How We Helped eLearning Industry Use Guest-Contributed Content to Drive 77 Percent More Traffic to Their Site

A community isn’t really a community unless it serves its members well. For a community to prosper, it has to have a group of dedicated people behind it, driving it for the good of its members, making it useful and impactful on their lives.

Such was the case for eLearning Industry, an online community for eLearning professionals to share and publish industry content, stay up to date on trends, connect, and find projects and jobs.

When they came to us, the folks at eLearning Industry said they wanted to increase the quality of organic traffic to a particular section of their website. They needed a knowledgeable team dedicated to this objective, a team that could look at their current efforts and identify the gaps within their strategy to see what they needed to be doing to achieve their goal.

eLearning Industry had blog posting down pat. They were consistently running their blog as a brand publication, linking appropriately to other relevant content, and engaging with the comment section of every post.

They were creating e-books and guides for their community to download and offered press releases for users along with webinars and the opportunity to guest post. In regard to on-site content, eLearning was doing everything right.

But as mentioned above, they just weren’t seeing much high-quality traffic back to their site, and we knew why.

Step 1: Mapping Out the New Strategy

We love helping our clients use content published outside their website to drive awareness of their brand and increase their website traffic. eLearning Industry needed those credible placements in third-party publications that highlighted their expertise and solutions offered in the learning management system (LMS) space.

After identifying this need, we crafted a strategy that would deliver 30 guest-contributed articles and eight press mentions a year. Through guest-contributed content, eLearning Industry would be able to own the LMS conversation and share key insights on their industry and what they do. This content also linked back to the three specific landing pages they were wanting to increase traffic to. By peppering in press mentions, we were able to reach broader audiences, all the while focusing on more niche publications to showcase their expertise.

Step 2: Performing an SEO Technical Audit

After establishing the guest-contributed content and press mention cadence we would implement, we had to review eLearning Industry’s website to see how it was stacking up on its own. This would allow us to see where certain issues were hiding that could affect the success of the new strategy.

It was important for eLearning Industry’s website to be set up to give every piece of content the chance to be found successfully by search engines. The SEO technical audit identified broken links and duplicate content and included an analysis of their site’s SEO, metadata, redirects, page speed, and technical files.

We found some issues with the website that eLearning Industry needed to rectify:

• Page speed
• Duplicate content
• Broken backlinks
• Metadata
• Insecure content

Fixing these issues optimized the site’s performance. Pages now loaded quickly, and each link led the user to an actual page instead of an error message. Eliminating duplicate content meant we had to set up redirects, which greatly reduced redundancy and the number of pages on their site that covered the same material. This allowed us to clean up their site, ensure it is secure, and make it as easy to navigate as possible, improving the user experience.

Step 3: Implementing the Guest-Contributed Content Strategy

As we mentioned previously, the goal here was to get high-quality traffic back to eLearning Industry’s site. Originally, we focused on directing traffic to their “Learning Management System” directory and their “Learning Management System (LMS) PPC Online Advertising” page. This strategy expanded over time to include other pages on their site.

This approach meant that getting the articles to rank very high wasn’t necessarily the goal. Rather, the objective was to help eLearning Industry create solid content that naturally linked back to those pages and to get that content placed in high-quality publications with a readership that aligned with their target audience.

eLearning Industry’s audience consists of corporate directors and managers focused on training, as well as marketers for eLearning companies. The articles we helped them create provided education on learning management systems, tips for using these systems to retain talent, mistakes often made with LMSs, and best practices for onboarding and online training tactics. We helped eLearning Industry place these articles in publications like Glassdoor, Innovation Enterprise, HR Daily Advisor, TalentCulture, Recruiter.com, and other high-quality publications that allow follow links.

By getting eLearning Industry published on these sites, we were able to pass the publications’ authority on to the specific eLearning Industry pages we were linking to, as well as to the links contained within those pages.

We took our new strategy data, measured from April 2018 to November 2018, and compared it against their site’s performance from June 2017 to January 2018 (the period prior to the new strategy being implemented). We found the following changes in eLearning Industry’s site performance:

• 77 percent increase in users, with a year-over-year increase of 227 percent
• 92 percent new users, with a year-over-year increase of 259 percent
• 82 percent increase in user sessions, with a year-over-year increase of 242 percent
• 102 percent increase in page views, with a year-over-year increase of 273 percent

In addition, the page one keyword rankings for the directory section of eLearning Industry’s website grew from 352 to 846. The keyword rankings for the directory section of their website likewise grew from 1,922 to 2,972, which allowed us to increase their coverage for relevant keywords, thus improving the likelihood of driving more organic traffic.

For each page we were targeting with this strategy, we were able to grow its linking domain and page authority. For example:

Learning Management Systems with Rich Gamification Functionality directory

• Linking domains: went from 0 to 19
• Page authority: went from 30 to 42

Learning Management Systems

• Linking domains: went from 46 to 84
• Page authority: went from 42 to 47

The Best Learning Management Systems based on User Experience directory

• Linking domains: went from 0 to 50
• Page authority: went from 30 to 45

Getting your site the kind of traffic you’re looking for doesn’t have to be rocket science. But if you can partner with a company that can pinpoint where you can improve and help you create content for the types of sites out there that are beneficial for your strategy, then you’ve won half the battle.