When it comes to creating a niche blog from scratch it can be challenging to attract visitors to visit your content and scale your content output alongside your marketing goals.
In this post, we’ll take you through how we’ve brought sustainable traffic to our new blog going from zero visits when the blog was first launched in October 2020 to over 2,500 monthly visitors in December 2020 by creating articles to attract potential B2B SaaS customers.
Whilst this may not be the largest increase for a newly created blog, our traffic is highly relevant to our target audience and has attracted authors and thought leaders as contributors who have led teams at IBM, Microsoft and have authored books on educational topics our users value.
Top Tips For Bringing Visitors To Your New Blog
1. Discovering Hidden Content Traffic Wins
Did you know that your organisation may already have the copy to support high traffic generating blog posts?
It is highly possible that valuable content is currently being hidden by your site structure or by simply working in a siloed manner away from your technical teams.
As more and more SaaS companies move to use subdomains provided by a third-party tool to host their technical documentation, help articles and best practise guides, these resources are being under-served to potential new users that would find a lot of value in this long-form content.
From prior experience, documentation published to a subdomain doesn’t tend to rank as well as content migrated to a subfolder. In addition to this if your help centre or docs library is poorly designed you may even end up taking what new users that do reach you organically away from being able to trial your product.
To combat under-serving content every so often, we’ll audit and review all of our owned content for new organic rankings occurring on posts that are located on a subdomain by using Ahrefs to review all available opportunities.
When it came to populating our newly created blog migrating existing ranking content was essential, the articles that were migrated quickly ended up being our most viewed blogs as the queries they were answering were not only related to our service but also served to help external users of the open-source software we’re built upon.
2. Evaluate Internal Resources For Technical Content Creation
As a content marketer responsible for creating blogs and articles that may be unrelated to our preferred field it can often be necessary to communicate internally with the rest of your technical team to discover that they have relevant experience around the topics you are keen to rank your blogs for.
By having knowledge of what topics your developers and engineers are passionate about it can become much easier to close your content gap against your competitors.
Getting your wider team on board with writing and brainstorming content gives you a much better chance of ranking for niche keywords then if you were to outsource your content creation or try to hack together something “good enough” for the topic you’ve targeted.
In addition to this, it is important to make note of what internally used documents have been created to support our use of new technologies as often these documents could easily be broken down into new blogs themselves for their external technical value.
To help keep track of these we have a content calendar where anyone can add in new ideas so as we work on projects or research tasks a supporting note can be added and assigned to the person who has the most knowledge of the subject for them to create marketing content around.
By repurposing “hidden” or under-served content and internal resources you can provide your new blog visitors with masses of value by simply centralising your content and auditing your otherwise forgotten written output on a regular basis. It is especially important to conduct an internal content audit prior to creating a new blog or migrating an existing outdated blog to a new hosting platform.
You may also be under serving your video content, you can use screen recorder to capture snippets of content to embed within your blog or convert into Gifs to make your blog content far more engaging.
3. Identification of Low Hanging Fruit For Fast Ranking Opportunities
As previously mentioned, we use Ahrefs to also help us discover and target low difficulty high volume keywords and long-tail keywords to assist getting our blogs to rank faster.
The Ahrefs keyword explorer is a great resource for discovering related keywords to the main topic you are writing about. Often FAQ-style long-tail keywords have a decent search volume and a very low difficulty score which make for ideal subsections on larger articles.
By implementing this strategy as we write content we’ve seen blogs start attracting organic sessions in as little as a week after publishing. The traffic has proved sustainable and many of these blogs have served us with relevant sessions every month since they were launched.
4. Evaluate SEO Strength As You Write
As well as Ahrefs we also use SEMrush to help not only improve the on-page SEO of existing pages but we also use their Google Docs plugin the SEO Writing Assistant as we are writing new articles and landing pages.
This add-on makes sure that whatever we write has an improved chance of ranking before it goes live.
Their checker works on the basis of four core attributes;
- Overall SEO strength for your target keyword.
- Readability to vet how legible this is for your target readers.
- Tone of voice to make sure that the article sounds consistent throughout the piece.
- Originality - which serves as a built-in plagiarism checker to make sure that you are not unknowingly duplicating the work of another author.
The addon takes all of these factors into consideration to produce an overall score that helps you gauge how strong your content is as it is being written.
One of the most useful attributes of the tool is the recommended keywords section which helps to indicate missing subsections and additional descriptive terms to support the topic you are writing about.
I also find that the readability score is quite intelligent as this tends to adjust based on the average reading level of the top pages ranking for your term, so the difficulty level varies based on the average knowledge level of the target reader.
These two attributes are helpful as you wouldn’t want to write an overly simplistic article for a reader who is a senior decision-maker of a company eligible for your product/service.
The checker also provides a nice baseline for word count. There are many SEO myths around word count including the notorious “longer is better for ranking purposes” whereas the score bases their recommended word count on previously published articles and advises the author not to risk exceeding the word count and losing relevance for their piece.
By analysing the context of previously ranking copy you’ll often find that the most suitable word count is going to support quality over sheer quantity of text.
5. Buyers Guides - But Make It Evergreen
The first of our originally written guides that started bringing in organic traffic was a buyers guide on comparable software solutions that largely were not in direct competition with our services. By writing guides that draw up the pros and cons of tools and services you enjoy using, which can be updated each year you can bring in long term traffic and build upon your initial article over time.
By focusing on creating lists around tools that have consistently high levels of search volume year on year you can minimise the effort you end up spending on creating brand new blogs that are only effective for netting organic traffic for around six months or less.
You can also get ahead of other comparable guides by including newer less established solution providers in your review. By picking a provider that is trending on Product Hunt and giving their tool an honest evaluation you are more likely to see them share your article with their network due to the fact they are less used to being featured and as a startup, they are likely tired of having to pay to be included in these types of comparison lists.
Long-form informative content bringing together real reviews of the top technology providers assists users in getting to know your brand indirectly off the back of solutions they are already aware of but may not know that you provide complementary functionality for.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed this article, once you’ve got your existing content properly audited and new content is created with optimisation in mind from it’s first iteration you can then focus on other marketing channels to share your content, whether that is through email marketing, advertising placements or on social media.
Author Bio: Eleanor Bennett is a digital marketing specialist at the centralised log management platform & hosted ELK service Logit.io. She writes on technology & marketing, with a special focus on informative pieces to help IT decision-makers consider tools and software to secure their operations and scale for business growth. Her research has previously been featured in the Financial Times, The Huffington Post & Dzone across a range of topics.