Hi friend,

Have you ever written content for your blog and thought “this is the best content I’ve ever written?”

You publish it and people seem to love it initially; but after the first day or two of attention... nothing.

How can this be?

The answer was pretty simple, your post was never optimized for organic search.

You’re not alone. We had a blog post “Here's How Email Color Can Impact Subscriber Behavior” that fell into this category - amazing content, no traffic.

Here were sessions from Google Analytics for the past year for this blog.

When I dug a little deeper, I noticed that we weren’t targeting any keywords that people actually search for. No one is searching for “how email color impacts subscriber behavior.”

When I performed keyword research in ahrefs, these were the top results for “email” and “color”:

So how did I take a blog post that had zero organic traffic dating back to its launch in 2016...

And turn it into a post that is seeing four straight months of organic traffic growth?

I optimized based on keywords people were searching for. Here was my process for optimizing this specific blog post.

1 - It all starts with keyword research

I use ahrefs for my research but there are several other tools you can use like Semrush or Moz.

The blog is about how color can have an impact on subscriber or consumer behavior so I started with a general search term of “color”.

Then I narrowed my search by including words that were relevant to the blog. Those words were “behavior” and “marketing”.

The top results showed that people are searching for terms revolving around “psychology of color in marketing.”

So I decided to modify the blog around that term.

2 - Internal research

Now that I had my topic, I wanted to see if we had any other blog posts talking about color.

I used Google Search Console to look for search queries that contained the word “color” to see if there were any blog posts getting organic traffic for a similar subject matter.

My research found a blog written in 2017 with the title “Color Theory for Sign Up Form Design”. This content was very similar to the content I was optimizing except it was talking about how color can impact a sign up form.

Next I wanted to see if this blog warranted its own post or could I combine it with my new blog. I looked at the past 12 months data in Google Analytics and the past four months showed no organic traffic. Even prior to that we only averaged 50 a month.

I decided this additional content would make my new blog post even stronger, so I added this content to my new, optimized blog.

3 - Reposition the content

I loved the content from the original blog “Here’s How Email Color Can Impact Subscriber Behavior” but that was very specific to email marketing. I wanted to keep this content, but knew as is, it wasn’t going to drive any organic traffic.

So I decided to reposition the blog to talk about the psychology of color in marketing. Here’s how I did that:

• Created a new title “How to use the psychology of color in marketing to increase your results”
• Added new content, including studies, about how color influences behavior in marketing
• Included a chart to highlight the different color meanings, my thought here was that I could also rank with the images.

After highlighting how specific colors can influence consumer behavior, I transitioned into how this can be applied to both sign up forms and email marketing. This is where I added the content from the original two blog posts.

Finally, since the original blogs URL’s were about how sign up form (blog.aweber.com/email-marketing/color-theory-for-sign-up-form-design.htm) and email (blog.aweber.com/email-marketing/how-email-color-impacts-subscriber-behavior.htm) color impacts subscriber behavior, I created a new URL (blog.aweber.com/learn/how-to-use-the-psychology-of-color-in-marketing.htm) and I redirected the other two URL's to the new one.

Your turn

Since I used content that was already created, I only needed to write about 40% of this 2,500+ word post.

Now it’s your turn. Find a blog that is simply an amazing piece of content, but for some reason is just not driving organic traffic. Do research and find keywords that you could incorporate that would give this post a chance to get organic traffic.

To give yourself a better chance to rank high for several keywords, I recommend you search for keywords that have a keyword difficulty under 40. These are less competitive and will give you a better chance to rank quicker.

Easily Add AWeber Forms and Pages to your Wordpress Site

We run our blog using Wordpress to make it easy for us to optimize for search and collaborate with the team.

If your blog or site uses Wordpress, it’s super easy to add sign up forms, and even pages created with the landing page builder, to your site using the AWeber Wordpress plugin.

Just a few of the things you can do with the plugin:

• Add sign up forms to any page or template using short-codes.
• Set up sales pages on your site using AWeber Ecommerce.
• Split test sign up forms to optimize your audience growth.
• Add people who comment on posts to your email list.
• Add pages promoting specific courses or offers and tag new subscribers to better segment your audience.

Behind the newsletter

In this weeks Behind the newsletter, Chris and I dive deeper into optimizing blog posts to increase organic traffic.
 

Get our latest expert advice and helpful tips 

As always, thanks for reading!

- Sean and the team
 

Did you notice the images I had in this email? I created and formatted those using Canva without ever leaving the AWeber dashboard. 

And you can do it too. Just drag the image icon into your email and the "Design on Canva" drop down will appear to the right of your editor.

Canva is so easy to use, your emails will look like a professional graphic designer created them.

👉 Here's how you can do it in your AWeber account.