Three Ways an MSP Can (Re)Direct Web Traffic

While you never know which new piece of content will gain the most traction, it is not uncommon for a blog post that is not “on brand” for your MSP to take off. Instead of letting the interest in the blog and the traffic it is driving to your website go to waste, there are ways to capitalize on it and use it to develop qualified leads and conversions for your MSP services. Here are three ways how.

An Off-Topic Blog Post Can be a Success for Your MSP Website

In a perfect world, your most successful blog would be about a service your MSP offers. Unfortunately, we’re not in such an environment and sometimes your most popular content will be one that is “off-brand”. What do we mean by this? 

In the before-times (before the pandemic), we held a Thursday tradition called Crockpot Thursday. Each week we made a big meal for the office and many weeks we produced a silly video about it. This content was, by a pretty wide margin, our most viewed content. People loved it on social media, it drove traffic to our blog, and it got a lot of comments and hits compared to everything else.

Why? People would prefer to not be marketed to. That doesn’t mean marketing content is inherently bad, but fun, off-topic content is almost always going to attract a wider audience. You don’t watch television for the commercials, right?

Of course, if you aren’t the entertaining type, simply providing a wide wealth of valuable knowledge can go a long way too. It doesn’t have to strictly pertain to the services you offer; it just needs to be valuable to your desired audience.

Before determining whether or not a blog post is a success, and worth investing resources into, you should consider a few things. 

Is the blog consistently driving traffic to your MSP website? A blog that is only hot for a day or two probably isn’t driving the type of traffic you need, particularly if it’s off message. If you don’t know,the first thing you should ask yourself is whether you are measuring your success. Information about your website’s traffic and which pages are top performers are critical tools for developing your SEO and content marketing strategies. Fortunately, they can easily be learned by reviewing your Google Analytics. 

Here’s how to check your top pages: 

Log into your Google Analytics account. On the left-hand panel, navigate to Behavior, drop down to Site Content > All Pages. There you will see a list of your top pages (you can sort/filter these as you like). In our case, our top page is a blog from our Facebook 101 series. Notably, this page has almost 3,000 more pageviews than the next blog, so clearly, it struck a chord with readers.

In fact, this blog has become such a success that Google noticed and granted it featured snippet status.

A featured snippet is a powerful signal that your content connects with a large audience and provides high-quality content that drives traffic to your website, gaining Google’s “seal of approval.” Despite this, there is little to no mention of MSP marketing in the blog itself.

The next question is if it doesn’t mention MSP marketing and that's our business, what’s the point of paying attention to a blog about Facebook Tips? 

Although the topic is about hiding your personal Facebook profile, it touches on services we offer: social media. Our Ultimate Social Media Rig, Social Media Graphics, and Social Media as a Service, provide MSPs with high-level services designed to make the most of their social media. The Facebook 101 blog provides MSPs methods to improve their social media presence and is part of our overall strategy to help MSPs forget their excuses not to use social media. 

While it is tempting to discard the value of this blog and its traffic because it’s not focusing on our “core keywords” for MSP Marketing, that would be short-sighted. If you examine the top blogs we show in the screen capture, you see that about half of them are about social media. This means that the Facebook blog is not an isolated event; but part of the overall interest in social media.

Your SEO should be treated as a snapshot in time. Effective SEO analysis looks at the trends of interest and traffic flow as part of the overall picture of user intent and not as an isolated event. Traffic comes and goes in a variety of directions and the actual test of your MSP marketing will be in how effectively you are able to direct unexpected traffic in the direction of your MSP’s core services.

Three Ways To (re)Direct Traffic To Your MSP Content

1. Add a Call To Action. Whether it’s a “Buy Now!” or “Click Here!”. The goal of a call to action is to tell a person what to do next and direct them on how to do it. This is a crucial step to add to a page that isn’t on brand. A call to action can encourage a visitor to go to a page or service that is more on brand instead of reading the blog and leaving. The amount of time a visitor stays on your site can result in a greater opportunity to convert them, and a call to action can guide them to pages more relevant to your services.  
2. Add a form. A form is a tried and tested method to capture contact information. Forms are an essential tool because, unlike most advertising, when a person completes a form, they are giving their permission for you to communicate with them. Forms are an essential part of your MSP marketing strategy, as they are a critical element of your inbound marketing tactics. No matter how you view it, you need to incorporate forms on your website. While a form can be as simple or complex as you like, people understand that their information has value and are reluctant to “give it away”. As such, it may benefit you to offer a deliverable or some other method of “sweetening” the pot to encourage the form to be completed. 
3. Add internal links. Internal links are links on pages of your website which go to other pages on your website. The goal of internal links is to provide readers of your blog an easy way to gain supplemental information about the topic they are reading about. For example, if you have a blog about ransomware, your blog would contain links to your MSP service pages featuring spam, cybersecurity, or other related topics. Internal links will drive visitors deeper into your website as they follow the links to more content, and the deeper they go into your site, the longer they will stay. The longer they stay on your site, the greater your chances are to convert them. Lastly, when Google and the other search engines crawl your site, they follow internal links back to their pages. As Google can understand the relationship between pages, internal links help them better understand what services your website provides, which allows them to offer your website as an answer to search queries.

Don’t Let Your Momentum Go to Waste

The more traffic you have, the more opportunities you have to acquire qualified leads, which is relatively easy to do when the traffic is going where you want it to. However, because you can’t control which content will resonate with an audience, there will be times when the traffic isn’t going where you want it to. The worst thing you can do is ignore this traffic because it’s not living up to your expectations, which themselves may be out of touch with the needs of your customers.

In reality, most businesses are searching for solutions to problems they have with their technology, using terms they are familiar with and comfortable using. It is essential to understand user intent and provide answers to what people are looking for and not what you assume they want. Additionally, developing a buyer persona is a way to put you in the shoes of potential leads, understand their needs, and help you better rank for the MSP keywords you want.

It is important to understand that the purpose of your MSP website is more than one page or one service, it’s about providing visitors insight into the deeper benefits your MSP can offer. In other words, you need to give potential customers a reason to take a chance on you. The best way to do this is by providing a variety of information about your services that is of value, and plenty of it.  

Don’t Leave Your MSP Content to Chance

Content is an essential part of your MSP marketing, but for it to provide the benefits you expect, it needs to give your audience a reason to read it, and most importantly, return for more. When many MSPs partner with a marketing agency, often they are provided with content that isn’t effectively optimized for their brand, their location (remember all search is local), their long-term SEO strategy, or—worst of all—is written by people who don’t understand the industry. 

Unlike most MSP marketing agencies, we understand the MSP industry because we’re part of it. This allows us to create content that can bridge the gap between MSPs and businesses in a way that lets each party communicate with each other. If your blogs, social media, or website doesn’t seem to be able to attract traffic and develop leads, we can help. Call 888-546-4384 today to learn more.