Letter #35: How to drive revenue-growing organic traffic?

Expert interview on converting your audience with content.

Hii there 👋

If you could see me right now, you’d see a huge grin plastered to my face today. The reason? This tiny bit of I-want-more-of-this-kind of feedback that a new client shared with me:

Worth popping some celebratory confetti? You bet! 🎉

Anyhoo, on to today’s lesson from Michaela Mendes, Senior Director of Integrated Marketing at General Assembly.

Michaela has helped companies scale website traffic organically all while growing conversion rates.

Wondering how? By creating troubleshooting content that Michaela swears as one of the best types of content to build trust.

“Your audience will take your actionable tips, apply them to a challenge they’re facing, and instantly see why you’re credible: you know how to help them.”

Here’s how Michaela created this content type in real-life: “We built a global resource wiki of over 500 pages of content all geared towards helping our target audience solve one specific problem.”

“As a result, we saw organic traffic grow from about 8,000 organic sessions a month to over 200,000 per month – all in about a year and a half. What’s more, the specific segment of traffic converted at a higher level than any other content section of the site.”

“Once we explained how to solve their specific problem, a large percentage decided they’d rather have us handle it for them.”

Intrigued, I decided to dig deeper to uncover more about driving revenue-driving traffic.

So I asked our regular three questions:

• A mistake that Michaela’s made when creating content that drives revenue

• An actionable tip to get you one step closer to attracting money-making organic traffic

• And, a secret tip for growing revenue with organic traffic

On we go.

👉 Learn from Michaela’s mistake: Don’t focus too heavily on conversion.

“Consumers are smart enough to know they’re on a company blog. They can easily click around your website to see what you do if they want to,” Michaela notes.

“You don’t have to structure all your content to drive towards conversion. If you put more of a focus on helping them, it will have a greater impact on conversion than adding a bunch of buttons and calls to action.”

👉 Do this today: “Get out of keyword tools.”

Instead, “look at your content from this lens: is what I’m working on right now going to help my audience solve a problem? If not, then stop creating that, and start creating something that will.”

👉 The secret tip for growing revenue with organic traffic: “You don’t have to talk about everything and target ALL the keywords in your industry.”

“If you find one subtopic that’s resonating with your audience, just double down on that,” Michaela advises.  

“Find ways to replicate blogs that have worked and go as deep as possible before you start to go wide.”

So today’s takeaways:

• Obsess over helping your target audience — not converting them

• Regularly ask yourself: Is what I’m creating really going to help my audience solve a problem?

• Find out which topics are converting. Then, double down on them.

That’s all for today folks!

Ciao,

Masooma