When I joined the startup I currently work for five months ago, we were in the midst of a heated debate about what to do with our content. We had recently moved a lot of our content behind a login with the logic being: as a freemium site with over 1,000 free videos, why would users not sign up to see our content? But as an SEO-er, I knew that content attracts customers and that hiding all of our content behind a login wall was actually hurting the chances that users found us. In other words:

Courtesy of Keep Calm-O-Matic

Teaming Up to Get it Done

One of the main reasons that opening up content had been delayed was that doing so gave users less of a reason to sign up immediately. Previously, you could access a landing page that listed all of our video content, but you could only watch the first video in the series. In order to see more, users had to sign up with a free account. So, instead of focusing solely on the SEO value of opening up content, I spoke to other people on my team about the project. It turned out that the UX Manager felt pretty strongly that our content needed to be shareable, or in other words, open and not behind a login. We met and aligned on why opening content was best for everyone, both the user and our company. 

From a UX perspective, ensuring that our users could access our content created a better and more targeted user journey and also allowed us to determine how successful our content was. Presenting the larger picture about how opening our content would allow users to find it and share it, while creating a better journey that we could monitor, track and improve on, made giving our content away without a conversion (in this case a sign up to our site) much easier to sell. It also showed that this was a project that would help the company as a whole and was not just a hack to increase traffic, which lent it more strength (since leadership can be wary of what is perceived as SEO "tricks"). Whenever possible, teaming up across your company will make it easier to implement a project and will also give you some new ideas and direction for how to do so.

Making Mistakes Along the Way

Once we got internal approval to open up the pages, the next question was what page to open. We decided to open up the exact page a logged in user sees as a test for all of our content around Pinterest. I was very excited to get this up and running after all the discussions, but imagine my surprise when instead of increasing our rankings and traffics, our traffic fell! Not only was our new content not ranking for longer tail keywords as expected, but it was hurting our rankings for head terms, which we had historically ranked well for, too.

I couldn't figure out what the problem was because when I checked the page source, everything seemed fine. So I reached out to John Doherty for some help and he reminded me to always check how Google is caching the page and to browse the page as Googlebot in Firefox. After some analysis, it turned out that we had two problems: 1) Google was having a hard time crawling our video transcripts because of how they were coded, and 2) Our lesson page didn’t appear to be a part of any site hierarchy.

Since our transcript was in a tab, Googlebot was seeing it as a link and not as a tab with content, which was a fairly straightforward tech fix. Additionally, logged in, we had a complete hierarchy of products --> courses --> lessons, but logged out these pages appeared to Google to be unconnected to the higher pages and floating in space. Instead of strengthening the product (category) pages by bubbling up value, they were making them weaker.

How Sharing Content Will Always Help You

We fixed the coding issue and added breadcrumbs to the top of the page to signify a clear hierarchy and bubble up strength. We are still in the process of potentially redesigning the pages to improve the user journey further, but even with a not-perfect page we’ve seen exciting results. (This is another great time to work across the team, especially with UX, as your co-workers will have great ideas for how to improve your content that you may not have thought of.) Our strategy has been to open up the lesson pages (or sub-category pages) by product (or category), opening around 3 a week. This way, Google will see our new content, but our percent of pages crawled will not plummet, nor will we trigger an unnecessary manual review by Google.

By opening up more content, we weren’t only making sure that search engines could crawl our pages and surface our content. We were allowing our users to share our content with their friends and let our content be useful and helpful for future users. We were making it easier to find our brand, but more importantly we were helping more users find content that they wanted and could help them answer their questions.

As a startup our traffic is still small, but opening our content has had a definite impact. To give you a few examples, comparing our unique organic traffic for a week from before we opened up content around a certain product to a week after we did, we saw a:

• 1,116% increase in traffic surrounding LinkedIn pages
• 222% increase in traffic surrounding Twitter pages
• 1,000% increase in traffic surrounding Google Drive pages

Possibly even more importantly, before we opened our content we had one landing page for LinkedIn, which received visitors for seven different queries in GA. Afterwards we had 52 queries driving traffic. That’s a 642.85% increase in queries driving to our pages. And while we can’t be certain of every keyword given GA’s “not provided”, we can be sure of how many landing pages we saw users click through to.

Above - 10 of the 52 different queries from GA that now drove users to our site through “LinkedIn” related keywords.

Another way of looking at this increase in LinkedIn related traffic (the dips between peaks represent the weekends, when we have lower traffic):

Now, imagine multiplying this across 100+ products.

We started opening the first pages (the second time around, after fixing our mistake) at the very end of February. We’ve only opened up about 1/10 of our content so far, but here’s a view of our unique organic traffic in March compared to December by week (hence the drop off in the beginning and end of the graph):

That's a 49.13% increase in unique organic visitors MoM.

Why it Works & What to Watch Out For

Thinking back to when we were going back and forth about whether or not to open content, one conversation sticks in my mind. Our CEO Jeff Fernandez had been hesitant about doing so, but after thinking it through he came to me and said, “It’s about being generous. We need to be generous with our content.” That really struck a chord with me because it exemplified why you should open up content. If you’re opening up content to game Google results, it probably won’t work in the long run. If you’re doing it because you think it can help people around the world, then it’s safe to say that it’s a good idea.

One way that we knew it was a good idea to open content was by listening internally too. Our own social media guru was struggling because he couldn’t share a lot of our content with our fans or with people he wanted to reach out to. When content is valuable enough to want to share it with your fans and people you want to impress, then you should probably be willing to share it with the world.

Opening up content works, but only when it is content that users want. I know that every single SEO blog post says it, but it is true. How does it help you to rank in search results if no one clicks through or consumes your content? And how can you expect to rank when your content isn’t worth sharing? So in other words, beware of opening up content just because you think it is a quick way to drive traffic to your site. Yes, having more landing pages for people to enter is good, as long as it is still the best user journey. Having pages that don’t help users won’t get traffic and won’t help you. In fact, as we saw when we first opened up our content, it’s pretty easy to mess it up and actually hurt your whole site.

Has anyone else had experiences opening up their content? What are other things to consider when you do so? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.