For a professional services firm, their question of what works best for them, paid search ads or content marketing, the answer is clear. The following graph tells the story.
The firm began a blog in the first month represented in the chart. They were able to consistently publish quality articles three times a week for the following 13 months shown in the graph.
Sources of Website Traffic
The red area within each monthly bar represents the amount of traffic from paid listings on Google. The monthly budget remained consistent throughout the entire 14 months. However, the quality of the site’s content improved Google’s Quality Scoring, and we were able to generate more paid visits with the same budget over time.
However the most dramatic growth in traffic came from organic visits (green area). As the blog grows, there is a compounding effect. Each month’s new content drives additional traffic, and builds on the traffic continuously generated from previous blog posts. Firms that depend only on paid search are leaving all the business represented by the green area on the table.
Also notice the growth in visits from social media in the month of May. We did an experiment that month, posting 3 times a day, 7 days a week to the social media to see if it had an impact. It did.
The growth in traffic from eNewsletters is represented in the orange area. As we collected more leads from the site, we are able to reach out to a wider group of contacts, which in turn improves the performance of the eNewsletters.
To achieve this kind of growth, first build the engine that will allow you to consistently produce quality posts — and then fuel it.
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