One blog is responsible for half your web traffic

How to tell if you have decent SEO? It’ll be the main driver of traffic on your website, or second after advertising if you’re doing that.

In almost every instance, a client will have one blog that is the source of that majority of web traffic, even if the client has an active content strategy.

This could happen for a few reasons, and it’s the reason that we blog in the first place. We blog and we wait for the internet to pick up on something it deems special enough to recommend to lots and lots of people.

One blog can be the reason someone ranks highly in search rankings, it can cause other high profile websites to link back to your site, creating a chain effect of SEO positivity. Having people share your site, spend time on it, and genuinely find it useful is a massive boon to your digital marketing strategy.

However, blogs tend to not be a point of sale. It’s unlikely that someone will purchase from you directly after visiting your website. So what to do? You’re now getting lots of traffic and none of it is converting.

Lots of traffic, no conversions, is actually a great problem to have. For geeks like me, it just means that your top of funnel is looking ship shape, but there are bits and bobs that need to be refined in order to improve the customer journey and make the most of your brand awareness.

Let’s take a look at how we might achieve that:

Optimising the user journey.

Analyse the user flow on your website to understand how visitors interact with your content. Where do they go after reading your most popular blog post? Are they bouncing (aka leaving the site immediately after reading) or are they going to a different page? If so which page? If they’re bouncing, we need to look at ways to encourage them to click on some other part of the site.

We also need to make sure, that the actual businesses nature, services and purpose are made clear on that blog page. It could be as simple as adding a side bar, pop up or footer.

Upgrading content.

Offer a content upgrade that is directly related to the blog post. These could be downloadable guides, white papers, or free templates that offer visitors to provide their email (in a GDPR compliant fashion).

If you have an email, then it doesn’t matter if they are a potential customer or not, we can still use that data for other things. Just having the knowledge of who is interested in this content is useful to us.

Retargeting.

With an email list, we can retarget that user via advertising. We can even disqualify certain people. Such as if your blog has a global audience but you are looking for regional customers, you can retarget ads to the list using regional specifications.

We can also create a ‘lookalike’ list. Say you have lots of people interested in your website in America, but it’s not getting picked up by the UK. Well that’s okay, we can make a lookalike list of your American audience and target the UK with ads.

We can use retargeting to approach new people, or those same visitors, encouraging them further down the customer journey towards a conversion.

Link to products, services or other interesting blogs.

There’s a very good reason websites link to other places of the site on every page. Make sure you have this set up.

Follow-up emails.

Email marketing lists are so valuable. Create follow up email campaigns with new interesting content and special offers. Introduce them to broader aspects of your brand and services.

Reviewing your popular page – Questions to ask:

• Does this page explain what my business is and does?
• What search terms are people using to find this page? (Check this on Google Search Console)
• Where is this traffic coming from? (Check your traffic sources on Google Analytics)
• Who is linking to this blog? (Use a backlink checker like AHrefs)
• What do people usually do after viewing this page, click off or take another action?
• Do they explore other parts of the website, or do they tend to leave?
• What is the bounce rate for this page?
• Does this page encourage further engagement with our brand?
• Are there clear calls-to-action that guide visitors to the next step?
• Does the page link to related products, services, or content?
• Does the page provide sufficient motivation for visitors to make a purchase or contact us?
• Are there opportunities to expand on the keywords that are doing well on this page? E.g including more localised keywords.