7 Tips for Business Blogging: Boost Traffic & Lead Gen

7 Blogging Tips to Generate Traffic and Leads for Your Business

If you operate a business website of any kind, it’s important to access a reliable and consistent source of online traffic. While producing quality products and services is the true foundation of every business, you need energy coming into your business to generate leads and promote sales.

If you’re looking for a repeated source of highly targeted traffic, one method stands above the rest — building a business blog. The following statistics show why blogging for business is such a powerful tool:

• There are more than 600 million blogs out there, or just under 1/3 of all websites.
• Businesses that blog have 126% higher lead growth than those that don’t.
• 60% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.

Why it’s important for every business to have a blog

Human readers and search engine bots often value the same thing. They want valuable, relevant, and fresh content. Blogs deal with all of these elements.

Whatever industry you’re involved with, blogging for business offers the following benefits: traffic generation, building authority, and converting traffic into leads.

Generate traffic

Creating a blog is an effective way to generate online traffic. When you write valuable posts and publish them on a regular basis, you have a great opportunity to cover lots of keywords. If you produce blog content based on the subjects your customers are searching for, you will get noticed by people and search engines alike. This helps to improve click-through rates, opening up leads and giving you access to more sales opportunities.

Build authority

Building a business blog can help make you an authority in your field. Instead of simply listing your products and services, you can inform potential customers about the issues surrounding your business. You can offer knowledge, mention industry trends, and elevate your business in the eyes of the market. Posts that educate customers about particular subjects are often more effective than outright promotions.

Turn traffic into leads

Blog posts are an effective way to transform interest into action. You can speak directly with your audience, building rapport and trust.

Converting traffic from articles into leads can be an effective process using pop-ups and embedded forms. Pop-ups serve as an excellent attention-grabbing tool, encouraging visitors to fill out a form for additional information, resources, or subscriptions. Embedded forms within article text also streamline the data collection process, providing visitors with the opportunity to quickly subscribe or leave their contact details without navigating away from the page

1. Always start with keyword research

When it comes to blogging for business, the importance of keyword research cannot be overstated. When you identify the search queries used by your customers, you can target these terms directly with your blog posts. Instead of producing content randomly or based on personal interest, you should identify keywords first.

There are lots of keywords associated with each business, so you need to be smart about what you target. For example, while some keywords generate lots of traffic, ranking highly for them on Google can be almost impossible. Depending on the nature of your business, it’s often best to target industry-specific keywords, local keywords, and novel keyword combinations.

Keywords connect businesses with potential customers to drive traffic

While the technical details of SEO cannot be ignored, keywords create a link between market interest, blog content, and product offerings. When you know what your audience is searching for, you can define your content strategy and choose your blog topics accordingly.

Choosing the right keywords is critical

Finding the right keywords is not always easy, but it’s definitely worth it. SEO tools can be used to measure and track search queries over time, including Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, and many others. You can find out what people are searching for and filter results based on your industry and location.

Keyword difficulty, volume, and CPC explained

Not all keywords have the same value. When tracking down keywords to create blog posts, it’s important to look into keyword difficulty, search volume, and CPC data.

Keyword Difficulty measures how challenging it is to rank highly for a specific keyword in search results. KD is assessed on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher the KD value, the more difficult it is to achieve a high ranking in search results for that particular keyword. The difficulty score is calculated based on various factors, such as the number of backlinks, website authority, page word count, and other parameters.

Volume refers to the volume of search queries. This parameter indicates how many times a specific keyword has been entered into a search engine over a specific period, typically on a monthly basis. The higher the volume, the more popular the keyword phrase.

CPC (Cost Per Click) is a metric that indicates the estimated cost of a single click on an advertisement associated with a specific keyword, within the context of advertising campaigns on search engines. It is crucial to consider this metric if you plan to engage in paid advertising. When analyzing keywords for advertising purposes, it is not necessarily essential to factor in their KD — in this case, it is more important to rely on volume and your own advertising budgets.

2. Choose keywords to drive organic traffic — low difficulty and high volume

High-traffic keywords are not always suitable for an SEO campaign, and that’s because of a very high Keyword Difficulty (KD). Not every high-volume query has a high KD, but more often than not, that’s the case. If you are not ready to invest in an exhausting struggle for the top 10 positions on a popular keyword against websites that are already authoritative and currently dominate the rankings, it is wiser to choose queries with lower search volume and a lower KD.

Not only are these terms easier to rank for, but they’re also a better way to attract targeted leads.

We will provide an example with the key phrase “digital marketing agency.” If we look up this keyword, we will see the following data:

It has a very large volume but also a very high KD. There is significant competition, and it will require a substantial amount of time and money to break into the top 10.

However, we can add a small clarification, such as “for small business,” and the situation will change:

As you can see, the volume for the key phrase is lower, but the KD is also not the highest — there are much better chances to appear in the top 10.

Why these keywords are important

Regardless of your location or industry sector, there is a relationship between keyword difficulty and traffic volume. While some terms generate more traffic, the likelihood of ranking well for these words is highly unlikely. In contrast, other terms may be relatively easy to rank for, but they generate an insignificant amount of traffic. When doing SEO, getting this balance right is a big part of the battle. The best keywords are the ones with low keyword difficulty and high volume in organic search results.

How to find organic keywords

There are lots of effective ways to track down these excellent keywords, but some expertise is required. When researching keywords, it’s important to analyze the terms your competition and customers use. As mentioned above, it’s important to analyze keyword difficulty and search volume to find the right words for your business.

SEMrush and Ahrefs are powerful tools for business blog management. Both tools provide a direct assessment of keyword difficulty and search volume. Additionally, Ahrefs assists in estimating the approximate number of backlinks needed for your page to appear in the top 10.

Once you have the difficulty score and volume data for each keyword, you can Google it to make sure it’s relevant to your business. Then, you can create a blog piece that’s capable of competing with others in the top three search results. Along with content relevance, quality, and length, it’s important to consider backlinks before publishing the article.

3. Choose keywords for Google Ads — high difficulty, high volume, and low CPC

If the keyword you wish to target is too difficult to rank for organically, you can try using Google Ads. Instead of relying on organic traffic, Google Ads and other platforms allow you to pay for specific keywords. When doing this, you are seeking terms with any keyword difficulty and high volume but low CPC. While these terms can be hard to come by, there are lots of great opportunities out there.

Why these keywords are important

If you choose to pay for commercial ads, you need to leverage keywords to your benefit. According to Google themselves, the best way to build a keyword list is to:

• Think like one of your customers.
• Target customers for specific products.
• Use general keywords related to your business.
• Group related keywords for different ads.
• Use symbols in keywords to split terms.

When you have a list, it’s important to measure keyword difficulty against cost. You can target difficult words with high volumes using Google Ads, but this approach normally comes at a price. Instead, tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can be used to identify and track relevant search terms with low CPC.

How to find keywords for ads

When you’re blogging for business, it’s important to reduce your expenses with high-value, low-competition keywords. There are lots of ways to find these terms, with different methods available during the research and bidding stages.

Use tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to search for keywords. When searching for queries for advertising, focus on volume and CPC.

Expand your advertising campaign with long-tail keywords. These words often have lower competition but can also generate valuable traffic that converts into leads.

Identify and include negative keywords to filter out unwanted traffic.
If necessary, add location-based keywords to target local audiences.
Work with Google Ads and explore what the platform can offer you. Often, it can suggest really good keyword options based on your campaign settings.

Check these keywords in Ahrefs or SEMrush by measuring their volume and CPC. Review the intent of surrounding content to ensure its relevance, and create an expert article on the topic with a catchy title. Once you’ve captured the attention of your target audience with the article itself, you can launch a Google Ads campaign to drive traffic and create pop-ups to turn visitors into leads.

4. Write with the customer journey in mind

Google’s algorithms may be shrouded in mystery, but its intentions are crystal clear. More than anything else, Google wants to promote a positive customer experience. When you’re building a blog or creating content of any kind, it’s vital to keep this in mind. Instead of trying to trick the search engines or guessing how they work, focusing on the customer journey is a clear pathway to success. Try to identify each stage of this journey, crafting unique content to capture attention, funnel interest, and promote action among your readers.

Explore and address key pain points

If you want the attention of the market, you need to reach out to them on their own terms. While the details of this process vary widely based on the nature of your business, the underlying mechanism is the same. You want to find, address, and target specific pain points to motivate action and drive sales.

A pain point is nothing more or less than a problem that your audience faces. To identify these points, you can talk to existing clients and look at Google reviews and forums to get a read on your target audience. When blogging for business, you need to identify these issues and present your products and services as a solution.

Analyze your competitors

When you’re mapping the customer journey, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Even niche industries have competition, and there’s a lot you can learn by researching their approach. Find out who your biggest competitors are, learn how they structure their content, and use this information to brief writers and designers. Understanding how your competitors work is an effective blog strategy for any business.

5. Implement on-page SEO to build organic traffic

Many blogging tips for businesses focus on organic traffic through on-page SEO. Keyword research is the starting point, but there are lots of creative ways to find, engage, and motivate your market. From how you structure your blog to breadcrumbs, pagination, and metadata, the following SEO elements are among the most powerful.

Structure your content

Creating a strong headline (H1) for each blog post is not enough. You also need to include subheadings, which are organized by hierarchy from H2 down to H6. Long blog posts are likely to feature H1 to H4, and shorter posts may only include H1 and H2. Along with these simple formatting elements, you can also structure blog posts by focusing on design, images, media, bullet point lists, and paragraph structure.

Use breadcrumbs and pagination

When it comes to crafting a blog, navigation is the key to usability. Breadcrumbs offer a visual map of your website’s structure, helping your readers to move between blog posts and product pages with ease.

Pagination is another navigation concept, describing a sequence of connected pages with similar content. Both of these tools promote on-page SEO and a better user experience.

Create catchy and unique meta titles and descriptions

Back-end optimization is central to many blogging tips. Meta tags are simple code snippets that inform search engines about the content of your blog.

Title tags name your page, and meta description tags describe your page to search engines. Meta titles work best around 50-60 characters in length, and meta descriptions up to 165 characters.

Meta title tags can be displayed as part of search engine snippets, so it’s important to keep them relevant and write them well. According to Google, meta descriptions can also be used in snippets if Google thinks “they give users a more accurate description than can be taken directly from the page content.

6. Focus on backlinks for effective off-page SEO

SEO is often split into on-page SEO and off-page SEO. The former is focused on the internal structure and content of your blog, and the latter is about how you connect to other websites. Google identifies and rates linking structures through its Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which are often described with the EAT acronym — expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Backlinks from established sites help to promote trust, and blogs have an important role to play. Key blog posts add fresh quality content, attracting backlinks and boosting SEO. HARO can be a great way to receive quality backlinks, with this service connecting journalists with expert sources for the benefit of both. This can be a very effective addition to a blog strategy for business.

Craft posts for high-authority websites

If you want to receive backlinks from quality sources, you need to produce quality content. One of the best ways to promote a business blog is to write posts for other authority pages. You can also reach out to industry websites asking for links and use specialist services that offer backlinks. Editorial links that haven’t been asked for or paid for are best, but they can be very difficult for a small business to get.

Always avoid low-quality backlinks

When it comes to backlinks, quality is more important than quantity. To determine your EAT value, Google measures the quality of incoming links based on their relevance and origin. While it may seem enticing, getting lots of low-quality backlinks does more harm than good. Even if you receive short-term benefits, your blog is likely to face long-term penalties. As your business blog is linked to your company website, poor-quality links can have an adverse effect on your entire operation.

To ensure quality backlinks, you need to focus on relevance. The highest quality backlinks use relevant keywords within the anchor text, and they come from related businesses or organizations. One effective strategy is to produce a valuable resource or become a trusted source of information. For example, writing a small web app that other businesses link to because it helps their customers, or delivering insights into industry trends before the competition.

To identify that a website has low quality and is definitely not suitable for publication, you can use special plugins and services that automatically detect the trust levels of search engines towards sites. You can utilize Ahrefs to determine the Domain Rating (DR) of websites. DR is a metric that allows you to assess the authority of a domain in the eyes of search engines. The higher the score, the better. We recommend obtaining links from sites with a DR of at least 40.

Also, analyze the site independently. Check the correctness of the layout and loading speed, and look for the presence of advertisements (too much is not good). Try using search to find articles on the site with prohibited topics (e.g., casinos). If the site has good metrics, no dubious publications, and its content is relevant to the theme of your resource, consider the possibility of placing a publication with a link on it.

Posting links on forums and social media can also be effective, but they need to be relevant to your products, industry, or location.

To remove low-quality backlinks, you should periodically collect your backlink data with SEMrush or Ahrefs, disavow or ask Google not to use certain links, and track your links over time to make sure they’re clean.

Working with an SEO partner is a great way to ensure quality links, as they can leverage existing relationships with third-party websites.

7. Implement lead generation tools

As mentioned above, SEO involves three separate stages. Once you have captured the attention of your audience via keywords and engaged their interest with content, you need to transform this interest into action. There are lots of great lead generation tools out there, with various techniques used to engage your readers and push them into your sales pipeline.

Use smart pop-ups and embedded CTAs

Lead generation tools are designed to capture contact information and deliver it to your marketing and sales teams. Smart pop-ups are a great option, popping up over your main browser window to capture attention at defined moments. Pop-ups with CTAs can be displayed to potential customers based on programmed triggers, such as specific exit points, time on site, and defined scrolling behavior. They can be used to capture emails, offer codes and discounts, or promote new products and services.

Integrate chat widgets for defined readers

Along with pop-ups, chat widgets can be a great way to capture leads. You can personalize these widgets for your specific site and audience. For example, if people have scrolled 50% of a blog article, they are invested in your message and more likely to offer their contact details. Instead of annoying your entire audience by adding widgets indiscriminately, you can appeal directly to a targeted market segment. When doing on-page SEO, small details like this make all the difference.

Blogging tips for businesses — putting it all together

Creating a blog is one of the smartest ways to generate traffic and get leads for your business. It gives you a unique opportunity to create consistent, high-quality content related to your industry. Not only does this enhance the user experience, but it also gives Google and other search engines a clear and obvious reason to index and rank your website.

With the following blogging tips for businesses, your blog can become a powerful SEO tool:

• Conduct keyword research.
• Drive organic traffic — low difficulty, high volume.
• Implement Google Ads — high difficulty and volume, low CPC.
• Focus on the customer journey.
• Use smart on-page SEO tactics.
• Get backlinks for off-page SEO.
• Use lead generation tools.

When you implement these blogging tips, you can get ahead of the competition. As the internet gets increasingly saturated with content, creating a business blog makes more sense than ever before.

Jan 23, 2024