Entire websites and online business columns have based their success on espousing the best ways of boosting the number and quality of visitors to corporate websites and getting results from the clicks. Yet all these sell the same story with predictive advice, saying what a corporate marketing team "should" do to get the best results.
Here, The Phuket Newspresents a case study from our island, showing how, in six months, Thanyapura doubled its web traffic and engagement with their audience. Here is their story, in their own words:
How did we do this? Is it possible for anyone to do? These are all questions we were asking several months ago when we turned a corner in our marketing efforts and began to look at different strategies to make sure we grew even in low season.
It was only after we introduced and applied these five key content marketing strategies that we really began to see the compound effect that can come from delivering quality content.
Understanding the needs of our customers, both online and offline, was essential to our level of growth in the past six months.
In the past, our focus was on purely on promoting what we were doing, which was good for keeping our audience but it didn't help us build a sustainable growth or include that connective element with our audience.
So we applied a number of techniques to our content strategy, of which we will outline the top fivemost effective methods we used to increase awareness and engagement with our customers at Thanyapura.
We began making these changes at the beginning of May when we saw an average of 2,869 weekly sessions. Today, we are averaging 7,802 weekly sessions.
We used these five methods to helps us double Thanyapura's web traffic in six months:
1: Building a better experience online2: Understanding search verticals and submitting to them3: Creating quality content4: Becoming more social5: Geotargeting for local success
BUILDING A BETTER EXPERIENCE ONLINE
Building a better experience for your audience is vital for gaining a loyal readership. But how is abetter experience online defined? And how can we change our current strategies to build on the current online experience? These are all the questions that our team had to ask when we were building our content marketing strategy several months ago and this is where we started.
Firstly, when working on building a better experience online it is important that a potential customer can not only find you online but can also easily navigate through your website. This is why one of Thanyapura's main priorities was running a full audit on the website.
We addressed this in a number of ways. Some of which were:
• Improving site speed – By reducing image sizes and getting rid of unnecessary plugins we were able to significantly improve the quality of the website load speed from a midgrade on Google Developer Apps.
• Removing 404 errors – Nothing can result in a more frustrating user experience than to navigatethrough a site only to arrive at a dead end – usually, it will send the user a message similar to 'page not found'. This can happen for any number of reasons. As a site matures it is natural to restructure and move things around. Making sure all previous efforts in generating traffic are not wasted by redirecting that traffic to where the appropriate content has moved to is key.
• Interlinking – Saving the user time by connecting them to related content they might be interested in is important. It also aids as a useful SEO tool and can be rewarded in your overall score with search engines such as Google.
• Being Mobile Friendly – Google recently updated their search algorithm to favour sites that are mobile friendly. If you haven't done this it's a must, especially with over 50% of our audience now accessing us and most sites via mobile devices.
UNDERSTANDING SEARCH VERTICALS AND SUBMITTING TO THEM
Another way to ensure that Thanyapura was FINDABLE online was to create a quality sitemap for the search engines to index, as well as submitting to many of the directories, aggregators and listing sites available on the internet.
This can be a mixed bag in terms of results. But make no mistake, the long-term strategy for this is key for growth.
Many websites only tailor their efforts to Google. But Google recognises authority with these linksas signals to improve results in its own rankings of your website. Submitting to websites like Yandex may only yield 20-30 clicks a month but if you add up enough of these sites then factor in how these links can build and grow through aggregators it can become an impressive number over time.
One year ago, between Google and direct traffic, our numbers were as per Table 2. We should note that even though we have relied more on diversifying our traffic sources we have not let up on the growth of Google.
Over the year, we have increased Google monthly search from 6,000 monthly searches to over 10,000. We are not just relying on Google anymore and our numbers show that we have managed to even out our Google and direct search traffic.
To visualise that growth we took an image of ONLY our direct traffic (see Table 1). Notice that direct traffic growth built over time? A worthwhile investment.
This is not only the result of indexing and submitting. A lot of the result ties into understand thatsearches are evolving. People were finding Thanyapura through the web, image, news, video, social and many other verticals.
Having the right meta-description for our web pages ensured that they would also be enticed to click on that source to come to our website, which brings us to our next method – creating quality content, which will be covered in the next article in this three-part series.
Source: Marketing: Online marketing helps Phuket resort doubled web traffic in low season
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