We Boosted HawkSEM Blog Visits to 40K a Month – Here’s How

In this blog, we’re giving you an inside look at our journey to answering one of the biggest questions in digital marketing: how to scale SEO effectively.

We’ve spent years fine-tuning content marketing strategies for clients — and, of course, those efforts extend to marketing our own business effectively as well. One of the key ways we do that is through strategic SEO and content marketing.

It’s how we’ve been able to reach 40,000 monthly visitors to our blog articles on all things digital marketing, from 101 posts to nitty-gritty technical guides.

First things first, the analytics:

We love a performance graph that goes up and to the right, don’t we, folks?

Clients often ask us how long SEO takes to work. And while we always respond that it’s a long game, every now and then you’ll get a quick win.

(One of our wildest victories was getting the #1 spot for the query “ppc case studies” within mere hours of publishing a brand new article on the topic.)

While two hours isn’t the norm, we can’t say it’s impossible. But we’re not about gatekeeping here, so we’re sharing our secrets to success below.

Quick summary of results:

• Doubled organic conversions year over year (YoY)
• Nearly doubled traffic value YoY
• Leveraged more than 40 internal team members as content SMEs (subject matter experts)
• Published more than 450 new or refreshed articles in one year

Content marketing — good content marketing, that is — involves near-constant iteration, adaptation, and flexibility to stay on top of the industry’s latest updates while answering important questions and educating your audience.

It’s a tall order, especially if you want to break through the noise to provide high-quality, educational content that really resonates.

So, how did we make it happen and get to 40,000 website visits in the process?

Read on for the inside scoop on the journey, strategy, and execution advice behind how we got it done.

How it started

At the beginning of our content expansion project, we started with a solid foundation of articles on a range of marketing topics we knew the industry was buzzing about.

We pride ourselves on providing content that’s valuable, educational, and relevant. So, our next step was to discover which topics our fellow marketers really wanted to read about.

“Over the years, our team members gathered an insane amount of knowledge from direct experience and ongoing continuing education,” says HawkSEM CEO and co-founder Sam Yadegar. “We felt there was an endless amount of knowledge to share.”

And there’s no better way to do that than by writing thorough, detailed guide articles on the challenges marketers see every day. It was time to scale and share our knowledge with the world.

We adjusted our content strategy by interviewing subject matter experts with a focus on the questions our clients were asking every day.

After polling our team of digital marketing experts and gathering hundreds of topics, we found that giving our articles an educational bent paved the way for more clicks.

Challenges

The goal of “good content” seems simple: you want to rank #1 for as many search terms as you can on as many search engine results pages (SERPs) as possible.

However, as any Google searcher knows, there is a lot of information out there, and Google’s search algorithm is constantly updating to determine which content to highlight.

Because of this, we found that terms we were ranking well for in the past would get pushed down the SERP if they sat for too long without an update.

Our challenge was to balance keeping our high-ranking pieces relevant and useful and adding new, timely content to the digital marketing conversation.

The solution

We pored over our existing library and asked questions like: “What gaps do we have in our content offering?” and “How do we address those gaps in a way that’s relevant and authentic?”

We took a note from our namesake and looked at our blog content from a bird’s eye view, shifting our approach from “Get the #1 spot” to “How do we best educate our readers?”

Great content isn’t created in a vacuum, so we brought in some tools to assist in the content creation process:

• Asana – for project management
• Yoast – a WordPress plugin that helps with search engine optimization
• Clearscope – for competitor analysis and content optimization
• Semrush – for keyword research and gathering SEO data
• Grammarly – Grammar suggestion tool

With the help of these tools (and our own expertise), we solidified our content philosophy, refined our style guide, and developed a publishing game plan to make it all happen.

(Image: HawkSEM)

Our fine-tuned process

Through our content journey, we’ve developed a surefire way to produce first-class content that resonates with readers. Want to know the secret sauce? Here’s a sneak peek into our process.

Strategic topic research

You can’t write a top-notch blog article without knowing what you’re trying to say. With everything digital marketing has going on, choosing timely topics is no easy feat.

We decide what to write about in a couple of different ways:

Data-based content ideas

When in doubt, we look at the numbers.

This method of topic research involves looking at key content metrics such as keyword search volume (KSV), performing competitor analyses, and content audits to determine what users are searching for and what type of content is already out there.

Once we have that data, we have a good idea of which topics to tackle in our own way.

Employee-suggested content ideas

HawkSEM hires only senior-level marketers, and with all that experience comes a wealth of knowledge.

We lean on our teammates’ expertise to highlight topics or questions our account managers hear from clients, and what they experience working on digital marketing platforms day-to-day.

If our managers, prospects, and clients are pondering these topics, then the rest of our audience probably is, too.

A roster of qualified writers

Now we have a wealth of topics to research — but how do you find the writers to cover them?

Our blog is an educational resource, so we wanted to find writers with a demonstrated track record of developing content that explains complex topics in an engaging way.

Of our vetting process, Yadegar says simply, “We looked for experienced writers and gave them the liberty to add in their perspective while taking a journalistic approach to covering a topic.”

Codified content guidelines

This step is crucial (and ever-evolving). Once we homed in on our unique blog format, we had a template and guidelines writers could work off of, along with our own codified content guide.

“We developed a very detailed style guide,” Yadegar says, “going into [all] the nuances of the Hawk voice and how our content should reflect that.”

To build our style guide, we used real conversations we’d had with clients over the years to get a good sense of the tone that resonates most with our audience.

Namely, we aim to educate in a concise, easy-to-digest manner without being boring or taking ourselves too seriously.

The Yoast plugin for WordPress estimates an article’s SEO using red, yellow, and green gradings. (Image: Screenshot)

A plan for regular optimizations

Tons of topics, first-class writers, and a beefed-up style guide. With these tools in our belt, we set out to create a top-notch marketing blog.

But of course, top-ranking digital marketing content is not the type you publish and forget.

After gathering data over the course of a few months, we began to see which pieces were getting clicks and which pieces needed a little more love.

We created a plan that involved regularly updating content that was several months old. We also focused on expanding more general content to add additional updates and nuances as needed.

This dual-pronged approach of revamping old articles and publishing new pieces has allowed our library to catapult us into a position of being industry thought leaders. We’ve also become a go-to source for accurate, up-to-date information on a wide range of marketing topics.

Our results

Through our proven process, we discovered that a holistic approach to creating content was the “magic potion” that made it all work.

“Like most, our initial thoughts were based on getting things ranked,” Yadegar says. “But once we got into a flow, we almost forgot about ranking. [Rather, we] focused more on creating content that readers would walk away feeling educated and inspired by.”

Yadegar adds that there is a layer of authenticity required to really make blog content shine. “We didn’t ‘fake it’ by covering things we didn’t have experience with just to rank. We wanted to make sure that our experiences and our voice were top-notch and valuable.”

The takeaway

The goal was to rank #1 for a search term. However, content has helped create an overall uplift in conversions from all sources — not just organic.

Through our content, we’ve been able to better connect with the right audience. This has allowed us to recruit amazing talent to fill out our team.

What’s more, we’ve now experienced what it’s like to build a robust, educational content library of blog posts that gets thousands of visitors a month. It’s all thanks to our proven processes and commitment to quality content.

Want us to help you see similar results? Let’s connect.