Throughout all of 2017, HubSpot experienced something that had never happened before —\u00a0our blog\u2019s monthly traffic flattened. Even worse, it started to decline. So after months of stressing over the mysterious cause of our blog\u2019s traffic plateau, we decided to sit down, chug a bunch of coffee, and find the culprit.<\/p>\n
What we discovered is that our editorial strategy of brainstorming topics and relying on our intuition to determine our audience\u2019s content preferences didn\u2019t suffice anymore. And coupled with almost every social media platforms\u2019 unwillingness\u00a0to direct\u00a0users\u00a0off their website and the ever-growing mountain of emails piling up in people\u2019s inboxes, we decided to pivot and focus our energies on the channel that has consistently generated the majority of our blog\u2019s traffic for its entire existence — organic search.<\/p>\n
Today, almost a year after we implemented our organic-only strategy, we\u2019ve exceeded the majority of our monthly traffic goals and even broke some monthly traffic records. Needless to say, we\u2019re thrilled (and relieved) that our new organic-only strategy fueled our\u00a0traffic boost and shattered the great traffic plateau of 2017 — and we\u2019d love to share the essential SEO tips that helped us devise this strategy.<\/p>\n
Even though an algorithm dictates the order of Google\u2019s search engine results pages, you must remember that Google designed its algorithm to reward the web publishers that craft the best content on the internet, not the web publishers that are the best at gaming their algorithm.<\/p>\n
In fact, part of Google\u2019s search algorithm\u00a0ranks your content based off engagement metrics, like total traffic, organic traffic, direct traffic through Chrome, time on site, bounce rate, SERP CTR, brand mentions on authoritative sites, and return visits.<\/p>\n
So, to boost your website\u2019s engagement and, in turn, your domain authority, there’s really only one way to do it — you must attract and engage a loyal audience by creating high-quality content. Only then should you start optimizing it for search engines.<\/p>\n
The first step we usually take when optimizing our content for people is understanding the intent behind a keyword we want to target. To do this, we analyze the keyword\u2019s search engine results page and determine the problems users are trying to solve when searching for this query.<\/p>\n
After that, we figure out how to effectively solve these problems by mining information from trusted sources, examining our own research, and asking HubSpot employees who experience similar problems the steps they take to solve them.<\/p>\n
The final and most important step of our content creation process is crafting the most engaging content possible. To do this, we\u00a0tell stories\u00a0and relate to our audience\u2019s problems in our\u00a0introductions, write\u00a0clear, concise, and compelling copy, highlight interesting findings, data, and quotes in our body text, and include vivid images and videos to provide a variety of stimuli. At the end of each blog post, we\u00a0keep the momentum going\u00a0and remind our audience of the thoughts and emotions they just experienced, which leaves them yearning for more content.<\/p>\n
Since people heavily rely on\u00a0Google to provide accurate and relevant answers for most of their questions today,\u00a0Google needs to understand the intent and context behind every single search. To do this, Google has evolved to recognize topical connections across users\u2019 queries, look back at similar queries that users have searched for in the past, and surface the content that best answers them. As a result, Google will deliver content that they deem the most authoritative on the topic.<\/p>\n
To help Google recognize our content as a trusted authority on\u00a0marketing, sales, and customer service topics, we decided to implement the pillar-cluster model on our blog. By creating a single pillar page that provides a high-level overview of a topic and hyperlinks to cluster pages that delve into the topic\u2019s subtopics, we could signal to Google that our pillar page is an authority on the topic.<\/p>\n
Hyperlinking all of the cluster pages to the pillar page also spreads domain authority across the cluster, so our cluster pages get an organic boost if our pillar page ranks higher, and our cluster pages can even help our pillar page rank higher if they start ranking for the specific keyword they\u2019re targeting.<\/p>\n