Case study: Experiment –
trying to rank in search for a topic of interest for RocLogic
The importance of aligning with the market
This case study is a recap of a small piece of RocLogic’s own marketing machine in action. As usual, you know what they say about data… so take it as a data point and with a grain of salt. There’s so much nuance and context in marketing.
The trigger
My recall on the origin of this is a bit fuzzy on this, but (likely) while doing some of my typical inbound marketing monitoring / analyzing, I noticed that RocLogic’s website was ranking (poorly) for a search topic of interest within one of RocLogic’s niches.
The Journey
After pondering a bit, I decided that the existing article that was ranking poorly for didn’t align very well with the search topic of interest.
I felt like I could do better.
So, I created a new article that was better-aligned with the market.
Within ~a couple weeks I could see the new article popping up in Google search results, but it wasn’t stable at all. There were other RocLogic articles being considered by Google, so the rankings remained unstable with different articles ranking over time.
It took ~8 months for the desired article to consistently rank for the search topic of interest.
It took ~1 year for the article of interest to rank ~2nd in Google search (in the US) for the search topic of interest.
The article mostly settled into ranking 1st in Google a couple months later.
Here’s a chart showing the often-bumpy ride of trying to rank for a topic of interest:
Here’s a a corresponding traffic plot for this article (entry page shown, removed known social and referral traffic) that you’d like to see:
The next level that you often want to see (there are exceptions) beyond traffic is desired behaviors that suggest some portion of the website visitors are interested in getting help. This chart shows that there are indeed some visitors showing desirable behavior:
And this is really just the beginning of the journey for this content. We’ll see where things head next…
