A prospect unequivocally disagreed with a recommendation I made recently.
I told him a few pages of content could make a significant impact on his site. Even when presented with hard numbers backing up my assertions, he still balked. My ego started gnawing: would a painter tell a mathematician how to do trigonometry?
Unlike art, content marketing and SEO aren’t subjective. The quality of the words you write can be quantified, and they can generate a return for your business.
Most of your content won't do anything
In order to have this conversation, we really need to deal with this fact.
Most content created lives deep on page 7 of Google, ranking for an obscure keyword completely unrelated to your brand. A lack of scientific (objective math) process is to blame. But more on that later.
Case in point: Brafton used to employ a volume play with regard to content strategy. Volume = keyword rankings. It was spray-and-pray, and it worked.
Looking back on current performance for old articles, we find that the top 100 pages of our site (1.2% of all indexed pages) drive 68% of all organic traffic.
Further, 94.5% of all indexed pages drive five clicks or less from search every three months.
So what gives?
Here’s what has changed: easy content is a thing of the past. Writing content and “using keywords” is a plan destined for a lonely death on page 7 of the search results. The process for creating content needs to be rigorous and heavily supported by data. It needs to start with keyword research.
1. Keyword research:
Select content topics from keywords that are regularly being searched. Search volume implies interest, which guarantees what you are writing about is of interest to your target audience. The keywords you choose also need to be reasonable. Using organic difficulty metrics from Moz or SEMrush will help you determine if you stand a realistic chance of ranking somewhere meaningful.
2. SEO content writing:
Your goal is to get the page you’re writing to rank for the keyword you’re targeting. The days of using a keyword in blog posts and linking to a product landing page are over. One page, one keyword. Therefore, if you want your page to rank for the chosen keyword, that page must be the very best piece of content on the web for that keyword. It needs to be in-depth, covering a wide swath of related topics.
How to project results
Build out your initial list of keyword targets. Filter the list down to the keywords with the optimal combination of search volume, organic difficulty, SERP crowding, and searcher intent. You can use this template as a guide — just make a copy and you're set.
Get the keyword target template
Once you’ve narrowed down your list to top contenders, tally up the total search volume potential — this is the total number of searches that are made on a monthly basis for all your keyword targets. You will not capture this total number of searches. A good rule of thumb is that if you rank, on average, at the bottom of page 1 and top of page 2 for all keywords, your estimated CTR will be a maximum of 2%. The mid-bottom of page 1 will be around 4%. The top-to-middle of page 1 will be 6%.
In the instance above, if we were to rank poorly, with a 2% CTR for 20 pages, we would drive an additional 42–89 targeted, commercial-intent visitors per month.
The website in question drives an average of 343 organic visitors per month, via a random assortment of keywords from 7,850 indexed pages in Google. At the very worst, 20 pages, or .3% of all pages, would drive 10.9% of all traffic. At best (if the client followed the steps above to a T), the .3% additional pages would drive 43.7% of all traffic!
Whoa.
That’s .3% of a site’s indexed pages driving an additional 77.6% of traffic every. single. month.
How a few pages can make a difference
Up until now, everything we’ve discussed has been hypothetical keyword potential. Fortunately, we have tested this method with 37 core landing pages on our site (.5% of all indexed pages). The result of deploying the method above was 24 of our targeted keywords ranking on page 1, driving an estimated 716 high-intent visitors per month.
That amounts to .5% of all pages driving 7.7% of all traffic. At an average CPC of $12.05 per keyword, the total cost of paying for these keywords would be $8,628 per month.
Our 37 pages (.5% of all pages), which were a one-time investment, drive 7.7% of all traffic at an estimated value of $103,533 yearly.
Can a few pages make or break your website? You bet your butt.
Sometines most of your traffic is because of that brilliant post with great original content that resulted interesting for a lot of people, or for a few of good content posts, and the rest of the site doesn't receive much traffic.
Well said Pau, When we are talking about traffic, yes, content must be engage-full, interesting and unique.
@Jeff - Keyword research is very essential and we can't categories content into 2 part - easy and difficult. It's a complete creativity when it comes under the concern of using key variants/ keywords in a part of content. Thanks for this post.
Thanks for reading!
Yep, that's the point I was trying to get across
I completely agree with your opinion @PAU, If about doing research for the topic maybe most people can do that, but you need to remember not all people able to write earth shattering article.
And consider to hire some professional writer? I don;t think so, most starter blogger don't have that kind fund, let along hiring someone, maybe some of them only have 1 meal a day. ^.^
Btw, Great post Jeff
Hi Jeff, thanks for the post! I found a few instrumental points that can be great take aways. You are right about the days of stuffing a landslide or even multiple keywords are over and in MOST cases... You do need to Isolate your targeted keywords beginning with "intent" to buy keywords.
Also, it is important these days to position your content to match search queries which will help you capture more targeted web traffic. We don't search with one or two keywords anymore so leveraging your web content (after doing your keyword research) you will want to have your content answer questions since many searches today will be longer type question based queries like, Best web designer in New York rather than a few years ago it probably would have been more like web design new york. This is where you headers and content should read Looking for the best web designer in New York?.....
One thing that I would like to add for some of the less seasoned web designers here is that many circumstances will come into play here like - Domain age, Backlink profiles, brand authority and many more.
I think if this post would have been longer that Jeff would have covered a bit more yet when it boils down to understanding who your ideal buyer is and how they search for your product.
So thank you Jeff for your time.
Hey Trevor. You make all great points. I think a lot of the points you make are sufficiently covered in a post I published a few months ago, here; https://moz.com/blog/influence-googles-ranking-fac...
Thanks for reading!
That was EXACTLY where I was going on that note.... Great post and I am glad that you shared it in conjunction with this one. Hopefully everyone put this in their strategy. Thanks Jeff!
Solid analysis Jeff, and definitely can agree with a few amount of pages generating the majority of organic search traffic being common. Quality over quantity of posts, and doing a deep dive into whatever keyword (and the surrounding topics) is a great way to get a page to rank. Reminds me of your other blog post- https://moz.com/blog/influence-googles-ranking-fac... which I enjoyed as well. Keep writing great stuff man!
Thanks Nicholas! I appreciate you reading!
Hi Jeff Baker,
This was really a in-depth article on how to identify keywords we can target for our next blog post. Also thanks for the Template, it looks good!
Just a small question, does this also applies to revamping of blog post ? or There is other way or steps to move forward with such content, why I ask this is because if a website is running since long and had lot of old content which not bringing much traction for now, its better revamp it with latest trends and terms people are searching! What do you think on this?
Cheers,
Ankit
Hi. Jeff Baker, Thanks for the post its really helpful to Digital Marketing guys & SEO Executives what are the factors we need to implement to increase the web traffic , we need to good reserach on keywords & we need to maintian good content to increase traffic to our site , SEO services
Thanks for the Post.I really agree with all of those points. I think now i have to update few of my pages.
Honestly, just updating your old pages can cause a huge bump in traffic. I've experienced it myself. Try it out guys.
That's right. Also there's a WP plugin to make it updated automatically.
Great post!!! I prefer do it with a long tail keywords. The optimization for these words are, in my opinion, more easy. Less traffic but i use link juice to increment the authority of others pages, for example a product page.
Agree. Long tail keywords are easier in competition, but more effective on targeted visitors.
Thanks for reading.
Consider me broken. One year ago, 4 highly targeted pages with little competition accounted for 37% of the total page views on a site I publish with thousands of pages.
Today, thanks to Google's love fest with big brands, those pages on my much smaller site don't even show up on the first page of search results. Mine continue to hold the #1 position on Bing, but of course, the traffic there is much smaller.
I knew back then I had a problem because I've seen this happen before in a long online career. But I just couldn't boost enough other pages to make up for it. So yes, you are exactly right, a few pages can make or break a site.
Ya pretty much. You either have the best content available, or life sucks at the blog front web property lol.
Good read with my morning coffee!
I read today that over 90% of URLs get zero organic search traffic. A study of 1 billion URLs by AHRefs, so a pretty reputable source. That correlates with your data quite strongly that 1 post can inflate the rest.
Great post, thanks. Adam.
Hi Jeff,
What you said is very true. Quality triumphs over quantity indeed. It is more effective to create unique, engaging content to drive traffic rather than spread your resources thin over numerous pages.
Very help full Blog as the content is main important in the website,knowing how it works and the importance of it has been clearly explained in the blog.
Great contribution Jeff.
Thank you for your post Jeff. I am begginer in SEO world and i am starting to learn now how all these things works together to get your objectives. At first time i thought that you only need to have good content on your web to have a lot of visitors, but now i am realizing that of course you need good content but more important is that you must work with this content and use it with a SEO mentality to get your objectives. I am sure for all of you it is obvious but for me it is a revelation. I am enthusiastic to learn more and more!
Thank Jeff, great article. We're now in the process of going through and updating some of our older and thin content in an effort to boost the overall quality of content on the site.
Hai Jeff thanks for the post , you are right as content is very important for the site, with out the good content user does not stay on your site for more time and which results in the high bounce rate which directly effects your organic traffic,So the content plays a major role in the website traffic.
Makes for a nice reading. However I give priority to the keywords that are already ranking but not in the top positions. You can find this by searching them in the Google Search console. I then give priority to keywords from the 5th to the 20th position and then decide to create fresh content or add content to existing pages.
Hey Joseph,
I agree to that strategy in tandem. I wrote another post that explains how we go about doing that as well.
https://moz.com/blog/influence-googles-ranking-fac...
Jeff
I have one projects, and there i did make small-2 categories of every same products. And research traffic based keyword for them and optimized accordingly. Still not but in future i have best chance get traffic for those categories even individual products. In shopping website have numerous product listing, which i have been manually optimized on basis of keywords which have small amount of searches.
Concise and insighful article. Thank you!
Yes, You are right Jeff. If any website has a number of pages that no means all pages will obtain much traffic, but 2 or 3 pages which are perfect in the eye of Google algorithm?those performing very well!!
Thanks for sharing, it is true that unique and engaged content deliver more traffic.
Hello Jeff,
"Content" is the "Heart" of today's Digital Marketing World. I agree with each and every conclusion made on this blog.
Thanks for sharing.