Using Content Strategy to Increase Blog Traffic

The Issue

A Washington, D.C., firm maintains a blog on whistleblower law that serves a dual purpose: to attract prospects and to demonstrate thought leadership in a very competitive marketplace. The law firm creates its content in-house, but lacked a formal strategy and repeatable process to maximize the impact of its efforts. Seeking to increase its page views and other critical metrics, the firm turned to Jaffe to help create a repeatable, dependable content workflow that uses four necessary elements – strategy, content development, distribution and analytics.

The firm needed to formalize its content strategy to improve blog metrics, including visitor count and bounce rate.

The Strategy

Jaffe met with the firm’s marketing team to talk through their pain points and assess the full breadth of the firm’s content assets. We then used this information to develop a multistep process that established a clear workflow, as well as a corresponding document that allows all parties to track the status of all content in real time.

The process works like this: Each week, Jaffe coordinates with the firm’s marketing team to identify opportunities to repurpose existing content, qualify blog topics and provide input to ensure posts will resonate with targeted audiences.

During the content development stage, Jaffe’s content specialists review post drafts and edit for readability – restructuring information, simplifying language, adding subtitles, creating bulleted lists. We also conduct on-page optimization according to SEO best practices, recommend compelling headlines, and draft metadescriptions and title tags.

For distribution, Jaffe consults on the timing of posts and assists with posting to social networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. We also use copywriting best practices to write social media text – “snippets” – to encourage click-throughs. Jaffe also signed the firm up with Lexology, an aggregator of legal content that automatically adds the firm’s blog posts to its daily e-newsletters, thus further increasing the blog’s reach.

Finally, our digital strategists track the blog’s analytics to assess reader behavior and provide ongoing input on ways to improve the content process.

Jaffe established a system based on the four fundamentals of content marketing – strategy, content development, distribution and analytics.

The Impact

Within two months of implementing the content strategy, the law firm saw significant results from the new system. Pageviews increased by 105 percent for the same period in the previous year, while unique pageviews jumped 97 percent. Meanwhile, the average time visitors remained on blog page increased by 64 percent. The bounce rate and exit rate both improved as well, indicating that visitors increasingly chose to explore other parts of the firm’s site after visiting the blog. Metrics received from Lexology reflected further success. For instance, the firm posted 10 articles in one month, generating over 1,000 unique reads and 151 interactions (i.e., clicks, forwards, prints and shares).