Tips to Improve Organic Traffic Using Underperforming Content

The healthcare industry is undergoing drastic changes as the years go by with advancements in technology and innovative treatment modalities. A significant development is the way in which healthcare consumers’ approach towards healthcare has changed. For many, Google has become the ready reference for various health conditions and treatment options. This makes healthcare website promotion and services such as medical content writing and SEO for doctors highly significant. In order to keep up with the changes in the industry, healthcare providers have to follow the top trends and tactics in the healthcare market. They need to have the best content marketing and management strategies.

Medical websites post blogs, articles, videos etc to improve organic traffic and community engagement. Content with relevant keywords increases visibility and allows search engines to find your websites easily. However, these content marketing techniques will have to be updated regularly to ensure ongoing online visibility. Blog content creation is a top priority for almost sixty percent of content marketers, but the problem is all of the content created does not receive the expected traffic. Such content is underperforming content, which you can’t leave lying around like that. You have to revamp it to bring in some shine once again. In other words, to generate more views and leads you have to identify, relocate, and optimize underperforming content. An important consideration in this regard is to clearly understand whether the content is truly underperforming or whether it is the kind of content that may require some time to gain footing.

The main challenges before content marketers are the following:

• Creating engaging, high-quality and relevant content
• Effectively calculating the effectiveness of the content
• Regular and timely production of content
• Ensuring content variety
• Measuring the ROI of content marketing program

So what are the markers of underperforming content?

• Loss of or no organic traffic
• Poor social engagement, with limited shares on social media
• No direct engagement, maybe due to some issue with your call-to-action or maybe because the content does not match the user’s search intent
• Low on-page session/time duration per page
• Increased bounce rate
• Failure to engage an extended audience in spite of having a fair number of social shares

First, choose a piece of content that is underperforming and instruct the SEO team to focus on that piece of content. You can earn more organic traffic to your content through strategies such as outreach email, broken link building, guest blogging, answering relevant questions on Quora etc.

• Send outreach emails to sites linking to similar content: Each person on the SEO team can be asked to send a specific number of outreach emails to sites linking to similar content. This involves researching around 20 different websites to ensure they are the right choices.
• Improve your headlines: Improving the title of the content and making it more compelling can help increase click-through-rate, reduce bounce rate and increase dwell time on Google.
• Improve use of long-tail keywords: Use long-tail keywords that better match the intention of the user against the context of your article.
• Generate compelling meta content: Though meta content has reduced SEO value at present, it still has considerable impact on user engagement and click-through rate.
• Use internal links and cross links: You need external links or reliable sources to have more credibility and authority.
• Match your content to user intent: Your topic may be a good one, but there may be a problem in how you approached it, or you may have missed out on important points. Analyze your content to see whether there is something you need to add that the audience is looking for. For example, a visitor looking for “pain management in NYC” may be primarily interested in facilities in NYC where pain management is provided even though they don’t use the term “facility” or “center” in their search terms. He/she may not be necessarily looking for pain management treatment options. So your article/blog should ideally address this user requirement also.
• Combine content: Make it a point to consolidate multiple pieces of content that may be receiving poor traffic to create a more comprehensive piece with increased value. Redirect links from the content that is underperforming to the new consolidated content.
• Social promotion: Be active on social media platforms. Schedule tweets for each article, change the text and use hash tags.
• Make your content attractive with visual images: Visuals are capable of attracting more visitors and encouraging them to read the content. You can use images as well as videos.
• Guest blogging: Write a guest post for a good website and get a link to your website or blog.
• Answering on Quora: Find and answer relevant questions on Quora as it helps to create brand awareness and referral traffic.
• Improve your call-to-action: Are you telling your audience exactly what you want them to do? Share, comment, sign up….and so on.

A Case Study

A small business-focused job board called Proven increased their organic traffic by 43% without publishing a single new blog post. Like many companies they started blogging but later realized that it was not a very effective strategy. In January 2016, they published an article “How to Interview: The Definitive Guide.” After 10 months the blog never cracked the top 10 for Google search results for any high value set of keywords. In October they chose this article which was underperforming and instructed their SEO team to focus on the same piece of content, update the title and meta tags. Now, this article ranks 5th on Google. The employees were assigned points for undertaking different promotional activities and each person had to accumulate 20 points a week.

Transforming the way you promote content can bring more organic search traffic and with the help of a strong SEO team you can renovate your existing content efficiently. A Long Island SEO company would offer various SEO techniques that can improve your online visibility and organic traffic.