Great content/news articles - but struggling to drive traffic from them

[bricktech]

We publish 2-3 great quality news stories/posts on our sites weekly, but are struggling to gain traffic from external sources for them, other than our own blog and socials. We have followings for each of our sites, but want to expand and get our posts found in other relevant blogs, features, releases etc.

The posts are 'Top 10 Tips...', 'How To... in 6 Easy Steps', 'What Makes a Great...' etc. All great things that people want to read about and share. All this of course helps towards the SEO of the sites, but the posts aren't written for that, they are written to guide and inform.

My question is, how are other people getting their great content found online, talked about and shared? I personally think that our posts are awesome; containing useful information that will help people. Isn't that what it's all about?

[artdivision]

In theory yes. Great quality content will pay off in the long run, people will find it and share it and some of them will convert but thats mainly down to your overal marketing mix.

There are many reasons you dont get traffic some of which i can think of right now;

1. Your content is not optimised for searches thus it is not ranking for anything
2. The content myth - Content is great for marketing but will not rank you for any commercial term (which is why white hat appraisal posts and Matt Cutt's worshippers never have examples of commercial terms ranking without links - cause they cant rank without links). You need to use it as a "sticky marketing" weapon rather a ranking/SEO for primary keywords weapon. People will find it, like it, bookmark it, come back for more, then when decide to buy a service they will remember you and you will be one of the people they get a quote from.
3. You have optimised your content but use wordpress with default settings which is an overoptimsied nightmare and need to amend some settings to make it rank higher.
4. you have a poor social media presence or not aware of other online properties where people will be looking for this kind of content. Posting it on your site is one thing, distributing it where people are looking for it, another.
5. you dont have rel=author set up.

Thats from the top of my head, I need more info to provide a more sufficient answer. In order to check the overoptimisation problem try and google the exact title of your post. If you are not in top 200 3 days after your initial post then you are over-optimised and you need to do more onpage work.

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Yiannis makes some great points. Here are some more thoughts:

Are there other news outlets, forums, communities on Facebook, etc. in your space that you regularly communicate with? One reason the SEO community shares posts so often is that many people have been chatting to each other in a range of locations for years. They are not posting in a vacuum where they put up blog post links on their Facebook and Twitter pages and wait for shares - they have been contributing in various ways in a lot of places, Moz included, for so long that their peers share their work.

You will also find that there are a LOT of networks like email lists that deliberately share each other's content. They're all meant to be secret and they realistically are - no one who isn't on an individual mailing list knows about it - but if you watch social media closely enough within a niche like SEO, you can see the same people sharing each other's things. You can determine that they have either a mailing list or a private Facebook / Google group where members ask for shares. These deliberate shares always prompt "natural" shares if the content is good enough.

Getting friendly enough with people that you're included in these sorts of lists, or setting one up yourself, is a longer process that means getting involved with a lot of peers, even competitors, where they're hanging out online - talking to them on Twitter and Facebook.

At my former agency, a post on pagination - one of SEO's most "boring" subjects - got so much attention due to being well-written and shared by a few highly-followed people within SEO (including Rand from here at Moz) that it became the second-most visited page on our site behind the home page over an extended period. If we had simply been tweeting out URLs and titles, few would have read it. However, we shared it with friends and cited it where relevant and it was picked up in a big way.

I hope this helps!

[Highland]

How do you know it's awesome? I mean the web is full of instances of sites that people thought were awesome but were not so much...

Now, you think it's awesome and that's an important step. But nobody is going to notice it without drumroll marketing! Do you have a Facebook? Twitter? Pinterest? Pirate radio broadcasts? Smoke signals? (I'm just kidding about Pinterest). Do you syndicate your content? Do you guest blog? Do you have Google Plus so people can see your face next to your posts? How about industry related sites where you can discuss the toopics you blog about? You need some social buzz going. FB and Twitter especially are basically what RSS used to be a few years ago. You "follow" or "like" (subscribe) and your content notices are pushed instantly to people who want it.

How about considering a paid route? Do some limited PPC campaigns to catch niche users and send them to your site. You clearly want people to visit it and stand back and marvel at the depth of your content. Bribing Paying Google is a great way to help jumpstart this.

Do a little network to build a following. You should see dividends soon enough.

[anthonydnelson]

It can certainly be tough to get traction as a newer content producer. As others have mentioned, you need to engage with the people you want to share your article.

• Tweet at them
• Send them an email, mention a new piece you published and ask for feedback (don't ask them to share)
• Comment on their blogs, like this

Do these things repeatedly and connections will start to be made.

If your topic is relevant to a wide audience, you could consider using a paid service like Taboola or Outbrain to get increased exposure at a relatively affordable price.

[EGOL]

This is just my personal opinion.  Others might disagree.....

I took a quick look at your site and saw content with titles such as...

"The Top Ten Reasons to Go Mobile with Brickweb"

"Need an Upgrade? – The Top 5 Reasons to Work with Brickweb"

OPINION #1:   Don't shill or chest-thump

In my opinion these are not articles and are not very linkable.  Why?   They are marketing pieces in which you promote your own services.   I link to eight to ten pages on other websites several days per week and have been doing this for about ten years and paying attention to what my visitors click and write to me about.  Based upon that experience I don't link to marketing messages.  I link to information.  I link to content that teaches basic concepts.

If I linked and sent my visitors to pages that are full of chest-thumping and people shilling their own products I would lose my readers.  Honest.

OPINION #2:  Share Expertise

If you want to earn links then blog about topics that help people understand the basics of how a responsive website works.  Do you make separate pages?  Do you use CSS?   Do you have a program that reformats?  Explain the choices and how they work.  Don't promote yourself.  Just explain it.

OPINION #3:  LOOK AT THE MOZ BLOG

The Moz blog is a pretty good model.  Take a look at how the authors have filled it full of diagrams, photos, images, data tables, screenshots.  That makes the content 10X more interesting than a page full of text.  A well illustrated article is kickass for attracting links.

OPINION #4:  YIANNIS IS RIGHT!

Yiannis says...  "1) Your content is not optimised for searches thus it is not ranking for anything"...   I agree.  What keywords are the two posts that I copy/pasted in bold above targeting?  They are not going to rank for anything that anybody in your biz niche is searching for.  "Go mobile?"....  "Top Ten Reasons" .... "Need an Upgrade".   They are not going to rank for any of those and the traffic there is not relevant.

[AaronHenry]

Thank you for being so blunt with #2! There still seems to be a disconnect (of sorts) between publishing great content and "old-fashioned" link building.

[SEO5Team]

We're testing this network Outbrain to promote quality content. Will do a case study on how it works out once we have tested the network.

[plcarrara]

Im thinking of using this content network. But the thing is that you wouldn t be obtaining new organic traffic, just referral . Yes, Im sure that the engagement would be higher that an adword click, but also the price per click is consideratly higher. Im sure most of the cases you will be paying a higher CPA, so I don´t  understand how Outbrain would make things better...

[SEO5Team]

Hopefully the content is good enough that the initial push using this network will expose it to a larger audience and result in more shares. That's the premise behind using this tactic.