The benchmark of a great blog is at least 50,000 views per month. To get there, you need a consistent approach to content marketing. But that may not be enough. Above all else, you need a sound SEO strategy.
There are two methods of growing a blog. The first is to create content at scale. Throw everything you have at the wall and see what sticks. This will require a considerable amount of resources, and you’ll burn both time and money along the way. You might even have to cut corners when it comes to quality, and the returns will diminish over time.
The second method is a calculated approach to digital marketing using SEO. A poorly designed website with high-quality content simply won’t work well with a site built for search. Think of content as a piece of the digital marketing puzzle that functions as part of your overarching framework to drive traffic.
And it All Starts with Keyword Research
Organic traffic tends to compound over time. It is the best distribution channel that you can use to reach the target audience at pivotal moments of their buyer journey.
But the process of generating traffic starts by identifying trends in digital marketing. This is possible with the use of keywords.
Keyword research lets you keep tabs on customer behavior by unraveling the words and phrases they use to search for information and answers.
Keywords in the “Goldilocks Zone” of Volume and Difficulty
I like to look for keywords that are in the ‘goldilocks zone’ for my website. The keyword research strategy for a website that is just starting out will be extremely different from that of a website that is already generating decent traffic.
So if the website is just starting out, I prioritize keywords that are most likely to rank. This often means going for low hanging fruit – such as keywords with low volume and low difficulty. However, once your website has accumulated enough ‘trust’ with search engines (with a high domain authority of 50 or more), you can pivot to high volume keywords.
Tools like SEMrush provide intelligence metrics on keywords to identify this ‘goldilocks zone’.
The table illustrates this relationship really well.
| Website Authority Score (from SEMrush) | Keyword Volume (per day) | Keyword Difficulty (competition) |
|---|---|---|
| 0-30 | 0-50 | Low |
| 30-40 | 50-400 | Medium |
| 40-70 | 400-10,000 | High |
| > 70 | > 10,000 | Extremely Difficult |
In other words, the website’s authority score can be used as a guiding principle for identifying keywords that it is most likely to gain.
The keyword research rule identified above isn’t as cut and dry as I laid it out. For example, it isn’t unheard of for low authority websites to ‘capture’ high volume keywords. But using outliers as trends would be foolhardy in the world of digital marketing.
There are good arguments for using keywords at each end. High volume keywords will result in a downpouring of traffic for your website – to the point where you might have to upgrade your hosting resources! The flipside is that the organic traffic from high volume keywords (usually short tail keywords) are less likely to convert.
Starting at low volume keywords, i.e., tackling low-volume keywords will earn you less traffic, but the visitors are more likely to convert.
Generating Social Proof from Social Media
Social media is an integral part of digital marketing. Besides acting as a powerful distribution channel for your business in its own right, social media also generates ‘social proof’ for your digital assets.
Both Google and Bing generate profiles for entities such as businesses and celebrities. Looking up businesses will now generate a profile on the side of the search results page that returns social media information.
Here’s a screenshot of an example below (I looked up Meta):
Google and Bing actively research your presence on social media and fetch them to create a profile for you.
This is an invaluable digital marketing asset that generates social proof and drives in more traffic to your blog.
The best part is that we can use social media signals – between the comments and the likes, reshares and retweets – as a feedback loop for our digital marketing. Social media helps us tailor our blog’s public perception and helps us fine tune our SEO strategy.
Internal Linking
Every blog will have a landing page optimized to the “T” for SEO and built to redirect traffic deeper into the site. The analogy of internal linking is that of a book with a table of contents.
The landing page has the ability to rank for search on its own. It directs users to your blog posts based on long-tail keywords.
Internal linking is crucial for SEO. This is because Google crawls your website by analyzing its link architecture, both internal and external.
The bot arrives at the landing pages, loads the page, and follows its first link. By following links, Google can find out what your website is catered toward.
This is why it is crucial for your website’s SEO to improve your internal linking strategy on a regular basis.
Get rid of pages that serve no purpose – in other words, ‘prune’ your websites as you would prune your trees. A healthy internal link architecture allows Google to find you quicker.
Backlinking and Digital Marketing
Before concluding this blog, we want to briefly touch on the topic of backlinking for SEO.
Backlinking, from our cumulative experience, is second only to content marketing.
Think of backlinking as a public endorsement by well-respected thought leaders for your website and content. It lets search engines know that your content is worth subscribing to. The more backlinks you have, the more likely you are to improve your search engine ranking.
So there you have it, a quick low down on the relationship between SEO and digital marketing. SEO has many moving parts – the most important of these are backlinking, content marketing, and social media.
Always make sure to optimize all aspects of your digital assets to stay ahead of the curve.