I keep reiterating the need to get quality articles on your website, and lots of them, for good reason: they impress visitors, they attract links, and they tell Google that your site is serious about its subject. The return on investment, if you get it right, can be excellent.
Here is an extreme example: one of our clients advertises on a specific Google search results page (let’s call it a search for “blue widgets”, of course), so I know that there are 50 to 100 searches a day. Based on that, my guess is that the top result in the “natural” searches gets 40 to 50 clicks a day (it’s not from a client of ours, sadly!). That top result is a background article, written in 2001, and updated occasionally ever since. I reckon that since the article was written, it’s probably had 100,000 to 200,000 visits.
Now, the top Google AdWords position on that search results page costs just under £3 a click. So over the years, the equivalent traffic to that article, bought through advertising, would have cost over a quarter of a million pounds. If the company had spent £1,000 of its own time (or a freelance writer’s time) getting it written, the return on investment has been 250x or more. Not bad.
In marketing, we often struggle with thinking up new ideas to write about, but sometimes you don’t need to be original. Why not get an expert in your company, or a technical writer, to produce an annual roundup on developments in a specific technology, once a year? “Blue Widgets: the state of the technology in 2015” is a compelling title for potential visitors, for link generation and for Google’s algorithms. Make it part of an annual editorial calendar and over the next few years you can steadily build your website into a genuine authority on its subject.
Great idea! Thanks for sharing.