By: Craig Spooner
Anyone looking to establish a successful website that consistently delivers organic traffic and builds your SEO needs to get their blog on. Still not buying it? Well, I’d be happy to set the record straight! Below is a list of the many benefits of keeping your blog up-to-date with relevant content for your ideal buyers:
1) Indexing New Pages to Your Site: More, More, More!
Think about how many pages are currently housed on your website. Can you count them all on two hands? Now, think about how often you update content on those pages. Has it been more than a month? A few months? A year or more?
Every time a new blog post is published on your site, Google (or another search engine) is indexing one more page on your website. Why is this important? Every one of these pages is another opportunity to show up in one of your prospects’ search-engine results for that particular topic. By creating a consistent posting schedule, you show that your website is active, cueing Google to crawl your site more frequently to see what content you’ve published and index those pages for popularity, authority, and relevance among your competitors. Curious where you currently stand amongst your competitors? Check out this link and see how your website is doing!
2) Creating Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy: If You Build it, They Will Come!
Clients are often overwhelmed when we mention building out their SEO strategy. They may not know where to start or they may not be fully sold on just how powerful SEO truly is. I am here to tell you that investing the time, thought, and effort will pay dividends when it comes to attracting those looking for a solution like yours. If you aren’t doing it, someone else is.
Blogging allows you to define solution-oriented keywords related to your blog content and attach them to your post via blog content, URL titles, image alt-tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. By attaching keywords to these areas on your page, you’re telling Google to qualify your site as a valid source of information on that subject. Continually indexing quality content will not only improve the findability of that singular piece of content, but will improve the overall SEO ranking of your website. Google will continue to recognize your site as more and more reliable due to the frequency at which you create content and add authoritative weight to that content based on how well you tag. The ultimate goal is to secure the top ranking for specific keywords, as that top link garners nearly 70% of search results clicks. By focusing your keywords on the goals and challenges of your ideal buyer, you can begin to carve out a space for your company in organic search results.
However, don’t assume this will happen overnight! Improving your SEO through blogging requires consistency. What’s more, by linking your blog posts to valid educational resources both in and outside of your company, you can create a sphere of influence that facilitates dialogue with other like-minded companies and publications, helping stoke the SEO ranking for both parties.
3) Social Media Presence: Promote That Content!
If you’re blogging correctly—meaning you’re creating the right content for your target audience(s) by addressing their goals, needs and challenges—then you need to be consistently sharing your content across appropriate social networks. Every time you post a blog, you’re creating something that your prospects can share on social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube. This helps your company gain exposure to new audiences across your followers’ networks while demonstrating your company’s willingness to put high-quality, helpful content online for the world to consume.
Blog content also contributes to your social media presence. Instead of spending time to generate original content for your followers, use your blog as a hopper for social media fodder. This will help drive traffic to your blog posts and social channels at the same time, giving your stats a boost across the board.
4) Increasing Traffic to CTAs: More Leads!
Your blog is one of the most effective locations on your website for placing calls to action (CTAs), since it is oftentimes a visitor’s first stop on your site. By increasing the visibility of your blog (and by association, your site as a whole) through on-page SEO, you are increasing the numbers of eyes on those conversion paths.—which means more of these visitors will raise their hands and convert into leads. These CTAs can be any content offer that relates to your blog topic: ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, infographics. Just be sure the content being offered addresses a similar or related topic as the blog post. This dramatically increases the likelihood of securing a conversion and moving that prospect through the funnel.
Testing CTAs throughout your blog posts provides invaluable intelligence into how your audience views the content they are consuming. (Did they stay a while or did they jet in under a minute?) If a blog post on your site has a lot of views but is producing very few conversions on the featured CTA, it might be a good time to test a new CTA, or possibly redesign or rewrite that content to be more in line with what your blog is covering.
5) Establishing Authority: Add to Your Google Juice!
So now you’ve started indexing more pages to your site, you’ve created and are following through with an optimization strategy for each blog post, and you’re sharing that content across your social channels to build your audience and spread your message. So, what’s next? Well, it’s simple really: keep indexing, keep optimizing, and most importantly, KEEP BLOGGING.
By continually providing content that your prospects and users need and want, you continue to bring value to those who visit your site, dramatically increasing your chances of closing a sale when they are ready, not to mention earning thought-leadership street cred. When Google recognizes that you’re not a one-and-done blogger, it will reward you for it by improving your page ranking over time. The effort you put in today will pay off in the future.
Time for a fun fact: Roughly 70% of PRP’s blog traffic each month is actually views of older posts, many of them months old. Same goes for the leads generated in a current month: nearly 75% of the conversions on our website occur on blogs that were published in previous months. (And yes, we do continually share those on social media, and we do update those CTAs!)
Quick recap: if you’re not blogging, start right now. My suggestion to you is this: create a posting schedule and stick with it. If you hold yourself to four blog posts a month for one year, that’s 48 new pages you’ll have indexed to your website by the end of the year. This will give you countless opportunities to promote blog content you’ve worked so hard to create. When in doubt, return here and reread these posts to ensure you’re minding your P’s and Q’s of blogging!
Thank you for sharing!