ICYMI: we gave our very own Vermilion brand a makeover in early 2023, which included (among an endless list of other things) a new website featuring a refreshed look with tidy transitions and an updated site architecture and user experience. Basically: we overhauled the whole site to reimagine how we express ourselves and our work.
The Challenge
We decided to deprecate our blog content as part of the new website strategy. It was older, content creation was inconsistent, and the strategy didn’t align with where Vermilion’s new brand was headed. However, this decision contributed to a 63% drop in SEO and a 32% drop in overall traffic. Even though we kept a live archive of top-performing blogs, removing the blog put more pressure on other efforts to drive traffic and referrals.
Will website content creation (aka a blog) solve everything? Of course not. But the data revealed how valuable it is to help clients find us, fueling inbound referrals and contributing to our pipeline. We decided to reintroduce content-driven marketing but with a “way in” that doesn’t duplicate common blog styles and content in the advertising and marketing agency industry.
The Process & Solution
Step One: Listen to our most engaged audience
We surveyed current newsletter subscribers to learn what they’d most like to see from us. We heard: trends and insights, which makes sense. We pore over primary and secondary client research, stay current on new and burgeoning tools, and keep our finger on the pulse of industry news. All of this gets infused into our assignments, and people want to know what we’re learning—and how that’s informing our work.
A curious and related runner-up? A look behind the agency curtain. (Yes, we’re foreshadowing.)
Step Two: Create distinction in a crowded area
Long-form content is not a novel company strategy in and of itself. Blogs have been around since the early Internet. So, with fresh data in hand, we set out to develop an approach to curate, package, and share information in a unique-to-us and interesting-to-you way.
First: we researched. We searched for, read, and synthesized other agencies’ content strategies to understand their approaches, what we loved about them, what wasn’t right for us, and what we weren’t seeing.
Then: we built a brief. It was critical to dial in on our audiences, because ”prospective partners” wasn’t specific enough. Why would they find our content? What’s driving their searches? Why would they want to read what we have to say? We also articulated the blog’s goal, role, and content types—where we shine and where we don’t play.
After that, we defined what it was about. We call this The Wrapper. How do you quickly describe it to your mom? (Here’s where the earlier foreshadowing pays off.) Picture a Venn Diagram where the left circle says “things that happen behind the scenes at agencies,” and the right circle says “partners who want to be more confident marketers and know what it’s like to work with us.” In the center is The Wrapper: questions we ask and get asked that you didn’t realize you wanted to know.
Finally, we named and pressured-tested it. Our team had strong feelings about the word “Blog.” We’ll save that monologue for another day. But we knew the name—Articles—needed to be both understandable and SEO-friendly. In parallel, we crafted sample headlines to gut-check the viability of The Wrapper. We’ve got a list of sample Article headlines that puts us well into 2026.
Step Three: Build a tool that’s easy to scale
Once we had our strategy and content lens, we built the platform for Articles. One reason more content wasn’t posted was that writing and publishing weren’t easy for staff. Each piece of content required web development support, and without a clear Wrapper, significant energy was required from each author. For this rebuild, we created a more self-serve approach that invites all of our Vermilionaires to more confidently write and post content while a dedicated team fuels the content calendar. This is important because consistent traffic and publishing are critical to having returning users, an important signal for SEO weight.
Step Four: Launch and keep writing
With the tool in place and a batch of pre-written content, we developed a content development cadence strategy to which we can realistically commit. For Vermilion, that’s monthly. Each month, a new Article will simultaneously launch across our website, email, and LinkedIn. Google’s helpful content updates last year prioritized user engagement signals, so the better we can leverage our owned channels as an initial traffic source, the better the lift will be for SEO equity.
The Outcome
Overall, we’re seeing very positive initial results from these efforts, with our first new article about why we need Pride Month. While SEO impact typically takes 3-6 months to fully manifest, we’re seeing other encouraging results right off the bat. Our email click-through rate increased by 40% when we included article content versus where we’ve been trending in the past 12 months. We saw 37% more LinkedIn clicks from an article post vs our average posts. And, we’re seeing much higher engagement on Article pages, to the tune of +81%. So, not only is there initial interest in clicking on these pages, but people are really absorbing the information.
While it’s still early, we’re thrilled with how everything is trending.
So to answer the question, if your company wants a diversified set of inbound traffic sources, your website absolutely needs a content strategy. A blog (or whatever you choose to call it) and written content is a great way to execute on that.
