Thread by @nateliason

Inspired by my friend @allthingsmarco, I'm going to do occasional threads on businesses that are either doing well, or could be doing better, with their SEO & Content Marketing. 📈

🥁🥁🥁 Today's thread is on... 🥁🥁🥁

@onepeloton! 🚴‍♂️

Peloton is an incredible business.

Their bikes are beautiful, they have thousands of fun and challenging classes on demand, and their customers won't shut up about them (myself included)🙋‍♂️

But there's one area of their brand that's really lacking: their blog content.

I took a look through their site this afternoon and was really surprised at how little they've done to leverage their massive brand.

Their blog is only getting ~1,600 organic visitors per month! That's ridiculously low, I was expecting well into the 100,000s.

To try to figure out why, I did a quick deep-dive on their site and content which you can watch here:



Here are some of the highlights in text as well.

First up, their blog landing page is really confusing.

When you scroll past the first few posts, the blog index just ends.

No pagination links or anything.

For a minute, I thought their blog only had 6 posts on it:

But it turns out that you just need to go into one of their category pages, which I figured out after a minute.

The "Wellness" section stood out as the one where they might have a lot of really high-value SEO focused content, so I started there.

The first thing that stands out is that none of the recent articles seem to be focused on a useful goal.

Content can be used for:

- Search traffic
- Conversions
- Sharing
- Link building

But these articles don't really fit those categories. They aren't good for converting readers, wouldn't be very viral, wouldn't solicit links from other sites, and aren't focused on search terms.

It does look like they might have given some thought to search traffic.

The "The Last Time I Worked Out Was a Year Ago. How do I Start Again" article has "start working out" as the slug: blog.onepeloton.com/start-working-…

So maybe they were trying to optimize this for "start working out"?

If so, there's a ton they could improve.

First up, this article is short. Really short.

It comes in at just over 500 words.

That tells me they probably hired a freelance writer to bang out 500 word articles, which will rarely get you anywhere.

It's too short to be useful, and very unlikely to get ranked by Google.

Looking at the current top results on Google, the #1 spot for "start working out" has 1751 words and goes into significantly more depth than the Peloton article.

Will Peloton's articles like this rank? No. They're too short, and don't provide enough value to be competitive.

The first thing Peloton should do: Go through their old content, and update it to make it more competitive.

When we do this for sites, we've seen anywhere from a 50-250%+ lift in organic traffic in the first 3-6 months. It's a hugely effective strategy.

Next, they need to change how they create new content.

Short articles aren't doing anything for them.

They should give new guidelines to the writers they have, or hire new writers who can do the long-form content they need to be competitive.

(Or hire us to do it, of course).

Once they have those two problems solved, they need to get into a more regular posting schedule.

The minimum cadence we've seen for good SEO results in a meaningful amount of time is 2 posts per week, but more always helps.

We have some clients doing 10+ posts per week 😱.

Since they have some $$$ to throw behind it, and it's a huge topic area, they could do 4 posts per while for a long time without running out of keywords to target.

We did 4 posts per week on Cup & Leaf, and that worked out pretty well:

growthmachine.com/blog/seo-case-…

The last thing Peloton doesn't seem to be doing is using any keyword strategy to inform what they write about.

A good SEO team could do some research on all the Wellness topics relevant to Peloton target customers, and then design a content strategy around those topics.

Anyway, all of these are VERY common mistakes I see on sites that are "sorta" doing content:

- Shallow content
- No keyword targeting strategy
- Irregular publishing
- Old content not doing anything

Fix those, and the Peloton blog (or yours) can grow like wild.

In case anyone (including @onepeloton!) wants us to help them do this: growthmachine.com/contact

And here's that video breakdown link again: