More and more people and businesses rely on a website to attract customers and generate sales. Choosing the right keywords and coupling it with quality content properly optimized for Search Engine Optimization (SEO ) is how you can drive traffic to your website.
In simple words, the traffic you receive must have a high potential for conversions. How much traffic reaches the website depends entirely on your skills of content marketing that helps to develop the right strategies.
To develop successful content marketing strategies you must first have an established end goal. Having set the goal, you develop the strategies around it.
Content marketing has done wonders for marketers for years for all sizes of businesses from the small ones to the national and international brands. The success of content marketing is evident from billions of blogs that exist on the internet, and the number is growing dramatically.
However, just like SEO, content marketing is evolving continuously, and you must know which areas of content marketing you must focus upon. Moreover, you should know that what you are doing today will work in the future and the experts at Seattle Golden Search Advantage SEO can guide you in this regard.
By looking at the statistics related to various aspects of content marketing, it will be possible to gather enough insights to know the future of content marketing. This should help you to develop strategies with an emphasis in the right areas.
Drop in traffic from social sites
If you look at the statistics of traffic generated from social sites between the period 2009 and 2019, you will observe that the social shares grew phenomenally for the first six years up to 2015 when it reached the peak of 175 shares per post.
Then, from 2016, there has been a steady decline in the number of shares and in 2019, it is about 90 shares per post. The sharp decline is the result of algorithmic changes on social media platforms like Facebook that restricts the reach of organic search.
The extent of sharing has something to do with the popularity of the social sites that encouraged high sharing during the days when it was going through a growth phase and rising popularity. As their growth has saturated, the extent of sharing has dipped as a result.
Focus on search but use other channels too
The focus must be on SEO that drives more than half of the traffic that reaches websites and is the most popular marketing channel while the social media sites that drive 7% traffic is fifth on the list of popular marketing channels.
Plan your link building campaign with the dual objective of boosting rankings as well as increasing your referral traffic. By adopting this single strategy, you generate two streams of traffic from two different channels which give more return on your efforts and investment. Targeting referral traffic through PR or guest posting generates steady traffic that remains unaffected by algorithmic changes. Use all marketing channels to generate traffic but give the maximum emphasis to blogs as Google ranks content over web pages.
The volume of weekly content or blogs
As content marketing has gained unprecedented importance over the years, to keep pace with its popularity the extent of publishing content has also grown hugely. Publishing one blog post per week equaling four posts per month was good in 2009. However, in 2019 the number has risen more than five times and is about 23 posts per month which (that) translates into 5.7 posts a week.
Just as the number of blogs posts increased so did the length of blog posts. According to the current trend in 2019, the average length of posts is 1890 words. There was time during 2016 when longer blog posts of 2300 words on average started trending but these posts did not rank well. Creating articles and blog posts of around 2000 words have since proven to assure better rankings.
Blogs drive conversion
Someone who reads your blog has a higher chance of conversion (74%) as compared to conversions that come from the section of visitors that do not read your blog. Advertising also boosts conversions, but blogging is an inexpensive way of doing it because advertising is getting costlier with time. However, conversions don’t happen as quickly for people that read your blog for the first time as do those that you acquire directly from advertising.
Only after people revisit the blog many times, will it lead to conversions. According to data available after visiting blogs at least 3.15 times, a visitor would convert finally over two weeks. Moreover, it needs some pushing to drive visitors towards conversion, and you must adopt various means like e-mail marketing and re-marketing to fulfill the target of conversions.
Look for opportunities beyond the shores
Demographics are changing fast, and you must tune to the new trends to help your content or blogs gain widespread popularity. About 10 years ago it was safe to assume that the majority of readers of your blogs belonged to English speaking countries. Today, the scene is quite different because statistics show that the number has come down to 53% from 91% which has resulted in companies translating their websites into other languages. The biggest traffic gains for marketers are now coming from translating their content into different languages.
Reconditioning old content and presenting it afresh is another significant way of driving traffic. Updating your old content and giving it a new purpose with necessary improvements help to maintain a flow of fresh content without the need for always generating new content.
Devote at least half of your content generation to re-publishing old content after performing necessary modifications and updates. This technique helps to extract fresh juice from trending topics that you have already used for generating content and now refreshing it to maintain its relevance in a new context.
Not WordPress alone
It is undeniable that WordPress is the best CMS and the most popular choice for publishing blogs because of its immense versatility as well as SEO friendliness. Although you can give maximum emphasis to publish blogs on WordPress, you must make use of the other platforms too because every platform has the potential to drive traffic and you must utilize it.
Although WordPress is the best, Tumblr and Medium are also quite capable of driving traffic. Without the fear of duplicating content, you can safely publish content of these platforms maybe with a little time gap. The same applies to Facebook where your content enjoys good shares, but you can move the entire content to Facebook itself just as you would do for Medium and Tumblr.
Depending on your content you can use LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube that is excellent for publishing video content that enjoys wide viewing and sharing. Exploring any other platform that accepts the content and is useful for generating traffic will bolster your efforts and increase the traffic volume significantly.
Having the right mix of content based on text, audios and videos will expand your options of publishing the content across a wide range of platforms that all generate traffic and can complement your efforts in search marketing by driving maximum traffic.
However, you must have the commitment and patience to work diligently and consistently while keeping your eyes open about algorithmic changes that can impact your moves.
