is his content and that the other blogs must have stolen his content resulting in the penalty - which, if it is true, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise, kind of sucks. Now, many moons ago, way before Penguin or Panda (maybe around 2006) I had a client that had suddenly lost all traffic and their historical rankings. No funny business, it was a small company, had been online since around 2000 and they were pretty much the first of their kind and always did very well from organic search. As it turned out, the content from the site had not really changed since it was set up and as lots of companies had sprung up offering a similar service they had seen their content copied wholesale, across many sites, all over the world. We attempted to contact many of these sites and got some results but many were just old, abandoned copy cat sites on advert supported hosting that had ceased to trade so we maybe got rid of about 20%. Well, in the end we just decided to rewrite the content, we did this and sure enough, the site bounced back to it's previous standing and has been pretty much there ever since. Now that was kind of easy, the site had maybe 20 pages, and it needed a sprucing up but in this case the site has around 500 pages so doing a rewrite is not going to be so easy. Problem is, I don't see removal requests being particularly successful either. So, I see the options and steps as being. Contact all the sites and request the removal of the content use the Google content removal facility:
Content Development | | Marcus_Miller
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals File a DMCA takedown for anything remaining Report Scraped Pages to Google:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGM4TXhIOFd3c1hZR2NHUDN1NmllU0E6MQ&ndplr=1 Submit a spam report for all sites involved ? Submit a reconsideration request to let Google know what we have been doing (unlikely In a nutshell, do everything we can to get this content removed and then documenting this to Google in the hope we catch hold of someone who hears our plight. Interestingly enough, this is a sensitive one, so no URL but I would welcome any thoughts or experiences any of you may have had with similar problems. There is a little extra info here from Matt Cutts + Barry Schwartz that kind of tallies with my approach above but would really like to hear any feedback. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-stolen-content-13243.html Cheers all Marcus0 -
Multisite Worpress Environment / Community
Hello fellow SEOMOZ rs. We are building out a platform on WordPress that provides a free blog for a market niche in a multi-site WordPress environment. The client we are building this solution for now wants the people signing up for the free blogs to be able to search for each other (based on categories and keywords), to build a list of favorites from other bloggers in this community (sort of like building a team), review each other (leaving a publicly viewable review and score of each other) as well as create a forum that is outside the blogs that each of them have. Here is a summary of the goals for the WordPress Plug in (s) 1. Search for other sites within the multi-site environment
Content Development | | webindustry
2. Scoring / Review system for other users (who also have blogs on the system)
3. Ability to build and maintain a list of other users in the community (like a prefered list or team list)
4. A shared Forum area that we could admin from the multi-site platform that they could log in with using the same credentials as their multi-site blog credentials. My question for you all is: Does anyone have experience in a single plugin that will work in a multisite environment that would handle some or most of the goals listed? If not a single plugin, how about recommendations for individual plug ins that might help with this? Thanks for any recommendations!1