2013 was a great year by many accounts here at LTnow. We experienced exciting growth in our office space, personnel, and company culture. If you missed it, Stewart did a great job of reflecting on our business growth. You can read that here.
Part of the growth here at LTnow last year was reflected in our blog content. We posted a lot of really good stuff on our blog in 2013, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t take some time periodically to review how our website and our blog is performing. Our Website Results Diagnostic helps us to measure, evaluate, and adjust our content marketing strategies. This report provides great insight into the performance of LTnow.com and our digital marketing efforts. But as we turn a new year for 2014, I wanted to take a moment and reflect on 2013 and share our experiences and success.
Before I jump into the articles here are a few quick statistics on our visitor acquisition.
2013 website traffic to LTnow
- 69.2% of our traffic came from organic search (Google, Bing, Yahoo)
- Overall site traffic increased 203.1% from 2012
- Mobile and Tablet traffic increased 296.1% from 2012
- Social Media accounted for 4% of our total website traffic
- Our best converted social media website was LinkedIn. Traffic from LinkedIn converted at a rate of 8.1%
Most popular blog content from 2013
#1 : Email Phishing Alert: “Your American Express Forgotten User ID”
Article context: This article was written to help users identify AMEX phishing emails that are slipping through most email spam prevention filters.
Success: This “how to identify a phishing email” post was responsible for 29.7% of our website traffic. Why such a large number? Well, the first such was tracked back to an unsolicited share on the Reddit.com. This traffic led to some additional social sharing around the world and very quickly pushed this post to a top ranking link in Google for many search queries related to the AMEX email phishing attempt that periodically circulates online.
#2 : How to get more than 10 results per page in Google Search?
Article context: Originally written in 2011, this post illustrates how to change the Google Search Results page to provide more that 10 results per page. A helpful tip for those doing research online or ‘exploring’ your competition.
Success: Another “how to” article that achieved substantial performance in organic search engine rankings, and tying back to the fact that such a large portion of our traffic was earned from search engines like Google. Just consider the potential volume. In 2013, Google handled almost 6 billion searches per day. How many times do you start a Google search with “How to?”
#3 : Using Aliases in Gmail
Article context: An interesting piece on how to use the alias or (+) feature on your Gmail or Google Apps for business email account. Many of us at LTnow use this concept on our own personal Gmail accounts to filter newsletter signups and different service-oriented emails. My favorite is when you sign up for a service they give you a handy email address to remember in order to communicate with your account on the service. Why not create a filter using a gmail alias that will automatically forward your message to that cryptic email address?
Success: Once again this post establishes a “how to” type of content delivery. And that ties back into the search traffic volume and overall performance of visitor acquisition on our website.
Honorable Mention : R.I.P., Windows XP – How XP’s End of Life Will Affect You
Article context: Microsoft is ending support of their ever-so-popular Windows XP operating system on April 8, 2014. This change has the potential to impact many businesses, large and small. So our Director of Infrastructure, Jeff Brown, put this into perspective with a write up about the potential impact and how to move forward.
Success: I feel that it is important to mention that most of the top trafficked posts on our site were content that has been live for a period of more than 1 year. While it is great to create the evergreen type of content on our blog, this Windows XP end-of-life post was originally written in October of 2013. A large portion of its success is due to the social reach of this post — partly our distribution of the content, but also social media sharing from readers and earned media coverage on the article.
All in all 2013 was a great year for our website and we are very excited about the content we are preparing for 2014. Want to stay up to date? Subscribe to our blog via RSS or email.
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