Whether you’re writing an end-of-year roundup of the most popular blog posts at your company website (find our list below!) or getting ready for end of year Google Analytics reports (ours will go out next week), this is the time of year when you’re likely to run into that popular blog post.
Not the posts that were written with the expectation that they’d be popular. The ones that make your team leaders say, “Why is this one so popular?” while staring at you brightly, hoping that you will have an important insight that will make a big difference in next year’s revenue.
Instead, you mutter, “I really don’t know. Weird, right?” Before you do that — in fact, before you have that meeting — look at a few things.
Did you have a viral social media post?
This Jetboil recipe post is not the best post at Uncle Sam’s Safari Outfitters, but it is one of the most popular. We were surprised, given the competition for the topic, till we saw that the stylish glamping image is very popular at Pinterest, and noticed that it was Pinterest that was sending the traffic.
If you see this at your website, examine how your social media got so popular and replicate the results with other posts.
Maybe it’s the best post on the subject.
One of our clients happens to have the best post on wedding shrugs in the whole web. This may not be a major topic, and it sure isn’t one of the posts she thinks of as major at her website, but Google considers this an important page for her, because it gives a great answer for people who are wondering about this particular topic.
Rosie’s post on Ulta vs. Sephora is the same kind of post — she was talking about the omnichannel experience, but the post has a lot more depth and substance than most of the posts comparing the customer service of Ulta and Sephora, so it shows up in the SERPs for that particular topic ahead of the other posts. It has been one of our most popular posts for a couple of years now, and gets more traffic each month.
For us, this is a great reminder that we should write about niche topics that will interest our target market. We are not a big enough company to expect to rank at the top of the SERPs for an article on SEO basics, but there are plenty of narrower topics we can dominate. You may need the same reminder — or you might need to think about professional blogging to increase that performance.
Do you have great links?
Our lab site has thousands of lesson plans, including this one for a writing lesson about pirates. That’s not a topic people spend a lot of time looking for, but this page has a link from a popular website for writing teachers. It therefore shows up as a popular post.
If you see this with one of your posts, you can encourage it with others. Send a link to well-chosen influencers in your target market in a persuasive and non-salesy email and you could end up with a strong link that sends you traffic and improves your search rankings.
Here are our Top 10 most popular posts for 2015:
- WordPress Plugins for Medical Professionals
- Source and Medium in Google Analytics
- Customer Experience: Ulta vs. Sephora
- Why Do Consumers Write Reviews?
- YouTube Beauty Gurus: An Analysis
- Internal vs. External Blogs
- PayPal’s Pros and Cons
- David and Goliath Websites
- Google Analytics: Year Over Year Traffic
- Are Sliders Bad for SEO?
If you read some of these posts — and we hope you will — you’ll notice that there are posts on this list from years ago. The investment we made in writing each of those posts has paid off in tens of thousands of visits to our website, and in good leads and great clients.
If you’re ready to step up your digital marketing, you should give serious thought to professional blogging; a great blog post can keep bringing you targeted visitors for years into the future. A lot of great blog posts can give you a game-changing level of authority.
Contact us to talk about how professional blogging can make a difference for your company in 2016.
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