Business blogging is an interesting concept. Many businesses have a blog, and yet, in most cases, there isn’t much planning going into how those blogs fit into larger business goals. Someone on the team is just assigned to publish content regularly, and that’s what they do.
A business blog is usually an island within a company: There’s likely, not much measuring, so no one has any idea if it is generating any traffic, sales, or rankings.
And yet, despite a lack of planning or measuring, there may be some good traffic coming.
Blogging is a good way to achieve “aссidental rankings” (those you didn’t necessarily plan for) and discover more search-driven sales channels. But many business owners or marketing managers have no idea what their blogs are ranking for. Consequently, there’s no buying journey set up for someone who lands on a blog post.
Clicks may come, but a blog remains an island. So, how can you include your blog in your overall marketing strategy to convert those clicks?
Step 1: Identify your blog’s current rankings that may bring sales
In other words, let’s see if there’s anything to worry about in the first place. Normally, the good old 20/80 rule works for blogs as well: About 20% of your content will be bringing 80% of your traffic. So, you need to know what 20% of your blog content actually does bring traffic.
Here’s a quick way to do that in Google’s Search Console:
Navigate Performance > Create a filter to see all the pages that contain “blog” (or whatever domain or subdomain you have your blog at) and click on the “Pages” tab.
The list is going to be sorted by the number of clicks your blog is driving.
Step 2: Plan your buying journeys from your blog
Make sure your blog makes it clear that this is a business blog and you are selling something. Define the major conversion funnels for your readers to follow.
At the very least, there should be a site-wide call to action (CTA) inviting readers to check your product or products, but the best idea is to create contextual CTAs and lead generation forms, which could better align with the searchers’ intent.
Hubspot is a great example of contextual CTAs that differ in each article and engage readers by providing “upgrades” to the article content:
There are many more content-based B2B lead generation strategies, but contextual CTAs work in e-commerce and retail as well.
HomeDepot is another prime example of including contextual CTAs (and automating them). They always show related products right next to each of their guides. Not only are these products actually helpful for following the tutorial and solving the searcher’s problem, they also create the right expectation that this content has a business behind it:
Look at your blog and open any individual article. Do you offer readers ways from that blog to follow the sales funnel? You may also want to set up a heat-map and button click tracking to better understand what your blog readers interact with on your blog post.
Step 3: Revive lost rankings
An important reminder: Blogs inevitably lose rankings.
The essence of any blog is that the more content you add, the further your older content is moving down the archive, away from the home page. And gradually, but inevitably, that content is going to lose rankings.
hus, checking your blog’s traffic and rankings should be done regularly because blogs tend to lose rankings over time. You can do that using the same tools. Search Console has a “Compare” option allowing you to see pages losing clicks…
Click the “Click difference” header twice to sort by pages that lost the most clicks. You can only go as far as 16 months back, though.
And again, once you set up tracking, the Moz Pro rank tracker will tell you exactly which keywords are losing rankings. You can compare your current positions to what you had when we first started recording any particular keyword.
So now that you have a list of articles that are losing rankings, what to do with those?
Is this something that can be saved?
First of all, figure out if this is something worth saving. There will always be rankings that you can just let go of. These include old news or press releases, articles that stand no chance of converting readers into buyers, expired product reviews or listicles, etc.
Update the content
If it looks like a page that is ranked for something with transactional potential, think about whether you should update that content to align it better to those keywords as well as relevant contextual CTAs. Maybe there’s a new video you created after writing that article, so now you can add it there.
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