Content can be categorized into three broad buckets.
The first category, content that generates traffic, is probably the most well understood. This content is the bread and butter of SEO. You’re creating a piece of content that’s designed to drive traffic from organic search. What are the benefits of this type of content? Not only do you help a lot of people, which introduces them to your business, but you also make your website more competitive in search overall. That authority extends to your product pages, landing pages, and so on.
The second category of the content we create is typically billed as “thought leadership” or “linkbait.” Unlike the first type of content, its goal isn’t ranking for keywords, although it might do that anyway. The objective is generating buzz and backlinks.
The last category of content is lead gen content. This content tends to bring in less traffic, but that traffic is higher qualified. We see these visitors download our content offers; they’re the most ”bottom of the funnel” visitors. This content is much closer to revenue than the other two buckets.
In February 2018, the HubSpot blog was getting several million organic users a month. Which is enough traffic to make most marketers very, very happy. But when you take a step back… you see our organic traffic is actually steadily declining over time. We needed to do something. In March 2018, I crafted a brand-new strategy around what we at HubSpot call the “Search Insights Report,” which is what we’ll learn how to create today. Right after we release a new Search Insights Report and the blog team uses it as a map to create content, the blog starts ranking for tens of thousands of new keywords. Traffic is going up and to the right… The blog’s backlink profile has gone up to 5 million plus links from 84,000 referring domains… And we’ve set new records for the number of leads and free software users generated from the blog, which shows that when you use a holistic content strategy, every type of content pulls more weight. In other words, 1 + 1 =3.
Okay, so that’s the why. Now let’s talk about how. Learn more in our “The Search Insights Report: HubSpot’s Strategy for Increasing Organic Blog Traffic” course: https://bit.ly/2sFJHAt