How to Build Website Traffic: Key Insights from Leading Blogs

A new analysis of business blogs provides insights into what differentiates leading blogs. HubSpot’s InboundRank tool ranks blogs based on their inbound traffic, average social shares and domain authority. It has ranked over 1,300 business blogs so far.

With the help of SimilarWeb and BuzzSumo, it analyzed the top to 50 business blogs and compared the top 10 blogs to blogs ranked 11 to 50. The results provide insights into how a blog can grow its traffic regardless of region, country, or vertical.

“The results have been fascinating,” writes Kieran Flanagan, a HubSpot marketing director.

These are some of the notable revelations.

Social Media Referrals

Social media has attracted plenty of attention, and perhaps hype, in recent years. Blogging and digital marketing experts usually recommend frequent social media posting across many networks in order to attract website visitors. Yet surprisingly, the top 50 blogs obtain less than 7% of their total traffic from social media on average.

Web publishers, including corporate PR blogs, may conclude that they should not expect a great influx of traffic from social media. But don’t discount social media. It offers many advantages, such as connecting to audiences, learning about audiences, customer service support, content promotion and targeted advertising. Blog posting and other social media activity can also greatly improve position in search engine results, the largest driver of traffic to most all websites.

Among social networks, Twitter drives 48% of traffic to the top 10 blogs. However, traffic from Twitter has dropped from last year, while Facebook traffic increased significantly. LinkedIn referrals were also up. For business blogs ranked from 11 to 50, traffic from both Twitter and Facebook declined since 2014, while traffic from LinkedIn nearly doubled from 9% to 17%.

The premier blogs emphasize Facebook more than other blogs. The lesson is that business blogs should not automatically dismiss Facebook, despite the tendency of B2B marketers to believe it’s strictly a tool for consumer marketing. Blogs can test the network with paid experiments that promote content on the network, Flanagan suggests.

There’e little difference in the frequency of tweets between higher and lower-ranked blogs. The top 10 tweet seven times a day on average, while the others tweet six times per day on average. Both groups post on Facebook twice a day on average, suggesting volume of Facebook posts is not a major influence on the size of Facebook audiences or referrals.

Organic Search Traffic

The top 10 blogs obtain slightly more of their traffic from organic search. Most interestingly, they obtain 87% of their organic search through non-branded search terms, vs 71% for the other blogs. The top 10 blogs have substantially increased the amount of traffic they’re getting from non-branded keywords.

The findings demonstrate that pursuing non-branded, long tail keywords is a far superior SEO strategy. “Relying on traffic from just branded searches is myopic and unlikely to result in success,” Flanagan says.

The implication is that corporate blogs can also improve their SEO and increase organic search traffic by focusing more on non-branded, long tail keywords.

Publishing Frequency

How frequently do the top 10 business blogs publish new blog posts?

The top 10 blogs publish posts 39 times a month on average, compared to five articles a month for the rest of the group. Some blogging experts recently questioned the tenant that blogs must frequently publish posts, especially new content, in order to maintain website traffic. Their experiments suggest that less frequent publishing may not necessarily decrease page views.

However, the difference in publishing frequency revealed in the HubSpot analysis demonstrates the importance of publishing often, whether through in-house writers or freelancers or by repurposing or updating content.

Bottom Line: An analysis of top blogs offers informative insights into what distinguishes the most popular blogs from others in regards to publishing frequency, organic SEO strategies, and social media referrals. Managers of corporate blogs may wish to consider strategies of the top blogs in an effort to increase their own website traffic.