How To Blog Your Way To More Search Traffic

This blog post is like one of those twisted movie within a movie plots. While I’m writing about content marketing, and more specifically, content engineering, you should know that I’ve actually engineered this content down to the title and word choice to ensure that this article finds you and other people like you. It worked. Yeah, I guess it sounds creepy, but I bet now you’re wondering how to do it yourself.

So what is content marketing?
It’s creating valuable content through blogging, podcasts, seminars, white papers, etc and distributing that material to people who will associate a positive connection to your brand or services. Content Engineering takes that a step further– it’s using trends in analytics to optimize the views, downloads, clicks, traffic, and overall saturation and performance of the content you are marketing, before you publish it.

Why does it matter if we engineer the content?
Well, Google (and other search engines) reward websites that provide helpful and relevant content and make it easy to find. Relevant doesn’t just mean it’s helpful to some people, it means that popular search terms, the blog title and blog content all connect, forming a relevant search experience for the reader. In other words, people search and find what they are looking for, consistently. As a result of your strategic content engineering, your website will be more credible and optimized.

This type of engineering can be as simple as doing keyword research to analyze the competition and volume of a keyword or group of keywords before publishing your blog post using tools like Wordtracker or Google Keyword Tool. Let me give you an example…I had a handful of options for the title of this blog:

Hi, I’m a Content Engineer, and I’m Doing it Right Now. (Interesting, but not good for SEO)
The Basics of Content Marketing, Keywords and SEO for Blogging
What’s the Value of my Blog?
How do I Search Optimize my Site with a Blog? (Getting closer…)
How To Blog Your Way To More Search Traffic (WINNER!)

The difference between these titles could be hundreds or potentially thousands of unique visitors in the next few months. It’s hard to predict exactly what the outcome would be for each title, but looking at the keywords in each, the titles range from very competitive to high volume / low competition (and that’s what we want).

For example, the term “Content Engineer” shows ZERO searches in the Wordtracker database. That’s right, being the top site on Google for those who search for “Content Engineer” will gain you exactly nothing. Nobody knows the term (surprise!), and so nobody is searching for it. Conversely, the term “How to” was included in almost 250 million searches in the Wordtracker database and “How to Blog” in over 20 million. While not everyone who searches for “How to blog” is looking to increase search visibility, there’s a good chance that people who are looking to blog want people to read it, making this a very pertinent article.

If you’ve read to this point and learned something new, then I guess I’ve done my job and I’m sure Google appreciates it. So, before you just post your next blog, think about the amount of potential interest based on the topic your writing about and don’t just come up with a clever title. Find the right title for SEO. You’ll be happy with the results.