Mar 21, 2016
In today's episode we're going to be covering a really practical way to take your best performing pieces of content and then making it even better. By applying what we talk about today you should be able to take content that is getting organic traffic, optimize it so that it hopefully ranks better, analyze the intent and context of the traffic coming to the site and improve conversion once you have done those things. Best of all, this shouldn't take too much time but it should be able to produce big results for you. This activity of reviewing your best performers and then optimizing it should be done on a pretty regular basis, maybe 1-2 times a year.
The first step, finding your best performing pieces of content can be done by going to google analytics, and sorting by organic traffic. Once you have your organic traffic chosen you can then set your primary dimension to sort by as landing page. This will tell you what pages get the most organic traffic and then you can sort by other factors like what keyword was used to get to the page. Knowing this info will help you to see what people are looking and and how most people are fining you. Updating content helps with your content's freshness and should help your ranking in search engines. Remember, search engines are trying to provide the most relevant results to the searchers because that helps them to make more money, and freshness is a factor in the search algorithm.
Once you've found your best performing content, make sure that you have your on page SEO optimized. This includes the title tag, meta description, heading/title, body copy and image alt optimized with the keyword that you're targeting. LEAVE THE URL the same, this is important! The search engines have indexed the URL and unless you're going to do a redirect you need to leave it alone. Don't keyword stuff, and make the language functional and readable. When updating content a good idea is to use stories, update products, give examples and put any new relevant data or info into the post.
The last step in optimizing this content is including a relevant offer for people to go to after consuming the content. This is where figuring out the context of the traffic is really important. Is someone doing comparisons between you're practice and another? If so they are likely ready to make a buying decision relatively soon, so an offer that is a reward for coming in or a one time coupon for first visits would be an appropriate offer. If someone is just doing research or trying to find answers to a specific question more content or driving them to a social media account to connect might be a good relevant offer to send the traffic to. Figure out what step in the process the traffic is in and help them to take the next step in the relationship so that you can hopefully bring them in.
The goal of good digital marketing is to take people from awareness to consideration to then decision. Push them through the funnel by giving them what they are looking for!