Blogging for businesses: does it still work?

I know what you’re thinking. Blogs are a bit 00s aren’t they? What with social media, emails and videos, surely blogging for businesses has as much relevance today as MySpace.

And yet more than 80% of internet users say they regularly read blogs.

The fact is, blogging is still an effective SEO tool for digital marketing. Even if things have changed.

And I’ll prove it to you.

Yes, blogging for businesses still works…but it’s changed

I’ll just say the fact you’re here reading this (hopefully) is a testament to the fact that blogging still works.

I think a lot of the reasons people question the value of blogging for business is that at one point businesses were writing all kinds of random stuff that had nothing to do with what they did, just to get traffic to their website.

When the traffic didn’t turn into anything else, it became a bit like, “well what’s the point”.

Which is the main point to take away. Yes blogging works. But only if you do it with a purpose.

Another reason people fell out with blog writing is that businesses viewed blogs as something they knew they kind of had to do, but didn’t want to put any real investment into it.

So you ended up with the work experience guy writing uninformed, thin content that only demonstrated they didn’t really know what they were talking about.

Again, this just resulted in blogs being ignored by search engines and customers. 

Google algorithm updates, mostly the Helpful Content update and EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authority & Trustworthiness) updates have changed blogging for the better.

The Helpful Content Update rewarded content that was written by people, for people and not as a way of manipulating search results to get more traffic.

A part of this was to assess the topic of a website, its audience and whether the content being created matched the primary topic or topics of the website. It was also to make websites focus on content users would genuinely find helpful, and gave away expertise or a point of view.

The EEAT update took this a step further.

EEAT requires a website to demonstrate that it has experience and expertise in the topics that it’s writing about. So for example you wouldn’t expect an article about seo blog writing to come from an accountant.

If you’re going to see any benefit from blogs now, you have to show expertise and authority. Basically, prove you know what you’re talking about.

Which, when you think about it, is what should have been happening anyway.

Take us for example, the only reason you should pay attention to this blog, or any other blog we write, is because we have the expertise to know what we’re talking about.

And we can prove it. Our case studies and client results are proof that we meet Google standards for helpful content and EEAT.

So if you get blogging right, it can still give you lots of benefits.

Why blogging still works for SEO

Better keyword ranking (for a broader range of keywords)

Let’s be honest, if all your website ranks for is your brand and main product keywords, you’re not going to rank for much.

Worse, you won’t be visible for long tail keywords that people use when they’re researching a product or service.

Blog writing allows you to target a broader range of keywords that you can show up for and get the attention of your audience.

More organic traffic

Along with more visibility from more keywords comes more organic traffic.

This is important because getting more people to your website earlier in the buyer journey increases your chances of winning new customers and making more sales.

Without blogs, this is traffic you’d never be able to get.

Supports topical authority and improves internal linking

Topical authority is essentially how well your website covers a particular topic and demonstrates your expertise.

Imagine you’re Google trying to decide between two websites and which to show to a user.

One website has a single service page.

They other has the service page, case studies and a tonne of relevant articles that show readers how to solve problems.

Which website are you more likely to show?

Blogging also helps with internal linking, which is a huge part of SEO.

Internal linking makes it easier for search engines to find, crawl and rank pages on your website.

It also gives your website structure.

By creating relevant blogs linked to a particular topic you can increase internal links around your site and improve its overall authority.

More indexable content and crawlability for search engines

The more indexable content you have (pages that are indexed in Google’s filing cabinet) the easier it is for Google to understand what your website is about. This can make it easier for Google to rank your pages higher in search.

It also gives you more chances to rank highly for a broader range of keywords.

Business benefits of blogging

Blogging for SEO is one thing. But any business owner wants to know what the ultimate goal is, and that’s usually how will this help us get more customers?

Blogging for businesses helps here too.

Attract qualified leads to your website earlier in the buyer journey

If all your website has is a collection of service or product pages, you’re highly reliant on being found at the end of the buyer journey, when the customer is ready to buy.

This is risky. Especially in industries with long buying cycles, high costs or when customers are likely to do a lot more research before choosig a vendor.

The most obvious risk, is they’ve already come across your competition, who are writing blogs and creating content, during that research phase.

They know who those businesses are now. Your business, which hasn’t been blogging, is an unknown they’ve come across right at the end.

Having a blog makes it more likely you’ll attract leads earlier in the buyer journey so they already know, and trust, you by the time it comes to making a buying decision.

Build trust and authority with your audience

Especially in B2B, trust and authority are everything.

If you’re spending £1,000s a month with a vendor, you want to be sure they understand the market and the problems you’re trying to solve.

Essentially, that they’re experts in what they do.

Blogs are a great of doing that. By taking real customer problems (like understanding blogging or how to do SEO) and turning them into educational and engaging content you can become an authority in your industry.

Gives you content to repurpose

Creating regular content is hard going. Trust me, I know.

With so many digital marketing platforms you need to feed, it’s becoming more about working smarter, not harder.

One of the great things about blog is that most good ones, the ones that demonstrate EEAT, are longer form content and cover a couple of different topics (or themes within the same topic).

Which means they’re ripe for being broken down and repurposed into content for your other platforms.

You can easily break a single blog down into 5-6 LinkedIn posts, an instagram story and a video script (all without creating anything new).

By focusing on creating a single great piece of content like a blog, you’ll be able to break it up into smaller pieces and create more volume.

Can improve conversion rates with CTAs

Final reason blogs are good for business. You can convert more leads with a variety of CTAs.

Content marketing isn’t just about going for the hard sell all the time. It’s about getting your customer’s details and nurturing them down into becoming a paying customer.

Blogs give you an opportunity to target lighter CTAs at your audience to encourage them to make micro commitments.

This could be signing up to a newsletter. Alerts whenever you release a new blog. Or to download a guide.

Once you have those details you’re able to send nurture emails to keep your audience primed for buying down the road.

But without blogs and other types of content, you can’t do this.

SEO blogging tips

So how do you make business blogging work?

Consider search intent and user experience

We’ve written another blog about search intent, but it essentially means understanding what your audience expects to find at the end of a search, and creating the content to match.

Blogs are ideal content for informational searches. How to guides are a great example of how blogs can attract readers based on search intent.

You should also think about the user experience. A blog doesn’t have to be a wall of text (who wants that?)

Instead use headers to break copy up and video or visuals to give a different element to your written content.

Be strategic with topic clusters and pillar pages

Pillar pages and topic clusters are an old SEO tactic that takes a single topic (like SEO) and breaks it down into its component parts.

Your pillar page is an all singing all dancing guide to a topic. Like our complete guide to SEO for businesses.

Your topic clusters are the supporting content that give more details and context to the different topics within the pillar page.

This blog, for example, is a supporting piece of content for our SEO pillar page.

These topic clusters don’t just help with SEO by targeting topical keywords and building authority. They help to keep your content organised, stop you creating random blogs on random topics and create a better platform for your internal linking strategy.

Focus on original, helpful content

If you’re going to remember one thing about blogging for businesses after reading this, let it be this point.

Every piece of content you create should serve a purpose, it should be helpful to your audience, and it should be original.

When I say original, it doesn’t have to be a completely original topic (you’d actually do well to come up with one).

But you can take an original view of an existing topic.

Take this blog again as an example.

They are loads of blogs out there talking about the benefits of blogging for business.

But this is my thoughts and opinions, based on my own experience, no-one else’s

That can be enough.

Biggest blogging for business mistakes

I’ve already mentioned that many businesses treated blogs as a must do, but give little thought to it exercise in the past.

And I’ve seen plenty of mistakes when it comes to business blogs.

Here’s a few you’d do well to avoid.

Low quality or thin content

Like I’ve said before, low quality content doesn’t cut it anymore.

If you’re going to create a blog, map out everything you could talk about.

Use your previous experience, conversations with clients and anecdotes to create quality insights that will satisfy your readers, and Google.

Ignoring SEO essentials

Keywords, header structure, image alt texts.

There is a lot of SEO work that goes into helping a blog rank in search engines besides the written content.

Not paying proper attention can mean even the best written blog gets lost in the basement of search results to gather dust.

Writing at random

How it used to be done. Pick a topic at random and go with it. 

If you’re going to have a blog for your business, I urge you to focus on creating content clusters and writing with a purpose.

Not only will you build topical authority and have a better chance of ranking. You’ll avoid the hassle of accidentally creating duplicate blogs that can harm your SEO efforts and waste your time.

Focusing too much on new content

Believe it or not, there can be such a thing as too much content.

Just look around the internet. There’s tonnes of it. And most of it doesn’t need to be there.

A big trap businesses fall into with their blog is they think keeping it updated means constantly creating new blogs.

No.

That’s how you can end up creating random topics just for the sake of it.

Instead, focus on evergreen content (content that’s relevant long term) and periodically go back and update it with new information, stats or quotes.

I promise you can see amazing results from updating existing content, and save yourself a load of time in the process.

Create an effective blog SEO strategy

So that’s the mistakes to avoid. Let’s go a little bit more about how to create an effective blog SEO strategy.

Start with goals

Like anything in your marketing you should start by asking, what’s the goal of these blogs?

Do you want to increase organic visibility? Attract more customers?

Decide what you want to achieve and if blogs are the best way to do it.

Do your keyword and competitor research

Keyword research is a huge part of business blogging. It’s not a case of a blog for every keyword anymore (thankfully) but they can give you ideas for what your customers are searching for.

It’s also good to see what your competition are writing about.

You don’t have to copy them (I actually you don’t do that) but can take a topic they’re writing about and put forward another opinion or take a different spin on topic.

Create a content plan

A content calendar is the best way to keep everything organised and your blog strategy on track.

Map out all the blogs you want to create over the next 3-6 months. Include titles, keywords, authors, writer briefs, anything you’ll need to keep things on track.

If anything comes up that’s outside of your content plan that isn’t urgent, it doesn’t get written.

Use on-page SEO to improve visibility

On-page SEO gives your blog the best chance of ranking.

Whether it’s using keywords properly, using headers in the right way or writing alt text on images, make sure you paying attention to the on-page SEO elements of your blog.

Track performance and improve

I think this is another reason businesses are sceptical about blogs. No one really knows how to track their performance.

A couple of key things are obviously keyword rankings and traffic.

This shows you whether you’re ranking for the keywords you’re targeting and that you’re actually bringing traffic to your website.

But beyond that there’s loads of things you can track with blogs.

Bounce rates and time on page are a couple of things.

If a user lands on a blog and leaves, that’s a sign your blog doesn’t meet their expectation or search intent. If they stay on the page for a long time, it’s a good sign your blog is engaging them.

Pages per session could be another thing to measure. If users are looking at multiple content pages in a session, it’s a sign they’re enjoying your content and reading more of it.

If they read one page and leave, it could be a sign that there’s a hole in your content strategy you need to plug.

You should also measure CTA clicks on your blog posts to ensure readers are taking the actions you want them to.

Let’s talk about AI in business blogging

So, how could it not be a blog about business blogging, and not mention AI.

Generative content has taken over conversions in content marketing since ChatGPT emerged. 

Since then, plenty of other generative chatbots have popped up claiming to help businesses right customer focused blogs that show authority and help you rank on search engines.

But it’s not as simple as that.

For one, chatbots are scraping existing content off the internet and repurposing it as a responce to your prompt. So there’s nothing oriiginal about it.

You also have to question if you trust a chatbot to demonstrate your business’ expertise better than the people who work for you.

Then there’s Google’s guidance on AI content.

While Google doesn’t strictly ban the use of AI content in search, it has stated that it will always favour original content written by and for humans over anything generated solely by AI.

So if you are going to use AI to create your business’ blog content, you should have a lot of human input over it before anything goes live.

Start seeing results from a business blogging strategy

I hope you’ve found this helpful and are in a position to start seeing better results from using blog SEO for your business.

If you want to take to us about how we as a search engine optimisation agency can improve your SEO or content strategy, you can always get in touch and talk to our team of experts.

If you’re not ready to talk to us, have a look through our other SEO content that will help to make you successful at search engine marketing.