Drive traffic to your website

In the second part of his guest comment on how to drive traffic to your website, SEO Travel founder Tom Mcloughlin discusses the three different types of content you need.

Content for Links

To make sure your content pulls in traffic, you need good quality links pointing to your site. Google views links as recommendations, so the more you can get from good quality, relevant places, the better your website will perform.

The content you create for links does not need to be as closely related to your end business goals, it just needs to be loosely related to the general area you are in. So if you are a tour operator specialising in a particular destination, a piece about travel trends in general will work just fine. The goal is to make something that is interesting enough to catch a journalist’s attention and make them want to feature it.

Monitor what is popular on some of the biggest sites on the web and create something along the same lines. The key is to offer these sites something unique, so they have to reference you as the source of the information. This could be:

* an infographic
* a map
* illustrations
* the results of a survey

You can then send that to publications that have covered similar content before, safe in the knowledge that if they liked that kind of content previously, they will probably like yours too.

Some tips for doing this successfully:

* Identify your targets first. See what they like and then create something similar. If you create your content first and then look for people who might like it you’ll probably be working with a much smaller pool of people (or the wrong kind).

* Try and find one key target to offer your content to exclusively and tailor it to that specific person. You can then use that coverage as social proof to other sites when pitching it to them. If you pick your exclusive carefully, one piece of coverage could lead to lots more.

* Make your design excellent. Even if your research is out of this world, if it looks rubbish when a journalist opens it up, they’ll probably discard it there and then.

You’ll find an in-depth case study of the step-by-step process we use to create a campaign which was featured on more than 100 websites, including the Washington Post and Mashable, here.

Content for Shares

Content built for sharing follows a similar approach to content for links, but simply with targets that have large social followings rather than individual journalists at large publications.

The key to success with this kind content is creating something that brings together people with the best social followings in a particular niche.

For example, we created a piece of content highlighting the best cat cafes around the world. We then contacted each of the cafes that were featured and told them they were included. Naturally the cafes wanted to shout about it, so they shared it with their huge social followings (cats are big on the internet, it turns out…).

Video content

Another key to successful social content is the type of content you produce. Video is a hugely popular format, so if you can create a video and share it with influential people and pages you are more likely to see interest on social platforms.

For example, we created a video of people saying Merry Christmas in 26 languages from around the world. As well as gaining coverage in the LA Times and a variety of other top-tier publications, people loved it on Facebook.

Amongst other places, it was shared by Distractify (a page with three million followers) ,where it was seen 38,000 times.

Content should be at the heart of any online marketing activity, but it’s time to realise that you don’t need each piece you produce to be everything to everyone.

Break down your content efforts in this way and there’s no doubt you’ll see far better results individually, and also in the cumulative effect it has on your website’s performance, brand visibility and sales as a result.

SEO Travel is offering the chance to win a free six-month marketing campaign, as well as free places at a travel marketing workshop. Click here for more details and to sign up.