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
-
Writing <200 word pieces of content in a 7.5 hour day
My employer has a content writer who is currently working on writing unique descriptions for many pages, on the order of around 150-200 words per piece of content. A recurring theme in this content is to write a list of features such as "it does X, X, X, X, X and X", which can sometimes happen a couple of times during the content and takes up a decent chunk of wording. This content does not require in-depth research over and above reading the about us page of some sites and looking at what services they provide, as well as some quick details like their payment and delivery methods etc. As well as that the writer also writes the Meta Description and then uploads these to a CMS. There are no other tasks. Considering the writer is doing this 5 days a week, 7.5 hours a day, and isn't getting paid a poor or trainee-type wage, what would you say would be an acceptable amount to achieve on the average day? The current average works out to around, or slightly less than 8 of these pieces of content each day. Thoughts?
Content Development | | crystal.fde1 -
Blog.site.com vs site.com/blog
Which is better for SEO: blog.site.com or site.com/blog. In other words, is it better to have the blog running in a subdomain or as a director within the main site? Right now we are running as a subdomain, but want to be sure Google isn't considering that a separate site. The blog shows up separately on Google Analytics, which makes me think site.com/blog is better if for no other reason, it would give our domain greater traffic. Not sure if this matters, but some site info: our site is a sharing economy tool for renting your stuff we are running the blog on Wordpress blog traffic is about 5% of total traffic
Content Development | | TapGoods0 -
Can We Publish Duplicate Content on Multi Regional Website / Blogs?
Today, I was reading Google's official article on Multi Regional website and use of duplicate content. Right now, We are working on 4 different blogs for following regions. And, We're writing unique content for each blog. But, I am thinking to use one content / subject for all 4 region blogs. USA: http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/ UK: http://www.bannerbuzz.co.uk/blog/ AUS: http://www.bannerbuzz.com.au/blog/ CA: http://www.bannerbuzz.ca/blog/ Let me give you very clear ideas on it. Recently, We have published one article on USA website. http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/choosing-the-right-banner-for-your-advertisement/ And, We want to publish this article / blog on UK, AUS & CA blog without making any changes. I have read following paragraph on Google's official guidelines and It's inspire me to make it happen. Which is best solution for it? Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.
Content Development | | CommercePundit0 -
How much do you pay for a 300+ word blog article?
I am considering outsourcing some of the blog writing and would like to get some idea of what is a reasonable amount to pay someone for writing say a 300-350 word article? Also any recommendations on where to find good writers? Thanks!
Content Development | | Clicksjim0 -
Marking our content as original, where the rel=author tag might not be applied
Hello, Can anyone tell, if it is possible to protect text –type content without the rel=author tag? We host a business listing site, where, apart from the general contact information, we have also started to write original 800+ character-long unique and original contents for the suppliers, where we expect visits, so rankings should be increased. My issue is that this is a very competitive business, and content crawling is really an everyday practice. Of course, I would like to keep my original content or at least mark it as mine for Google. The easiest way would be the author tag, but the problem is, that I do not want our names and our photos to be assigned to these contents, because from one hand, we are not acknowledged content providers on our own (no bio and whatsoever), and on the other hand, we provide contents for every sort of businesses, so just having additional links to our other contents, might not help readers to get what they want. I also really do not think that a photo of me could help increase the CTR from the SERP:) What we currently do, is that we submit every major fresh content through url submission in WMT, hoping that first indexing might help. We have only a handful of them within a day, so not more than 10. Yes, I could perhaps use absolute links, but this one is not a feasible scenario in all cases, and about DMCA, as our programmer says, what you can see on the internet, that you can basically own. So finally, I do not mind our contents being stolen, as I can’t possibly prevent this. I want however our original content to be recognized as ours by Google, even after the stealing is done. (Best would be an ’author tag for business’, so connected to our business Google+ page, but I am not aware, this function can be used this way.) Thank you in advance for all of you, sharing your thoughts with me on the topic.
Content Development | | Dilbak0 -
Can you help me with my options on publishing others' news releases on my site?
I wish to add a "News" section to a highly-read, highly ranked blog I have. The News pieces will not be in the same flow as my regular posts. I'm contemplating what the best way to do this is, and would like some advice, please. I see these options: Option 1. Pay textbroker type people to rewrite news releases and post them into the news flow. Pro: indexable content. Con: expense. Option 2: Have a Submit News form on the site for vendors to submit their news stories. I would have to ask them to rewrite their stories to avoid dup content. Pros: Easy for me, no cost. Cons: Will still get dup content I bet, a lot of companies won't take the time to do it, and I will have no control over quality. (I really doubt this option will work). Option 3: Post news releases from companies in their raw format, and mark them as no index (even if I don't noindex, they won't move up the SERPs anyway, so why not just noindex them). Pros: very easy, all the news I want. Cons: not creating any indexable content. Bonus question: If I do Option #3, and I place an adsense ad on the page, will it work the same as if it was an indexed, non-duplicate content page? Your thoughts?
Content Development | | bizzer0 -
Content being copied from our product page hurting our site overall?
On our product pages, he have short descriptions and some bulleted lists. Resellers of our products, and many other sites who are not resellers are copying this content, often verbatim. While I'm not as concerned for the product pages themselves as we're hoping the category pages will rank, does this duplication of our content hurt our site overall? FWIW, our brand name is in our domain and often also shown on these sites that copy the content.
Content Development | | minutiae0 -
Duplicate Content - Video
I recently noticed a drop in rankings for my site shortly after the new algorithm update. I'm not sure exactly why rankings went down, but would like to know if it has to do with having videos on our site that do not belong to us. We have a few videos on product pages that the manufacturer of the product had created. I was wondering if Google maybe thinks we are maliciously stealing these videos or something and penalizing us for it. And if stuff like this has anything to do with the recent algorithm update. We make our own videos, but some of our manufacturer's videos are just better... and they work with us and are glad for us to have their videos listed. Thanks in advance
Content Development | | poolguy0