Brands today need a strong online presence. In order to help your site rank better with search engines and bring in more traffic, you should have an ongoing blog program.
Websites with an active blog have 434% more indexed pages than those without and are 97% more likely to get backlinks to their websites.
But not all content is equal.
Here are nine tips to help you write the kind of enticing content that draws in new visitors and builds trust with your audience.
First, you need to know who you are writing for in order to write the kind of content your audience cares about. You should define the buyer personas for each decision maker and influencer of your products and services to establish a clear understanding of the different people groups most likely to become your customers.
Write content that appeals to different personas during their various stages of the buyer’s journey. Provide value that is buyer-centric (and not brand-centric) by always considering what the buyer gets out of the content.
Don’t write just one kind of post. While you may be most comfortable writing informative or promotional posts, it’s important to offer a variety of topics and formats. Explore video content for those buyers who would rather watch a two-minute pitch than read a blog.
Try covering industry news when interesting changes come up that may impact your buyers. B2B buyers often want to be better at doing their job, so look for ways you can help support their pain points and overcome their hurdles outside of your products or services.
Keep up with your old content so that many of your pieces become evergreen with year-round value and don’t get outdated. But don’t just commit to fixing old posts—create new content to supplement your best posts.
Updating old content can help revitalize pages that have a good track record and established SEO presence. It can also save you some content creation time while still giving you content to share with your audience on social media. Include backlinks to newer posts as you refresh old pages to help give a little more clout to your newer content.
Do your SEO homework to understand keyword strategy,
pinpointing the “low-hanging fruit”— or relevant keywords with a high search volume and low content saturation. For many of your pieces, let your keywords determine your title, topic and direction.
However, it’s much more important that you write for content than try to stuff in keywords. Google is very sensitive to “keyword stuffing” (the black hat practice of repeating keywords in an attempt to beat the search engine). With modern algorithms, keyword stuffing doesn’t look like quality content and does more ranking harm than good.
People will often choose to click or skip your article based on its name alone. Try to be creative in how you answer keywords with an enticing title so readers will want to click on your listing. While the keyword should be in your title to help with SEO, you still need to make your buyers curious enough to click.
Spend time crafting your titles and meta descriptions to make your audience curious. In most cases, you should focus on what the audience gets (“Learn how to…”) rather than what you’re offering (“We’ll show you how to…”).
Your blog is the perfect place to answer customer questions in depth. Just think of this as your extended FAQs section. Blogs answering common questions are more likely to be searched-for terms. Your buyers will likely use supportive content like this to share with their colleagues or boss when trying to make a business plan for implementing your solution.
While some questions may not have a straightforward answer (like pricing for a custom service), you can still provide an in-depth understanding of what impacts the outcome. B2B buyers are typically 57%-70% done with their research process before ever contacting sales.
And 90% of buyers say online content impacts how they make decisions, with 67% of their journey done digitally. Most buyers (62%) say web search is one of the first three resources used to start researching a solution, and 80% say they are more swayed by an article than an ad.
Don’t make your content look overwhelming
and time-consuming for the buyer to work through. Most of your audience is busy, and you want to respect their time.
Use visual breaks in the content by using plenty of headers and short paragraphs. Include images throughout your content to help support the concepts and keep them interested. Visual content is interpreted by the brain much faster than written content, so choose images that help convey the message, meaning or emotion you want to express.
Don’t just wing your content. List out keywords and topics you want to cover in an Excel or Google Sheets document. Build a content calendar to help you provide thoughtful content for your buyer personas on a variety of important topics. A content calendar helps keep you on schedule, organizes your thoughts and reduces the last-minute rush that often leads to half-baked concepts.
See how our content calendar and SEO-driven approach helped one Atlanta CPA firm increase organic search traffic by 744% and boost website visits by 310%.
Finally, know what’s working and what isn’t. You don’t want to waste time and money producing content your buyers don’t care about. Look at your top-performing posts and create more content along those lines.
If you want help with the content development process, SEO strategy or lead generation, Contact Jonathan Ebenstein at jebenstein@strategicseven.com
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