Increasing traffic to site

[corn2015]

Hi,
One of my clients runs an online magazine that is geared towards the elderly market. She is looking for a continual increase in traffic. Is PPC the best/most effective method to utilize for this or are there good link building opportuntieis in this arena? Would it be a good idea to have her submit some of her articles to article directories as she is an author?

[MattRoney]

Hi Cornelius!

Good question, and it looks like Patrick has given you a lot of (awesome and necessary) homework! I just wanted to add that I really wouldn't recommend article directories as a link building/traffic growing tactic. The return has decreased a lot in recent years, and it's generally considered an unnatural tactic.

Patrick gives some good ideas for getting your content out there. I'd also recommend checking out our Beginner's Guide to Link Building.

Good luck!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Cornelius

This will take a bit of research on your end, as well as getting input from your client. Google offers a great feature called the Customer Journey to Online Purchase that helps break down what marketing channels help in different phases of the funnel for different sized businesses in different industries.

I love PPC because it has value not only for getting content in front of your audience quickly, but it has SEO benefits in showing if a page is correctly relating to a targeted query or keyword search, as well what keywords or queries are converting best. But again, it's going to come down to research and learning as much as you can for your client's business.

• Do some research

• What information is missing in your industry?

• What are users actively searching for?

• Where are they currently participating in conversation?

• What language do they use in search and those discussions?

• How do they digest their content?

• Here's a quick resource on content gap analysis from Edge Multimedia

• Take advantage of great tools like Open Site Explorer and SEMRush to get a handle on your competition and what's working / not working for them

• Build out content on the site based on your research

• Mind your obvious onsite SEO fundamentals (titles / meta descriptions / schema / content length and language / etc.) (resource)

• Lay your site architecture out in an easy to use / understand fashion (Information Architecture for SEO)

• Repurpose content through video / images / guides / e-books / how-tos / etc

• Take advantage of internal site search functionality

• What are users searching for on your site?

• Distribute that content through social platforms / industry blogs / email marketing

• You can try social paid advertising (based on target audience)

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Pinterest

• LinkedIn

• Also look into posting on Linked with a tagged URL giving credit to the original post on site

• Reddit

• Stumbleupon

• BuzzFeed

• You can also try sevices like Outbrain or Taboola. Lastly, check out this post from Curata - HUGE list of opportunities.

• Participate in the discussions that are happening in your industry

• Social

• You could take advantage of features like Twitter's Advanced Search and start fielding questions

• News sites

• Industry forums

• Q&As

Take the time now to learn about the business, the industry, and the audience as best you can. Take the time to optimize your website, and focus on the marketing channels that are going to best reach your audience. The above points and resources will help you. It will take effort and time, but it will greatly pay off in the long run.

Hope this helps! Good luck!