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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
My website is struggling to receive traffic I think I have a serious error
Hi, My website would receive a lot of traffic and then I asked a SEO company who contacted me to do some work on the site. Since then, the site has dropped in the rankings and our traffic has dropped by like a lead balloon. Instead of receiving thousands of visitors, today we have received 10. I am finding that I have articles no longer in Google but they are in Yahoo. Here is an example of an article that was once popular https://www.in2town.co.uk/travel-advice/how-to-save-money-booking-a-holiday-through-a-travel-agent/ I have tried everything and now I do not know where to turn. I am not sure what they have done but everything has now failed. We have not been penalized and our hosting company have said they cannot find anything wrong. Due to this problem we have stopped writing articles and have spent all our time trying to work out what has gone wrong. If anyone can give me advice and point me in the right direction then I would be in your debt.
Content Development | | travelmagazine0 -
Would a lot of images on one post be categorized as thin content?
As an example, if i write an article on 12 best print ads by BMW, it will have 12 images and possible 12 single liners and a paragraph. The images will have the necessary alt tags. But overall, will this post be counted as low content and is there changes of being penalized by google for it?
Content Development | | marketing910 -
Is Publishing Content from a Book to your Site Considered Duplicate Content?
It is a book we don't own, either. Would you need to somehow find the original and rel=canonical it? Or is this just all around bad to do? Thanks.
Content Development | | ThridHour0 -
Typepad.com blog migration & duplicate content
I've migrated a typepad.com blog with a bunch of content (but little traffic) onto a hosted WordPress site under my own domain name (the way I should've done it in the first place). Now I don't want to confuse Google that the new site is duplicating content from the other site, so would I be better off with: 1) meta-refresh redirecting each typepad.com post to the same post on the new blog, or 2) just killing the typepad.com blog entirely so Google will not find duplicate posts anywhere. In favor of #2 is the fact that these posts get very little traffic today. I figure I will lose more traffic from duplicate content ranking penalties than from losing the posts themselves in the original blog. What do you think?
Content Development | | chriscrabtree0 -
Is there a tool for measuring content freshness?
i.e. crawling a site to identify last date of new or changed content? Thanks.
Content Development | | PeterTroast0 -
Promoting blog content
I've created a pinterest board, which kind of serves as a blog also as it tells people how they can save money on their heating bills this winter. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to promote it as a backlinking opportunity? Would it be good to also feature the content on our website? Guest blogging? Any suggestions would be welcomed. Thank you.
Content Development | | AAttias0 -
Content Writers / Blog Posts
Hi there Would anyone know where i could fund affordable, reliable blog post writers who would be able to produce quality posts at affordable rates? What would the accepted rate be etc? Regards Stef
Content Development | | stefanok0 -
Duplicate content across multiple e-commerce sites
Hi, This may have been discussed here before though I couldn't find a definitive answer, but I was wondering what the best practice for having multiple e-commerce sites with some of the same products on both is. If Site A has 200 products, and Site B has 300 products, and 50 overlap, do they absolutely have to have unique product descriptions? The descriptions have already been rewritten to be different from the manufacturer's description, but do they need to be changed again? Or should the 50 products only be listed on one site or the other? Sites like csnstores.com seem to have the same descriptions as the subsidiary sites that they have, but maybe they have different sidebars/footers/etc which make the content considered original?
Content Development | | nks20120