Throughout our decade-plus of experience at First Page, we have seen blogs heavily drive SEO success for brands. If done correctly, blogs are the “fresh” content your website needs to feed Google’s content algorithm. They also serve as a medium to create brand awareness, generate quality leads, and drive revenue to your business.
In a moment, we’ll be walking you through some of the best ways to build a blog that will drive incredible results.
But before that, we thought we’d touch on the benefits.
What Are the Benefits of Blogging for a Company?
Blogging can be beneficial to a company in many ways, but here are some of the most significant benefits:
The SEO Connection Between Blogs and Organic Traffic
Blogs are ideal for communicating with potential customers and connecting them to your brand in a variety of ways (way more than your core website landing pages can). You can publish different types of content (tutorials, case studies, and interviews) that will add value to your target audience and give them more info about your brand, what you offer, and the problems your product can solve for them.
Also, blogging helps keep your website regularly updated with fresh, high-quality content. Doing so feeds Google's search engine robots with new content to index and also sets yourself up for backlink opportunities from other industry-relevant websites.
Drive Quality Traffic and Leads
Blogging for a company is also a great way to target industry-relevant keywords and drive quality traffic to your website via search engine optimization. By creating actionable and SEO-optimized content regularly, you can turn your blog from just a publication into a traffic-generating machine.
Aside from driving traffic, you can also include a high-converting call to action at the middle or end of each blog post to convert your website traffic to qualified leads and then to customers.
Drive Revenue for Your Business
To connect with new and potential customers interested in purchasing your product, it's important to study your customer's search intent for each stage of the marketing funnel. Then you create actionable blog content that matches this intent.
For example, at the top of the funnel (TOFU), what troubles your customers the most? What problems are they looking to solve? What keywords are they searching at this stage? These questions all get to the intent of your customer’s search at this stage. Then repeat these types of thought patterns and questions for middle of the funnel (MOFU) and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). You can read more about the buyer’s journey and customer journey mapping and access a free template from HubSpot.
You can also use Google Analytics (GA), which provides you with in-depth data, such as:
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New visitors in GA — what pages they’re reading on your site
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Your top-performing top-of-the-funnel content
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Your top-performing middle-of-the-funnel content
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Your top-performing bottom-of-the-funnel content
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Lead information submitted on forms
With this information, you can optimize your blog content to fit your prospects’ interests at each stage and work to deliberately move people down stages from top to bottom — driving more revenue and growth to your business.
Boost Your Brand Reputation with Customers and Your Industry
Additionally, blogging for a company is an inexpensive way for brands to boost their reputation and position themselves as an industry leader. By publishing valuable and high-quality pieces of content, your business will serve as the go-to in your industry for accurate, quality, and high-level resources. The more your potential customers start seeing your brand appear in the searches they conduct on industry topics and questions, the more you’ll appear a trustworthy resource to them that they want to purchase from.
How Do I Build an Effective Blog for My Company?
So when people say, “I don’t understand the point of blogging.” We say: “It’ll drive traffic and new potential customers to your business website and close business.” Does this sound like something you’d like to do? Great, here’s how…
Know Your Target Audience
Before you create any piece of content, you must understand your targeted audience inside out. Audience research will give you more insight into who your target audience is and how to create conversion-focused blog content that will resonate with them and match their search intent.
Instead of making wild guesses about who they are, you can learn more about your audience's interests and major challenges, and how your product/services help solve them using qualitative and quantitative research. You can go the long haul and conduct this type of customer research by yourself, or you can seek the assistance of a content marketing agency with more experience to help you map some of these key strategic pieces.
Have SMART Content Marketing KPIs
You must have specific marketing goals tied to each of your marketing campaigns — including your content and blogging tactics. This will help you optimize your blog posts to get the best ROI. However, it is important to note that not all Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the same. To get the best ROI on your campaigns, you should focus on the right marketing KPIs. When tracking your blog ROI, make sure you’ve check for:
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Organic Traffic: The number of people that found your business via the search engine.
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Traffic-to-Lead Ratio: The number of web visitors that converted into leads.
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Lead-to-Customer Ratio: The number of leads that converted into paying customers
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Sales Revenue: How much revenue your blog has brought to your business.
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Customer Lifetime Value: The lifetime value of your existing customers.
Create a Solid Marketing Strategy
Having a blog does not guarantee you ROI on a content marketing channel, especially when you dive headfirst into creating content without a content marketing plan. To create a blog that will deliver incredible results for your business, you need to have a solid and comprehensive content game plan.
Before you begin blogging, clearly define your target audience. Doing this will help you shape your content marketing plan to fit your audience needs.
There are three types of audiences that your blog content should cater to. They are:
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Decision-Makers: These are your direct customers and they are on your blog because of their interest in your products and services. This is the audience with different search intent and purchasing stages/marketing funnels that we mentioned earlier.
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Influencers: This type of audience learns more about your product simply because they want to test it and introduce it to their audience. They are also likely content creators themselves with their own online publication or social channels.
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Supporters: They are frequent consumers of your blog content because they find it valuable and keep returning to read your content.
Additionally, your content marketing plan should include a list of industry-relevant topics that you’ll be covering. At First Page, we create a “Publisher Theme” that dictates the different content pillars your blog will focus on and the percentage of content a month that will comprise each pillar. For example, your pillar might be “New Technology” since this is a top keyword for you, so you write 40 percent of your content calendar on this pillar. When creating your content calendar, this Publisher Theme helps you lay out the number of pieces each month and what the topics need to be to match your content pillar mix.
Create Top-Notch Brand-Relevant Content
According to WordPress statistics, WordPress users alone create over 70 million new posts every month. With this high volume, your blog posts must be very in-depth, engaging, and backed with data to stand out. Usually, you want to choose topics that haven’t been covered hundreds of times before, and if they have been written a lot, your blog post needs to be the BEST. You can achieve this by analyzing what blog posts on the first page of Google cover and then make yours better. We also love the trick of using your own data to create data-driven content (such as survey results or internal data captured by users). This type of content is highly shareable because it is unique to ONLY your brand and is often picked up by PR and media outlets too, increasing your backlink profile (a major Google algorithm signal).
Creating clever and unique blog posts ideas and then managing the entire production from editing to choosing images to posting can be very tedious and time-consuming. You need to likely hire an internal Head of Content or Content Marketing Manager, multiple freelance writers, and an editor at minimum. These are the pieces that companies find the most challenging for content marketing — in a study done by Forrester, about 60 percent of B2B marketers struggle with creating engaging content.
To create new blog posts that attract highly relevant customers, you’ll also need to research target keywords in your industry. After that, you’ll need to write, polish, and promote each blog post. You can choose to build this internal team at your company, or you can outsource your blog production to a content marketing agency that’ll help you create high-level blog posts to:
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Match your user intent and buyer’s journey
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Provide answers to audience questions
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Provide insight and value to your audience
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Provide real-world examples and analogies
Ensure Your Blog Is Fully SEO-Optimized
Optimizing your blog content for search engines will help drive organic traffic to your website. To optimize your blog, you need to research queries that your target audience is searching for using a free program like Google Adwords or premium tools likeSEMrush or Ahrefs. We recommend creating an entire spreadsheet of keywords you can pull from for blog posts ideas but also thinking through your purchase-intent SEO keywords first and then content ideas to solve them. You can read more about what we mean with this type of keyword research in our Content and Keyword Philosophy.
Also, you need to incorporate these relevant keywords into the body copy in a natural way without “keyword stuffing” and include an SEO-optimize title, alt text, image title, meta description, and other on-page optimizations.
Format Your Blog to Make It Readable
Increasing your blog’s readability will aid easy communication with your audience, boost your conversion rate, AND your search engine ranking.
To make your blog readable, you need to write strong and clear paragraphs. Your main paragraphs must express a core idea while the subordinate paragraphs should provide more information about the core idea. It’s a good idea to break up large chunks of content with bullets, blockquotes, sections, images, or rich media like infographics and video. Additionally, each section needs to use H1, H2, and H3 correctly for SEO.
You can use tools like Hemmingway Editor and Yoast to optimize the readability of your blog posts.
Have Clear Call to Action
Lastly, you need to add a CTA to your blog post. Adding a clear and strong call to action will help convert and drive first-time web visitors to your marketing funnels.
Whenever you’re adding a CTA to your blog, use strong command verbs and write in an active voice. Also, you should consider words that will evoke emotion and compel them to action. It’s also important to only include one link and “action” rather than multiple. For example, don’t ask people to download a piece of content AND at the same time contact you. Keep it simple.
A strong call to action must be very specific, benefit-oriented, and, most importantly, create a sense of urgency. It must also be positioned where it can be easily located. It can be at the top, within, or at the end of your post.
With our client work at First Page, we’ve tested CTAs at the bottom of blog posts and also within the blog post copy, closer to the top. We saw a huge jump in conversion with the CTAs that were included closer to the top versus the bottom of the post. Adding these in also skyrocketed our clients’ blog revenue. However, we still see CTAs covert at the bottom of blogs, so we recommend testing or using both.
Conclusion
Blogging is a smart way to establish a strong web presence for your business and drive incredible traffic and revenue results via organic search IF you approach blogging for your business the right way.
However, if you’re worried about creating engaging and SEO-optimized blog posts on a consistent basis, we got you covered. First Page specializes in providing businesses like you with a complete content marketing and SEO channel that work together to drive qualified traffic that converts to business revenue.
