How to increase website traffic with content marketing

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You’ve written a piece of killer content, you’ve had the design assets created and now you’re ready to push it live. Mission accomplished. But, did you know that once you publish a blog post, case study or news item on your site it continues to “work” for your company?

Research from Izea revealed that blog posts continue to drive traffic and generate impressions up to 700 days after they go live.

How? Well, if you’ve included the right keywords and written about a topic that relates to your business, offering and appeals to your audience, your post will continue to rank in search engines long after it’s published, and it’ll keep driving traffic to your website and convert leads.

And, the more new content you upload to your site, the more chance your website stands of being recognised by search algorithms and the more traffic you’ll generate to your site.

Research backs this up, as it has shown…

• B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads than those that do not (InsideView).
• 69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging (HubSpot).
• Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors (Simple Marketing Now).
• 82% of marketers who blog get positive ROI (HubSpot).
• Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic and 4.5X more leads than companies that published between 0-4 monthly posts (HubSpot).
• You have a 434% higher chance of being ranked highly on search engines if you feature a blog as part of your website (Tech Client).

But blogging isn’t the only answer when it comes to driving website traffic. Below, we’ve identified our top tips to boost your site traffic.

1. Create a content schedule

As mentioned above, the more blog content you produce, the more traffic you’ll drive. To ensure you create a steady stream of regular content, create a content plan.

The aim of a content plan is to keep you on track with your content production and provide some kind of order to your activity. At first it may seem daunting coming up with 4+ blog topic ideas for one month, so instead, focus on key “themes” for each month, and then create blogs that fall out of the theme. We’ve shared more advice on this in our content marketing guide which you can find here.

2. Hit the headlines

Headlines grab your audience’s attention so make sure yours break through the noise. Consider what makes you click on an article and use this thought-process when crafting yours moving forward.

For inspiration, look at news headlines and outlets such as BuzzFeed, you’ll notice that these types of articles will always focus on the key topic that the content piece is about, and the writers often use shock tactics to draw readers in.

3. Enhance your on-page SEO

You may be familiar with the phrase “SEO is dead”, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Whilst Google will penalise businesses that “keyword stuff” their content, it’s still good practice to optimise your content for search engines by using keywords that your audiences are searching for in your writing. In addition, make sure you make the most out of things such as meta descriptions and link to other pages on your site, as it’ll help improve your organic traffic.

4. Utilise long-tail keywords

Keywords can be “short-tail” or “long-tail”. Short-tail keywords are shorter phrases that have generic meaning, whilst long-tail keywords are longer, more specific search terms that are often used as search queries in search engines.

When crafting your content, consider what search terms your audience may be using and sprinkle these into your content. This will help you better target your website traffic and they are great for highly competitive, niche subjects.

5. Introduce rich, unique content

Unique content is content that hasn’t appeared online before, and rich content is image-led (think photos, animations, GIFs and video), and this type of content is favoured by search engines which means it’ll be given prominence in rankings. And, it’s preferred by people online as research from Digital Sherpa found that 80% of online website visitors will watch a video whilst only 20% will actually read content in its entirety.

So, as well as text-based content on your site, mix it up with infographics, animated videos, vlogs and image-led content in your blog posts to appeal to search engine algorithms.

6. Get social

Whilst using the right keywords in your blogs and article posts will help to increase awareness of your content, you need to be proactive at promoting your content too.

One of the best ways to do this is to ramp up your social media activity. Depending on where your audience is hanging out online, depends on which social channels you should use. For example, if you operate in the B2B market, it’s most likely that LinkedIn would be the most suited channel for your activity. And, look into specific LinkedIn groups that your audience are members of, so you can make your posting super targeted and achieve the highest impact from your efforts.

For more content marketing insight, check out our latest blogs by clicking here, and read our guide to develop your strategy.