How to get most out of viral blog traffic?
-
Our website has a WordPress blog, hosted at website.com/blog.
I've discovered that with some hard work and a bit of luck, I can create a blog posts that will go viral - they will get about 50k readers in 1-3 days (which is a LOT for our website), and 300-1000 tweets, 100-250 Facebook shares, and anywhere from 10 to 130~ G+1s. (Unfortunately, these are for the posts, not for our website.)
The posts will also get some comments. And most importantly, a few links - sometimes from very reputable domains.
However, I feel that I could be doing much more here.
The links go directly to the blog post, and I'm not sure how much is that helping our website overall in regards to SEO.
-
What actions can I encourage the readers to do, and how should I prioritize them? Some of the actions are: Sharing/liking, writing a comment, checking out our products, subscribing to our Facebook/Twitter/G+ profile, subscribing to our RSS. One another possible action/opportunity that I see and which could potentially pay off is to offer some kind of PDF report to be emailed, which would initiate an autoresponder sequence.
-
Do you think that having a clear call to action in a blog post could reduce the sharing of it ?
-
Is it possible to encourage whoever is writing about our blog posts to use a direct link to our website, instead of linking directly to the post? If yes, how? E.g. if I included a direct link to our website in the post itself, e.g. in the most important part of the post that gets quoted, it could work - unfortunately that's usually virtually impossible.
-
Am I sitting on a gold mine here, and should do this as much as possible?
-
Should I consider putting this content not just onto the blog, but on our website.com/something ? I'm actually not sure how that would help though, it would simply have a shorter URL. I've discovered that it doesn't matter where I post this content, if the presentation looks decent. So it doesn't have to be posted on website.com/blog. I can even post it on other domains - should I?
And the most important question:
- How do I get the most out of this opportunity in SEO regards?
Thanks for any ideas or insights!
-
-
Good for you to be able to create such shareable content!
I have one post I wrote that occasionally gets a boost of virality and I'll tell you what I did (but I am by no means an expert on how to make the best use of viral traffic.)
-I put links in that article to other interesting/related articles on my site.
-I encourage people to share or link to this article if they have found it helpful. (If you're not already doing it, you may consider adding a block of code to show people how to link to the article, for those who are not html savvy.)
Another thing you can do is use this article to look for linkbuilding opportunities. If that many people are willing to share and read your stuff then you should have people who want to link to it. Depending on the content you can look for other websites that are linking to this kind of stuff and then suggest your site as a resource to link to. Similarly, you can do broken link building. Find sites that link to your kind of content, then search for broken links (I use the chrome check-my-links extension). Then, you can send them an email saying, "Hey, I found some broken links on your site. I was wondering who I could report them to...and by the way, you may find this article of mine worth linking to.)
Care to share your tips on how you make an article attract so much attention?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Blog keywords for wordpress/duplicate keywords an issue?
Would you treat the blogs that businesses do the same as their subdomains/landing pages and putting different focus keywords in their blogs/wordpress and meta tags? So you put something different for each of the blog based on content/location/etc and nothing duplicates? Would that affect the rankings that much in regards to blog seo keyword similarities/duplicate descriptions?
Social Media | | kpexpressions0 -
Will Facebook traffic hurt our SEO? Should we put our blog on the core domain or sub domain?
We are concerned that social traffic could hurt our SEO. What do you think... Our average time on site from organic search traffic is 7 minutes. Facebook traffic has an average time on site of 1 minute. Both traffic sources are going to different pages. If we generate 3 times as much traffic from Facebook as we do from google this will pull down our overall average time on site and engagement levels big time. Should we put our blog on the core domain or a subdomain? Right now we are holding back on promoting on facebook because we are concerned it could hurt our SEO, what do you think? Should we try to get as much traffic as possible from Facebook even though the engagement is much lower? Should we put our blog which is generating the low engagement traffic from facebook on the core domain or a subdomain?
Social Media | | rvshare0 -
Rel=Publisher On Business Blog
Hello! We were just wondering if we can add the Rel=Publisher on our business blog? We would like to have any of our blog posts that rank to have the small thumbnail/logo of our business similar to the way the rel=author tag works in the serps. All posts are published by our business and we would not like any of our personal pictures showing up. Any help greatly appreciated! Thank You!
Social Media | | TP_Marketing0 -
Google 'Author' tag question (Guest Blogging)
Hi, It seems like im seeing more and more about the Author tag, its now in Webmaster Tools and Google+. If your guest blogging, is it a good idea to include the Author link back to your Google+ account? If your Google+ account is also connected to your website and Google confirms they can see the connection does the Author links help with ranking when you push them back to the connected Google+ account?
Social Media | | activitysuper0 -
How to promote a blog after Penguin and the Google blog update
Hello, I have a question, or maybe a discussion. I'm wondering what the best way is to promote a blog from Blogspot or Wordpress nowadays with Penguin and other Google algorithm updates? Looking forward for your answers. Regards, Thomas
Social Media | | ThomasH1 -
Why do people try to get random pictures on the first page of reddit?
I'm fascinated with reddit. Yesterday I did an IAMA and got lots and lots of comments. In the comments I was able to refer back to some pages in my website which got me some traffic. I can see the benefit of getting your website featured on reddit. But, I'm wondering how people benefit from putting random pictures on reddit (that don't link to their sites at all.) Is there something that can be done with the link karma that you get? Am I missing something? btw...I just posted a random picture on reddit just for fun as I realized that my daughter has reddit pajamas: http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/k5kv3/i_just_noticed_that_my_daughter_has_reddit_pajamas/
Social Media | | MarieHaynes0 -
MyBlogGuest+Wordpress+Onlywire = viable semi automatic blogging?
Do you guys recommend I pursue this combination? I want a semi-automatic (spend a few minutes a day picking interesting blog articles) blog and to automate its promotion. Is there anything else I could be doing? Also this combination doesn't seem to post to facebook pages well. I'd like to also add buttons to like/tweet/ etc, right on the blog. What are some best practices for this?
Social Media | | ilyaelbert0