53. How to Keep the Gears Turning on Your Passive Traffic Machine

[00:00:00] Stephanie: A huge part of passive traffic is creating a web of related content that helps your audience get to know you and your products. Let's chat about how you can use strategic linking to keep the gears turning on your passive traffic machine. Welcome back to the podcast. This is our final episode in our discussion about building a passive traffic machine.

[00:00:35] Last week we talked about the fact that search engines are the power behind passive traffic, and this week we're going to talk about the gears of this machine. When you look at a machine, there are usually a variety of gears that work together to create movement. One gear turns another, and then that causes something else to happen.

[00:00:57] These interlocked pieces are essential to the function of the machine. The same is true for your passive traffic machine. Each piece of content you create is a gear that needs to be strategically connected in order to increase traffic, sales, and search performance. So in this episode, we're going to talk in more detail about those three outcomes of linking your content together more strategically.

[00:01:27] So first, linking your content together can increase the traffic across different pages of your website. If you have a blog post that ranks really well, you can use that successful post to support other content on your website that could use a little bit more attention. You would just add internal links from that strong post to some other related content on your website, and by doing this, you create a journey for your website visitors.

[00:01:55] One post can lead to another, giving the reader more time to get to know you, your brand, your products, and how you can help them. If you're not sure if your website visitors are having this experience of going on a journey on your website, your analytics can actually tell you. So if you go to your analytics, you can look at your bounce rate and a bounce rate represents how many people are leaving from the same page that they landed on when they came to your website.

[00:02:29] This means they're not following that journey on your website. They are landing on a page and then leaving. So the lower your bounce rate, the better. The problem is bounce rate used to be really easy to find in Google Analytics, and then ever since they switched to GA four, it's a little bit more tricky to find.

[00:02:50] It's not a default metric when you open your traffic reports anymore, so to find it, you just go to engagement on the left side of the page, then pages and screens. Once you're on that page, you'll click on the pencil in the upper right corner to customize the report. Then there will be a menu that opens up on the right side of the page.

[00:03:14] You'll click on metrics and then add metric. There's a little search bar, find bounce rate, select it, and then click apply. So once you do that, the bounce rate will be on the far right of the table. You might have to scroll over to see the end of the table, but that will show you your bounce rate by

[00:03:36] webpage, you know, by URL on your website. And then also at the top in bold will be the overall bounce rate for your website. There are a lot of things that can impact your bounce rate. That includes how your website is optimized for users. It's whether your blog post matches user intent. And also where your website visitors are coming from can impact your bounce rate.

[00:04:02] Just as a fun fact, people who get most of their traffic from Pinterest tend to have a higher bounce rate. And even though there are a lot of factors that go into bounce rate and can contribute to it, it's still a good overall indicator of whether or not people are sticking around on your website.

[00:04:21] And you can kind of start to think about if there are any things you can do to, encourage people to visit more than one page when they land on your website. And one of those things that you can do is link your content together strategically, and that really can go a long way in improving user experience,

[00:04:41] and then as a result, your bounce rate. Next, linking your content together can also increase your sales. Maybe you've discovered that one of your blog posts is doing the heavy lifting in the sales for one of your products. Let's say it's a bundle of math centers and for whatever reason. It just converts really, really well.

[00:05:03] So this post should become the destination blog post for that journey of internal linking on your blog. So as you write other blog posts related to math, you can mention math centers at some point in that post, and then link to that high converting blog post. This can help you cast a wider net because people can find your math content through a variety of different pain points, and then take a logical journey that ends at your blog post about math centers.

[00:05:38] But sometimes linking your content together isn't necessarily about where the reader ends up. Instead, it's just about giving them more time to get to know you and your products before they decide to make a purchase. The more time your cold traffic spends on your website, the warmer it becomes, and this can have a very positive impact on your sales.

[00:06:02] You can also strategically link your content so that users land on a post with an opt-in. As this user then spends time on your email list, they will also be able to see more of your products and take advantage of your promotions. And this long-term relationship can be a huge contributor to sales for your business.

[00:06:23] And it all starts with the gears of the passive traffic machine working together. Finally, linking your content together can improve your search performance on Google in more ways than you might expect. As we've talked about before, linking between your posts, the internal linking process, is essential for Google indexing.

[00:06:46] When the bots can crawl from one post to the next, it makes your content more cohesive and Google is able to get a better picture of what you offer your website visitors. And this is essential in getting Google to trust you and refer people to your site. But there are other kind of backdoor ways that linking your content together can improve your search performance,

[00:07:13] and one example of this is using video. I have a client who does an excellent job with creating video content for her brand, and then she also publishes weekly blog posts on topics that are usually related to videos that she has recently recorded. The challenge is that sometimes that particular topic is saturated with competitive blog content, and it's difficult to rank on Google with that blog post.

[00:07:46] But what's awesome about Google is that for a lot of keywords, there is a section with video content on page one. And so for those saturated keywords where she might be on page two or three for her blog post, she's on page one with her video for the same keyword. And so then when people click on and watch the video, they will be able to see a link to her website in the description box on YouTube.

[00:08:13] This has been a great way for my client to get search traffic for blog post topics that are just a little bit more competitive. Her video kind of does the heavy lifting on page one of Google. But then on the other side of the coin, the passive traffic to your blog can also help you increase your YouTube views or podcast downloads because you can embed that content within your blog posts and really blog posts that have that additional content usually perform a little bit better in search results as well.

[00:08:52] Overall, I just think it's amazing to see how the gears of a passive traffic machine can serve your business on autopilot. I hope that this episode has given you some food for thought as you decide how you wanna prioritize your time in marketing your resources. Even though this particular series is over for now, I would love to continue to help you increase your passive traffic.

[00:09:15] My course, Bring Your Own Traffic breaks down the essentials of SEO blogging and pinning into one cohesive and manageable workflow. You can check out some free preview lessons at stephanieroyer.podia.com. That's stephanie royer dot po dia.com, or you can find the link in the show notes.