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07.07.2016

2 min read

Search Leeds: There’s more to life than “great content” by Matt Barby

This article was updated on: 07.02.2022

Matt Barby is global head of growth and SEO at Hubspot. He’s also a blogger, industry speaker and lecturer for the Digital Marketing Institute, as well as a regular columnist for a number of marketing publications. His talk focused on how great content just isn’t enough…

Promote your own content

Around 2.5 million individual blog posts are published online every single day.

“And within those posts a large portion of them are rubbish,” Matt said. “How do you stand out among all of that?”

He said one problem is that many bloggers don’t even bother to promote their own content – giving one example of a company that didn’t even share its post on its own Facebook page!

He gave a rather simple formula: content – promotion = failure

Care about user experience

“Backlinks matter” he added – and don’t neglect your website architecture. Matt saw a 16% increase in organic search traffic on the Hubspot blog by simply fixing the blog pagination.

Most searches, he said, start with a specific need. “You search for it and in your mind you have a certain expectation of what you want to receive as an outcome.”

Google looks at what happens after someone clicks on a search result and this applies to links too. “User experience really matters,” he said. He also stressed that that’s something we should always keep that in mind while we’re writing good content.

A slightly more complex formula: Content + architecture design + user experience + promotion = success

“All of this has to be really good if you’re to stand a chance at success.”

Matt also gave a couple of top tips for quick wins during his talk.

One was in relation to Quora, a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organised by its community of users. Matt described Quora as “such an awesome way to generate some traffic through to your blog content” and said you can take inspiration from the questions that are asked on the website, and look at the related question section on the right for more content ideas.

Another tip is to sponsor local meetups. Not only are they a good way to get some ‘easy’ links they are a “huge content research asset”.

Read more from Matt @Matthewbarby