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We Increased The Frequency of Blog Posting and Check Out What Happened To Our Inbound Leads!

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At Haley Marketing, we’re big believers in content marketing, and as I’m sure you know, we practice what we preach.

Over the last several years, we have continually posted new blog content–and it’s worked extremely well.  Not only does it offer a high level of value to the staffing industry, but it helps position our team as experts in the space and it drives a lot of awareness.

We’re also big proponents of testing and looking at data to make sure our efforts are having a meaningful impact.  At the beginning of the summer, we set out on a test:

Our team was encouraged to post 90 blogs in 90 days.

The goal was to help identify whether posting a higher frequency of blogs would improve our already impressive traffic numbers, and drive more business.  The results were pretty telling.  (I’m going to save the best for last, but there are some great stats leading up to it.)

Our test methodology:

For the purposes of this blog post, we will compare our website traffic from June 1, 2015 – August 18, 2015 to the previous time period of March 14, 2015 – May 31, 2015.

From  March 14, 2015 – May 31, 2015 our team published a total of 43 blog posts.  A pretty good number, right?

From June 1, 2015 – August, 18, 2015 our team upped the ante and published a total of 77 blog posts. Even better!

Here is what we found by posting more content:

Top level traffic stats all improved.
Toplevelstats

The first thing we looked at was overall traffic to the site and top level visitor behavior.  Overall sessions on the site increased 7.63%.  While this number isn’t totally shocking, when adjusting for seasonal fluctuations, it’s very impressive.  Historically, our website traffic peaks in Q1 and Q2, then we see a big slowdown in the summer months before rebounding into Q4.

In addition to more sessions, total pageviews increased 8.64% and time on site increased 6.52%.  So not only are we getting a lot more people to the website, but those people are staying longer and viewing more pages.

Bounce rate actually decreased.

When writing more content and publishing at a more frequent rate, we expected our bounce rate to increase slightly.  A bounce rate is the number of people that come to the website and leave after visiting only one page.  We expected that our audience might be a bit more saturated with our content and might leave a bit more quickly.  We were pleased to see that assumption proved wrong! Bounce

In fact, our bounce rate actually dropped 8.21%!  So not only did we drastically improve our reach and total impressions, but we didn’t have to sacrifice quality visits to do it.  In fact, we improved on quality and people spent more time and bounced less.

Social media and referrals drove a lot more traffic.

Next, we wanted to look at what was driving this traffic.  When posting blog content, we want to see an increase in search engine traffic over time (it takes time for all this great content to get indexed).  We also want to see increases in social and referral traffic, too.

Search traffic remained pretty steady over this time period.  Because we’re looking at just a few weeks of time and SEO is a longer-term objective, I didn’t expect to see an immediate improvement in search engine traffic.  But when we look at search traffic this year compared to last year, we did see at 18.25% increase in organic traffic–blogging consistently over time works!

Where we did see an immediate traffic increase was in referral traffic (other sites linking back to us) and social media traffic:

trafficsource

When posting more valuable content, you have a higher likelihood of building more inbound links and getting other sites to link back to your content.  Additional posting had a really nice impact on referral traffic.

Because we were posting more content, our social activities were also amplified.  Internally, we were sharing more content to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Groups, and Google+.  Visitors to our site were also sharing more of our content and engaging with our brand on social channels.  That helped drive social media traffic to our site up 60.30% in just a few short weeks!

This is all great, but did you get more business?

The quick answer is yes! Let’s take a closer look:

Traffic to “Products/Services” sections increased–some dramatically!
services traffic

When posting and sharing more content, our goal isn’t to just get people to read a post and leave.  Instead, we want to draw people in with good content, but then encourage those people to learn more about the services we offer.

By posting more content with strong calls to actions at the end, we were able to increase traffic to our “products and services” pages by 11.16%.  We also wrote more content around a few themes like website development and brand identity.  Those posts helped improve website traffic to our “web development” page by 25.9% and traffic to our “brand identity” pages increased a whopping 51.01%! 

The kicker: Inbound, online leads increased nearly 12%!

Perhaps the most telling statistic of everything we have included here (I told you I would save the best for last) is our increase in inbound leads.  By posting more content and including strong calls to action, we were able to increase inbound leads (people who requested a quote right through our website) by 11.81%!

Estimate

These are people who came to our site, read our content, visited our services/products pages, went to our contact us page, and completed a form to get an estimate on a specific product.  This isn’t even counting the increase in people who picked up the phone and called us, instead of filling out the form!

Again these are inbound leads!  Our sales people weren’t on an all-out cold-call blitz.  They were dealing with hot prospects who already expressed an interest in working with us and were close to the finish line!

Summary of our findings: Increasing blogging frequency drove more traffic, better traffic, and led to a big increase in business leads.

 

Ready to get more leads for your staffing firm?

At Haley Marketing, we are content marketing experts who specialize in the staffing and recruiting industry.  We have detailed analytics on what works for driving more inbound staffing leads (and what doesn’t). If you’re interested in increasing visibility, driving more traffic and improving your recruiting and lead generation efforts, contact us today!

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