We've all been there: The shimmer of some high-traffic, super broad-match keyword catches your eye, and you go to town creating a blog post about a related topic without thinking too deeply about how tailored the content is for your target audience. Maybe your post is even starting to show an impact on your reporting. I work for CallRail and we produce a call tracking and analytics solution for marketers looking to better understand attribution and how calls fit into the sales cycle. They did a tremendous job at answering broader questions—so much so, that they were ranking high on SERPs for the high-volume keywords they were targeting. Three Options for Redeeming Value From Mistargeted, High-Traffic, Well-Ranking Posts Although the traffic we were getting from these blog posts may have had low value, there was no need to unpublish them. Add a section or two targeted to decision-makers How close can you get to discussing a related topic that's more relevant to B2B decision-makers? Embed video to increase time on page and build brand awareness We can confidently presume that most visitors to our "how to recover from a bad voicemail" post weren't really looking to solve a business problem, but a personal one. Link out to high-level content with parenthetical CTAs Parenthetical CTAs are a great tool for content marketers to help navigate readers to the content they'll find most useful. At the end of a section, offer readers a jump-off point to a piece of content that might be more helpful to them. Jules Tompkins is a Content Marketing Manager at CallRail, a call tracking and analytics platform for data-driven marketers.
We’ve all been there: The shimmer of some high-traffic, super broad-match keyword catches your eye, and you go to town creating a blog post about a related topic without thinking too deeply about how tailored the content is for your target audience.
A few months later, SEO kicks in and traffic starts showing up to the page, and you begin climbing SERPs for related queries at breakneck speed. Maybe your post is even starting to show an impact on your reporting. Congrats, you’ve got some vanity metrics to show off!
But when you start to dig a little deeper on posts like that, you’ll typically notice a negative trend: No one’s engaging with your CTA or clicking through to other posts. Bounce rate is high. Exit rate is high. Conversion is low, super low.
So much for vanity.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s often easy to see the flaws with past content ideas: Maybe you’re a B2B content marketer, but you wrote about a topic that—in hindsight—is obviously B2C; or maybe you wrote about a problem that your company has no solution for, so people start showing up on your site but it’s nothing but a dead end for them because there’s no obvious place to send them.
Defining the Problem: What’s So Wrong With More Traffic?
Let’s be totally clear: It’s kind of snobby to be griping about getting more traffic. I get that.
But the reality is, getting a bunch of unqualified traffic is a little like having a house too big to furnish. It looks great on the outside, but it’s hollow on the inside; ultimately, it doesn’t do much for you. Oh, and you’ve got to maintain it.
So, it may be nice and big, but what does it do for you besides offer shelter?
Similarly, big, hollow blog traffic is little more than shelter for a content marketer: “Look, boss: I know how to get people to the website.”
Retracing Content-Ideation Steps: How’d We Get Here?
I work for CallRail and we produce a call tracking and analytics solution for marketers looking to better understand attribution and how calls fit into the sales cycle. When I joined the company, and started looking at content performance, two posts, in particular, stuck out. Each was driving thousands of unique visitors to the blog every month, but together they had earned just seven leads since being published in 2013. (Compare that with a post that we published earlier this month about a product update that has already gained six leads.)
One was about recovering from an accidental voicemail. The other was about improving verbal communication skills.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that those posts weren’t exactly answering questions that our customers had about marketing attribution. They did a tremendous job at answering broader questions—so much so, that they were ranking high on SERPs for the high-volume keywords…
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