There’s any amount of theory out there that will tell you that filling your site with content will get you more hits
And as we know…
More hits = more business
But many people may be sceptical and frankly, in my humble opinion, they are right to be.
The problem is that there are lots of people out there that will tell you something with absolute certainty that turns out not to be true.
It turns out that they are just great salespeople and not great content creators.
Who’da thought it?
So I wanted to give you a real-life example of a recent client that I have helped and show you what happened.
The real-life client
Most of my content is written ‘white label’. This means that to all intents and purposes the posts on the client’s page is written by them.
So naturally, they wouldn’t be happy if I blew the whole thing by telling people that it was actually me that wrote their stuff – but it was.
So I’ve anonymised the client concerned but I can give you some clues.
They have formed a newish company (back in 2018) and have developed an app for customers.
It’s a pretty good app, but there are competitors out there, so they don’t have the field to themselves.
Naturally, they have a website but it really wasn’t doing anything and it certainly wasn’t ranking on Google for any keywords.
So the brief was to start telling people about their service and how it could help.
So here’s the first graph.
It’s a bit difficult to see but the story is fairly simple, they started off in April with no hits.
I got involved with them halfway through May and started writing content to an agreed plan.
2 posts a week. 500-1000 words each.
By November this had happened
By August they had 5 keywords ranking in position 1-3 and as anyone will tell you these are like gold.
They had 10 keywords in position 4-10. Not exactly gold but still appearing on page 1.
And another 275 that appeared lower down than 11.
Although the latter may seem pointless what they are telling Google is that this is a useful site that has a lot of information around the client’s particular niche.
So what does that look like a year on from the start?
The important thing to remember is that this client kept on doing it.
They didn’t do anything whacky, they just kept producing a couple of blog posts a week (or at least I did).
And this is what the graph looked like after 14 months.
You can see that it takes time to get going – so don’t lose heart.
We started the project in May and we had some good early success. Admittedly the business is a bit seasonal so there was a downturn in Dec/Jan and then in February, 9 months after starting they began to get a ton of hits.
Now for the reality check
So if I was just trying to sell you then I’d gloss over the actual numbers.
But I’m not interested in conning people so I need to give you a bit of a reality check here.
Because just posting a lot of stuff will get you a result a bit like my client got.
They didn’t have a lot of money to spend on outreach and they were working in a very small niche but even so they got to the point after a couple of months where they were getting 90 hits a month.
Now it’s worth saying here that 90 hits in a tiny niche is pretty good. Very niche subject areas don’t get a lot of hits, but they do convert to sales well.
By June this year they were receiving 290 hits, which is even better.
If it was about Premier League football or Elton John or the NFL then it would be much easier to get a shed load of hits.
And this is where it really is down to you.
You see the journey from content to hits to conversions is down to getting your content out there using postings, advertising and outreach to people like bloggers in your area.
The conversion from the 90 hits to actual sales is down to how slick your ‘customer journey’ is.
So although people may tell you that all you have to do is get your conversion right. or that you just need to do outreach, or that you only need to have a great looking website, they are all lying to you!
The truth is that it is a combination of things.
You need a website that looks good and works properly.
You need great content that is actually about what you do.
You need to push that content out to get noticed.
Finally, when you get hits you need to convert them to sales.
It’s a simple process but it is amazing how so many snake oil salesmen will pretend that it is only their thing that will provide you with a billion leads.
So what’s the next step?
Well let’s assume that your website works fine but you just don’t have enough content or it’s not finely tuned enough.
Your next step is to sort out a content plan around the keywords you want to hit.
Then get your content written
Then tell people you’ve written it.
Again, this is a simple process that anyone can do.
How Yellow Tomato can help
It’s distinctly possible that you don’t have the time to sit down and write a load of articles or you may not be confident in making your content plan.
That’s where I can help.
I can help you work through what you do and what content is likely to have the most impact.
I can write the content and, if you don’t know how to I can even upload it to your site.
And I’m pretty cheap as content writers go!
Get in touch now and let’s have a chat about how I can help you drive more sales.
Update: Nov 2020
So it’s been a few months since I wrote this article and I thought I’d do an update.
I logged on to the customer’s analytics and this is what I found.
What you are seeing there is the exponential growth of content.
One piece gets you a little bit of notice and 3 pieces gets you 10 times more.
Needless to say the customer is very happy indeed!