Blogging is a very common way to generate traffic through SEO. It's an embodiment of keyword strategies. A common misunderstanding is that SEO and blogs, which is an integral part of content marketing, are two separate things and that businesses only need to take care of their on page SEO. Businesses with this mentality are missing out on what business blogs can bring to the SEO table.
Why are business blogs important
There are close to 6 billion searches performed on Google everyday, and roughly 8% of them are questions, that is 480 million questions asked every day. Website pages, by their nature, aren't built to respond to questions (if they are, you'll either need a ton of pages, or your target is too niche). An exception to this are localized pages built with PHP, which we'll talk about in another blog.
Blogs, therefore are a good way to respond to various queries, without diluting the focus, branding, and story-telling of your site. They can be the key output for SEO keywords and SERP candidates. To put it simply and in a cheesy way, if there's a "one-in-a-million" chance for someone to land on one of your blogs per day, you have 480 visits per blog per day; and what if that blog is well optimized not only for SEO, but for conversion as well? You do the math.
How to find the right blog topics for your business
Keywords, simply put.
A good way to figure out how to come up with the right topic is to build a solid and substantial keyword research strategy and process, which should include keyword positions for your own site, difficulty of keywords, search volume, as well as competitor keyword gap.
A well done keyword research will be able to inform you on target market search intel, letting you know what topics are popular, and which topics are still "blue ocean" (relatively). Therefore it'll give you the most optimized return on investment.
Internal & External Linking
A lot of times the value of internal and external linking are neglected. A well designed internal linking structure doesn't only help Google crawl your site much more easily, it provides readers and visitors a logical nurturing experience. You would always want people to go from top of the funnel content to bottom of the funnel content, so they are logically taken through a persuasive path to be nurtured and converted into a potential buyer, a sales qualified lead.
External linking (to be differentiated from inbound links) serves a similar purpose by leverage content produced by other authorities in the industry. The goal, again, is to nurture visitors to leads, marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads.
Technical or Non-technical
Inevitably, there are various types of business blogs. A medical device company may write something far more technical than an eCommerce shoe company, at least based on our common sense judgement. Their market department may very well strategize their content strategy like so.
Although there is nothing wrong with it, it might not be the most fitting strategy in all cases. So how to find out if a business blog should focus on technical content, non-technical content, or both? It ultimately comes down to buyer personas.
The initial segmentation of buyer personas can provide a starting point of different types of business blogs, based on company offerings, target marketing, competitive edge/strength, etc..
Over time, a data-driven strategy can be derived from the feedback from different buyer-persona-based initiatives. As more and more data comes in, one will be able to design a content strategy according to the feedback and data from technical and non-technical business blogs.
Google Ads or Business Blogs
I think it's fair to say that Google Ads are expensive, but they do get results, and there's no denying that. However, business blogs can be a good supplement, if not an alternative, to Google Ads.
Even though business blogs take time to build SEO for your site, it's more everlasting (when you stop paying Google, you stop generating Google Ads leads).
I think a lot of us have experienced the low quality leads generated from Google, and depending on your industry, those low quality leads also cost you a few to a hundred dollars.
With business blogs, because you are targeting and responding to certain search queries, the visitors you get will be significantly more relevant to your business, and hence are easier to convert.
