The Secret To Getting More Search Traffic For Your Business

Traffic is the oxygen of the internet. It might not be the only thing you’ll require for a successful website, but it’s definitely one of them.

Getting traffic comes down to two options: Buy it or attract it.

Buying traffic means advertising – pay per click, display, mobile, native. Attracting traffic means creating and optimizing content, improving site performance and usability, finding quality inbound links… the list goes on and on.

There is no shortage of tactics for generating traffic.

But which one works best? If you could only do one thing, what would it be?

Blogging.

Yup – blogging. It’s not necessarily the most popular tactic among small businesses, as we learned from the WASP Barcode 2017 “State of Small Business Report."

But it is the most effective.

Before I dive into the benefits of blogging, please understand that limiting yourself to only one traffic-building tactic isn’t a good idea.

Blogging can get you lots of traffic, but you still have to apply the basics of “technical” on page search engine optimization. You’ll still need the fundamentals of a good site (mobile-friendly and fast).

As most of you know, just publishing great content isn’t enough. But IMHO, having a good blog means more than just publishing content.

So think of your website traffic building like it was investing. It’s wise to blend your portfolio. In addition to your blogging, do some careful link building. Write a few guest posts on high-profile blogs. Optimize your pages intelligently, and have a social media presence. You know – act like a company that has a website worth visiting. Put a serious and sustained effort into building your traffic. Then be good to it when it comes to you.

Alright. ‘Nuff about that. Back to blogging.

Here’s the research that proves blogging gets traffic.

Hubspot reviewed the blogging frequency and website traffic of 13,500+ of their customers. This is what they found:

They broke it out according to company size, too:

Interesting, right? Clearly, blogging drives traffic. But I notice another thing from these charts.

It takes quite a lot of blogging to get results.

According to Hubspot’s data, you won’t really see any significant increase in traffic if you publish even four times a month. These companies didn’t really move the needle until they published 5-10 blog posts a month. And exceptional results didn’t show until they were publishing more than 11 posts a month.

Most blogs don’t publish that often. If a business has a blog at all (and most don’t), they’ll aim to post once a week, if that. According to the 2016 Orbit Media blogging study, 53.8% of blogs publish once a week or less.

So why don’t more companies publish more often? Easy: Publishing two or three times a week is a quite a lot of work.

Or is it? According to the Orbit survey, it takes about two and a half hours to write the average blog post.

And that blog post is about 800 words, on average.

So you’re looking at 5 hours (for two blog posts) or 7.5 hours (for three posts) of extra work per week.

Assuming you can get a post written in two and a half hours, of course. Mine tend to take anywhere from two to seven hours. It depends on the post’s topic and length and how productive I happen to be that day.

The ROI of blogging - explained

Let’s get more concrete. To give you an idea of what a successful blog publishing schedule might look like, let’s plan out the costs and benefits of publishing three times a week. Your mileage will definitely vary, but doing the math on this makes it clearer.

The first thing you’ll need to know is how much each website visitor is worth to you. Figuring that out could be its own blog post, but here’s the gist of it:

(What you earn from your website every month – Website overhead) / How many unique visitors you get per month

For example:

($30,000 earned - $20,000 overhead) / 5,000 website visitors

$10,000 / 5,000 = $2 value per unique visitor

In the real world, you’re not going to have numbers that clean. For instance, sales from your website may be driven by offline factors. The costs of your site’s overhead may be supporting other marketing channels. You’ll have to figure out how you’ll attribute those costs and income. And are you going to count unique visitors, or every visit, separately?

I’ll let you figure that out on your own.

Once you know what each visitor is worth, you can estimate what your blogging might be worth.

So here’s your blog setup:

• You’re publishing three times a week
• You aren’t writing the posts. An employee who earns $60 per hour (including benefits) is writing them.
• Your employee requires 3 hours to write each blog post. So each blog post costs $180 to write.
• The employee spends 9 hours every week writing blog posts, at a cost of $540 for you.
• In addition to the time spent writing, each blog post requires another $100 of design and promotion work. That’s one hour for design, one hour for promotion, at $50 per hour for each task.
• So each blog post costs you $280 to publish and promote.

Before you started blogging, you were getting 5,000 website visitors per month. Now you begin blogging, publishing twelve blog posts a month.

This costs you 12 x $280 = $3,360 per month

It doubles your website traffic. So you get an additional 5,000 website visitors a month. That traffic is worth $10,000 to your business.

Your profit is $6,640 per month.

Ah… if only it was so easy. Here’s a couple of ways this estimate could be off:

• It assumes your site’s traffic increases immediately. That ain’t gonna happen. Expect to just write off the first 3 to 4 months of your blogging initiative. It takes time for a site’s traffic to increase.
• We’re assuming the value of visitors you attract through blogging are of the same quality/value as your previous visitors.
• We’re assuming that this blogging thing is going to work as well as Hubspot’s research says it will. Nothing at all against Hubspot or their excellent study… but don’t bet your business on one piece of research.
• $2 per visitor is pretty high for an average value per visitor. If your average visitor was worth, say, 50 cents, you’d gain only $2,500 of new traffic. That would put your blogging project in the red.

So there’s risk here. But I think you can see a path where it could work. Especially if you put some effort into converting that traffic with effective lead generation and other conversion tactics.

Don’t skip over that last part. As many of you know, a website’s profit can increase dramatically with no additional traffic. Just increase your conversion rates. Or increase your average order value. Traffic isn’t the sole path to profits.

So what if your numbers don’t work?

What if it simply costs too much to create enough blog posts to see the traffic lift?

Well, then you cut your overhead costs.

How to get more blogging results with less investment

But not by going cheap. Do not cut corners with weak content. This whole model breaks down if the content you’re publishing isn’t worth reading (or sharing, for that matter). You’ve got to be delivering value to your audience or they won’t bother to read your blog. And honestly, would you?

So keep the quality up. But there’s a bunch of things you can do to maintain quality, publish frequently enough, and still cut costs.

Here’s just a few:

• Promote your posts throughout the year.

Don’t publish, promote for a week, and then forget about the post. Keep sharing those posts on social. It’ll get you more traffic and leads.

• Republish and refresh your older posts.

Any content more than a year old needs an update. So go update it (expanding it if at all possible), then republish it. This often takes half the time of writing a new post but gets you just as much or more new traffic.

• Convert every post you publish into at least one other format.

A series of related posts can become an ebook or a Kindle book. A few posts can be made into short videos. Make others into simple infographics, checklists, SlideShares, quizzes or assessments. Start thinking of your blog as a content creation engine, not just a place where you push out a blog post and then forget it.

Conclusion

Writing and publishing blog posts is a skill. If you rarely do it, it’ll be harder to do. It’ll also take longer to do and you’ll be less likely to do it. You won’t be as good at it, either.

But if you can create a simple system to get more blog posts written, and maybe hire a little help, it doesn’t have to be as huge a time sink as it sounds like.

I realize very few of you have four to eight hours lying around every week, unused. Adding blogging to your task list is a problem. But consider this: What would getting 50% more traffic to your site be worth? What would doubling your site’s traffic be worth?

If it’s worth enough, maybe 2017 should be the year your company blog finally takes off.

What do you think?

Is blogging the best way to generate traffic… or does something else work better?

Or is it? According to the Orbit survey, it takes about two and a half hours to write the average blog post.