Read on to discover how building a blog on your website can help with lead generation, attracting regular traffic, increasing conversion rates, and ultimately boosting your sales. 

What is business blogging?

Blogging has been around for decades but the term “blog” has undergone massive changes in the past few years. 

From being a platform to sharing personal thoughts and ideas on the internet, it has now expanded to the sphere of business marketing. 

Did you know that 80% of companies that use blogs for their marketing strategy claim they earned customers from their blogging efforts?

Business blogging is essentially a marketing strategy used by businesses to gain credibility and domain authority while attracting traffic to their business website.

Business blogging also builds brand visibility and awareness and contributes to a strong digital presence.

Does your business need a blog?

Here in Florida, there are 2.5 million small businesses which account for 98.6% of total businesses in the state.

With numerous businesses competing for visibility and awareness and gaining a foothold in their niche, online marketing is a powerful platform that brings favorable results. 

Building a business website is the first step in creating a credible online presence and brand visibility. The use of blogs is a powerful tool in inviting an audience to your website. 

Statistics show that 28% of small businesses in the US do not have websites. Here at Paton Marketing, as a digital marketing agency, we build websites that are designed to perform. 

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Best ways to write engaging blogs for your business website

The mere presence of a blog has little contribution to your business, much like the letter ‘i’ in the word business. 

A blog must have reliable, relevant, and engaging content to attract and sustain readers aka leads. Leads are customers or personas interested in your product or services and are promising prospects for potential conversion. A great blog can guide these leads through the funnel to conversion.

Here’s a list of 8 tips to write engaging blogs for your website:

Research and identify the most relevant topics in your niche

Before blogging, it is important to research topics of importance and relevance in your business niche. It is smart to also research your competitors and find out the topics they rank for in the SERP. 

Conducting Keyword research also helps understand what your target audience is searching for on the internet. 

Find the goal of the blog and target the audience

After the initial research, figure out the goal of your blog. This should include the main topic to discuss, your argument/stance, the relevance of content to the business, the target customer, and planned call-to-action for prospects.

The content of the blog should directly address the interests, questions, and concerns of your targeted reader. Since social media is the best platform for driving traffic to your blogs, remember that people only share information that they think is useful to others.

Verify the sources

A well-researched content performs best in SERP but can be punished for duplicitous or redundant information. Verify the sources of the gathered information to weave them into your content. If the information is sourced from high-ranking authority websites on the SERP, note them down for using them as high-quality outgoing links.

Plan and structure your content

Plan your content with the main topics and subtopics to be addressed. Structure your content into headings and subheadings for readability. Search engines crawl pages based on the headings so ensure that the content grouped under it best answers the heading.

Include visual aids

Using visual aids like graphs, tables, pictorials, maps, and infographics helps in balancing the content and in keeping the reader engaged. They act as text breaks that emphasize the point driven across in an easy, digestible form. It also may bring traffic from Image Search.

Insert CTAs

Call-to-actions are as important as the blog itself as it determines the next course of action of the reader. If the reader consumes the content and leaves, all your efforts are wasted. Insert relevant and lead-generating CTAs between the text and at the end of the blog to nudge the reader to linger on and convert.

Edit and rewrite

All good content comes from countless edits and rewrites. Audit your content for relevance and structure. Ruthlessly edit the content that is duplicitous as not only is it harmful from an SEO point of view, it cannot hold the attention of a casual reader. 

Once published, edit it periodically as search engines favor the latest information. 

Measure blog’s performance

Publishing the blog is not the final step. Measuring the performance in terms of page views, number of shares, engagement, CTRs, amount of time spent on the page, conversion rate, etc., helps in deciding if the content is helpful. Use the analysis to tweak your blogs in the future.

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How you can optimize business blogs for high page ranks

As of last year, Google accounts for 86% of the search engine market. SEO experts claim that Google uses more than 200 different ranking factors to determine the result on its Search Engine Results Page(SERP). 

The first page results on a search engine almost account for 95% of all clicks. Here are 5 beginners’ tips for ranking high on SERP. 

  • Publish authoritative and relevant information regularly 
    Add high quality high-ranking outgoing links and relevant inbound links from your own blogs. 
    Optimize the meta description, meta title, and keywords for which you would like to rank. 
    Get valuable backlinks by creating helpful content and promoting them. 
    Build an authoritative and SEO website with your blogs to contain relevant information

Here at Paton Marketing, we offer a multitude of web design services. Want to know if your website is also optimized to achieve visibility in the search results? Audit your website now!

How to convert blog traffic to increase sales?

You’ve successfully attracted traffic to your blog, now what? You need to get the traffic to convert into leads and subsequently into customers.

Here’s how you can do it:

  • Insert lead-generating CTAs in your blog content which can include Ebooks, white papers, free webinars, free trials, or exclusive offers on your products.
    Promote your services and products in your blogs by weaving them into the content. 
    Build an email list e.g. by offering free newsletters via email. 
    Create a non-leaky funnel by designing the website to guide the reader from the blog to sign up for your services. 
    Ensure your website is user-friendly, intuitive, fast-loading, and has minimal ads. 
    Display testimonials and success stories of your clients. 
    Make the contact information accurate and easy to find. 
    Gamify the user experience to keep the reader engaged and interested. Reward them with freebies. 
    Repurpose the content of your blog for social media posts to regularly engage with your followers while also piquing the interest of the target audience. 
    Make the content shareable as much as possible. It brings additional traffic which is additional leads and prospects. 

How to find out if your blog is increasing sales? 

Everything that can be measured can be managed. 

There are many analytical tools that use different performance metrics to study the efficiency of your content marketing efforts e.g. Google Analytics, Tableau, HubSpot, SEMrush, etc. 

Using performance metrics like page views, average time spent, bounce-rate, SERP ranking, returning visitors, CTR(Click-Through Rates), etc., can help in understanding your blog traffic.

Use these metrics to streamline your content marketing and digital marketing efforts so that your sales will see exponential growth. 

Are you a small business, looking for expert advice on building a website, contact us now and multiply your sales manifold! Still on the fence? Listen to our clients. 

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