Looking back on the Hydration Summit after 3 months

When the Hydration Summit ended in June, I set reminders in my calendar to follow up on the metrics.  I wanted to see what impact time would have on the performance of the content at one month, three months, and six months.

Today I measured again and  compared my new measurements against the initial benchmarks taken just after the initial phase of the project ended on June 29th, 2012.  And what I found was interesting:

• All posts on the site are still indexed on Google and the total number of images that have been indexed increased from 127 to 146 of the total 180 on the site.
• Impressions in Google search results increased dramatically - the active session saw 6500 impressions delivering 250 visits to the site.  The 3 months following the active session created more than 170,000 impressions and more than 2500 visits to the site.
• Links in to the site increased from 1436 to 1653.
• Organic traffic has increased and is now bringing twice as many visitors to the site each month as it did during the active session of the project in June.

When I dug deeper into the top content I also discovered that the biggest movers were the gear reviews, specifically, the reviews of the 4 systems that we compared.  The top performing post was the review by Whitney of Outdoor Gear TV which is ranked as the #1 result on Google for both “hydration bladder review” and “best hydration bladder 2012“.  Other pages and posts on the Hydration Summit also rank in the top position for a few dozen other keyword phrases.

The Bottom Line

The impact of the content for this project, or any other that you may be part of, not only lives on but can deliver increased value over time if it’s optimized properly.  Content marketing can be a very solid foundation for building an audience around the interests that are shared between your brand and consumers.

Back by popular demand, the Hydration Summit will kick off again this month and will serve as the platform for an ongoing conversation about hydration on the trail.  Stop by and get involved in the conversation.