Inbound marketing involves creating content that will attract people to your website. The specifics of that content vary for different organizations. First of all, companies develop content about diverse topics. They can also produce content in different formats, like videos or written blogs. Beyond that, the cadence with which companies share new content can differ as well.
Many SEO thought leaders talk about the importance of producing quality content over large quantities of content.
With this in mind, some companies post infrequently but manage to drive consistent, quality traffic to their websites. Consider Brian Dean of Backlinko. He is an authoritative individual in the SEO space, but he normally only posts once a week. However, the content that he does post is compelling, pulling visitors to his site.
While such a strategy is certainly possible, as Brian demonstrates, the quantity of content you post is still a major factor. Of course, your content always needs to provide value to your audience, but if you can produce a large quantity of high-quality content, you will drive more traffic.
At the beginning of 2019, we set out to do just that — bring more traffic to our website by posting high-quality content every day.
Over the three years prior to the beginning of 2019, we posted twice per week on the New Breed blog. The content that we wrote about was tightly focused on a small set of topics. While our blog was not very diverse, the strategy worked well for us.
Our traffic from 2013 through 2016 grew steadily month-over-month for almost the entire time. During that four year period, our traffic was consistent and predictable, pouring contacts into our funnel and sustaining our business.
Then in 2017, we noticed our traffic begin to fluctuate. It was still trending upward but wasn’t as consistent as it had been previously. Eventually, in 2018, our traffic plateaued.
One of the biggest causes of the plateau was an influx of site errors. Beyond that, we recognized a number of other issues that we hoped would become opportunities for us to improve our traffic.
One of the first things we decided to do was bolster our keyword strategy. Since our previous content topics were limited, we wanted to target more keywords to increase the number of people we brought to our site.
For example, if we targeted one term that garnered 500 searches per month, our potential reach would be 500. If we added another keyword that had 750 monthly searches, our total potential reach could expand to 1250. Essentially, with each term we added, our potential reach would expand as well.
From there, our keyword research revealed a lot of topics that we had never written about before. We recognized we should have content on many of them, so we added the ideas to our editorial content calendar.
Beyond keyword research, we realized that there would be around a three-month lag before we started to gain organic traction on any new posts. Expanding our strategy would take a long time to make a difference at our current posting cadence. If we only posted two blogs a week and the blogs didn’t gain much traction until three months in the future, we probably wouldn’t recognize much of a change (especially since we wanted to write about keywords we had never targeted before). Also, it would take a long time to expand our content library if it grew at such a small rate.
Since we couldn’t rely on our current posting cadence to realize our new goals, our existing strategy wasn’t going to cut it. So, we devised a plan to increase our publishing schedule to five times per week.
Of course, such a dramatic increase in publishing required discipline. We became regimented in how we created posts, defining a concise process.
Now, when we produce a piece of content, we start by establishing the subject we want to write about. From there, we identify a subject matter expert (SME) that knows a lot about that topic and schedule an interview between our SME and the pre-designated blog author. During the interview, the author extracts the information they need from the SME on that topic so they can draft the post. Once the post is drafted, they pass the piece on to receive two rounds of editing: developmental edits and copyedits. After the editing is complete, the post goes on to be optimized for search and published, concluding the process.
Beyond a new process, we needed a tool to organize our content creation. So, we started using a project management platform to track our progress towards different tasks.
If your company is starting to create content from scratch or increasing their content production, establishing a well-defined process and implementing a project management tool is vital to staying on track. Sticking to a schedule is one of the most important and difficult things to accomplish, but with those aspects in place, you are well on your way to accomplishing your goals.
We decided that if we were going to invest so much time and effort into posting regularly we wanted to diligently monitor the results. So, we started tracking our organic search traffic since that was the main key performance indicator that we identified.
We started to examine our posts in a few different ways. First, we analyzed daily traffic across our website, looking for trends or changes in the number of individuals we were attracting. We also created cohorts of blogs based on which month they were posted and tracked how those cohorts performed in comparison to each other.
Initially, we didn’t see any substantial changes for the first three to four months. There were also a number of Google algorithm updates that occurred which were frustrating. It was difficult to see all of the work we did suddenly take a hit for a week when a new update dropped. Eventually, though, we gained traction.
In June, we started to see some dramatic increases. A lot of the posts that we had published from January through March were starting to rank and were ramping up in views.
Beyond that, we noticed some of our newer posts were picking up speed and their time to value was much faster than our initial posts.
Google Search Console states, “If you put up a bunch of new information, or have some really useful information on your site, you might be crawled a bit more.”
This seems to suggest that the more frequently you post high-quality content, the more frequently Google will crawl your site. If this is the case, it means that pages would be indexed and begin to gain traction sooner — potentially giving your new blog post a faster time to value.
Since we started publishing blogs daily, we have increased organic traffic to our site by 120.49% when comparing our best week this year to our worst week last year (excluding holidays). We also increased our organic traffic 75.41% from our best week in January to our best week in October.
Besides helping to increase our traffic, publishing new posts on our blog every day has also greatly increased our awareness of the blog’s performance. Before we started posting more frequently, we only thoroughly analyzed our traffic once a month. Often, if something drastic changed, like an algorithm update or a substantial dip as a result of site errors, we didn’t notice it for a couple of weeks. Now, we look at our traffic every day and catch changes as they occur.
We can also gather and use information faster, enabling our team to make better decisions in shorter amounts of time. For example, if we post a blog about a particular topic and it starts generating traffic quickly, we might decide it’s worthwhile to write another blog on that topic or a related one.
Ultimately, posting blogs more frequently has proved extremely beneficial for our company, and we highly recommend applying the lessons we’ve learned from the process to your own business.