On the Brink: A Case Study About Love, Life and the Organic Search Benefit of a Robust Content Marketing Strategy

The is the latest installment of our Delucchi Plus blog feature, On The Brink, in which our Senior Search Marketing Specialist and resident Batman expert Jonathan Brinksman breaks down the latest and greatest trends in digital marketing. Whether you’re a seasoned expert or total newbie, Jonathan will be offering expert, accessible insight into the ever-changing digital world.

About a year ago, an edict was issued:

Delucchi Plus, being a collection of thought leaders and brand advocates, is to create a blog. This blog shall issue forth an unending stream of engaging, original content on all manner of subjects to showcase to the world the amazing, unrivaled talent hanging out under our roof.

I don’t know why this edict was issue. Honestly, I think it was mostly because Tom was bored. But the fact remains, it was issued, and we have been absolutely killing it delivering on its promise. In fact, there hasn’t been a single business day when we haven’t published an original blog post. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

For the SEO savants among you reading this, I can already sense you salivating. This edict is a content marketer’s dream. More than that, though, the rhetoric for a while now from Google has been “content, content, content.” I suspected that this militant blogging of ours would have a benefit to the Delucchi Plus website’s organic search traffic, but I wanted to see just how much.

Faster than you can say “case study,” I was already in our Google Analytics account.

The top line results speak for themselves:

Just look at that blue line go! Even at a visual, at-a-glance level, it’s clear to see that we’re seeing a tremendous increase in overall website traffic (347.4% year over year, to be exact – and that’s not including the eight days we have left in 2014).

But where is this traffic coming from? I think it’s safe to say that a fair chunk of it is social growth, given that we’d be fools not to share all of this great content that we’re regularly publishing. But who cares about social media? This is a blog post about organic search. Let’s dive a little bit deeper into the channel:

BOOM! Just like that, we see a 920.4% year-over-year increase in organic search traffic. That’s absurd. Not only that, but organic search traffic went from being a slight 16.4% of the total website traffic in 2013 to 37.5% in 2014, overtaking paid marketing as our top traffic driving channel. I should also note that Delucchi Plus did absolutely zero paid marketing to support our website in 2014. This traffic growth came almost exclusively from our content marketing efforts.

Is this really a fair comparison, though? What’s the real benefit to our bottom line?

When you talk about organic search traffic, you always have to talk about user intent. The fact of the matter is, content from our blog posts has a very different end-user goal than the content of the rest of the website. Simply speaking, it breaks down like this:

• The end-user goal of any given blog post is to get users to read that particular blog post.
• The end-user goal of more or less every other page of the website is to support the Delucchi Plus brand and business.

From that standpoint, it’s safe to assume that our blog posts got “unqualified” traffic (by which I mean traffic that at no point in time could conceivably be a customer). These are people who were probably just looking for some funny GIFs or something, not the services we offer.

So, to get a really fair understanding of the impact from this organic search growth to our business, we have to look at the pages on our website that speak exclusively about our services. Let’s hope this growth holds up:

Sure enough, that blue line is unstoppable!

So what’s the takeaway? To be fair, Delucchi Plus is in an ideal position for this kind of content marketing: We’re a company that prides itself on its unique and interesting team, and offers them a voice to talk about, well, basically anything that’s on our minds.

That’s kind of the point, though. Our content strategy was about generating unique, original content – not about generating unique, original content exclusively within the confines of our industry. Regardless, it still helped us see incredibly significant channel growth on the pages of our site that matter the most for growing our business (the above chart represents a staggering 6,591.7% year over year increase in organic search traffic).

Ultimately, you shouldn’t feel limited in what you’re capable of. A blog is great, but it doesn’t have to be that strict or robust – as long as you have a place on your website where you can create something for users to engage with, you’re golden. As we move into 2015, if content marketing isn’t a part of your online strategy, you’re only hurting yourself.

If you’re still at a loss about how to do content marketing, though, just follow my lead: when in doubt, link to a cat video.