Milbank newsroom development

The beginning

Once I was hired, the newsroom section of the Milbank website became my responsibility. First, I had to wait for the new website rollover and then I could establish a schedule of two posts a month. Previously posts had been a combination of press releases and a few attempts at thought leadership. I expanded this to also include posts about types of products Milbank offers and projects the company has been involved in. This included articles like covering a case study of how Milbank helped develop EV charging infrastructure in Kansas City and how Milbank meter mains meet NEC 2020 requirements. My plan was to build up some content and then start looking at analytics and figuring out what worked.

Gaining steam

In addition, I went through and updated SEO for the previous blog posts including writing metadata (titles, descriptions and keywords), updating headers, adding images to articles and including more internal linking and CTAs where applicable. I also added social share images to give posts on social media more impact.

Reviewing posts, I could see that views were increasing, but none of the articles had quite the impact that I wanted.

The big idea

I talked to our product experts and asked them for ideas for articles based on pain points they heard from customers and others out in the field. That’s how we developed two posts focusing on technical aspects: the first explained the difference between a bypass and a disconnect and the second laid out SCCR and AIC (short-circuit current rating and ampere interrupting capacity respectively).

That did the trick! Newsroom views have increased substantially. In 2020, this section of the website had 6,580 pageviews, averaging 548 pageviews a month. In Q1 of 2021, the Newsroom generated 2,221 pageviews, an average of 740 views a month.

Organic traffic has increased significantly. Q4 2020 saw a 44% increase in organic traffic from the previous quarter. And Q1 2021 saw a 115% increase! So far, Q2 is on track to continue this growth.

My aim is to increase this to more than a 1,000 views a month in the next quarter, which I have already accomplished for April. This continued growth will help establish Milbank as an authority and educational source in the industry.