Why You Should Blog
Having a blog is a lot like having a retirement account. You deposit into it today, and tomorrow, and next week and next month and next year. Gradually, very gradually, your account will begin to generate dividends, and those dividends will compound and compound and compound until it’s returning a healthy salary to support you during retirement.
The compound interest that you receive from your blog works in much the same way. As you write high-quality content, you’ll begin to notice a little trickle of traffic. As you write new content and optimize your existing content, you’ll start to see higher and higher streams of traffic. As your website receives more and more links, each post that you link to will receive a lift in SEO rankings.
In this post, we’ll look at the tangible benefits of blogging and how to organize your blog so that you have the best chance of generating traffic, leads and ultimately revenue for your business.
Domain Authority for Quality Keywords
One of the biggest benefits of having an SEO-optimized website is that the words that you start to rank for are highly related to the services or products that you sell. If you sell, for instance, helium balloons and rank well when people search for “helium balloons” or “best helium balloons” then you’re in a really good spot. You’re bringing in highly qualified traffic for free.
As you write more content around your target keywords, search engines will begin to see you as an authority and you will have a better chance of ranking higher with more of your content.
Organic Traffic Compounding Results
While Organic Search Algorithms change, they generally follow this principle: If you provide high-quality content, you should do well. A lot of marketers try to sell a lot of SEO tactics to help improve rankings quickly, and while not all of them are shady or sleazy, the undisputed way to rank well for your most related keywords is to consistently write high-quality content.
Google’s primary goal is to provide the best content to searchers. As long as what you are writing is consistent with their goal, you should continue to see your traffic grow over time.
Good Content Helps Qualify Leads
A consistent pain point that I see in businesses is the struggle to qualify leads. If someone fills out a form or requests an appointment but doesn’t immediately buy, it can really become a burden on your sales team to keep up with them. If you write good content and have a solid tool in place to track the pages that a particular lead has viewed then you are able to qualify leads based on how often (or recently) they’re reading your content and whether they are reading content written for leads in the Awareness, Consideration, or Decision stage of the Buyer’s Journey.
Provide value to your users
A big part of inbound marketing, as well as the whole idea of making marketing more human, is about providing value. Marketing gets icky when we try to take something from our website visitors or leads before we’ve earned it. Good content marketing can only happen when you have defined your marketing personas, their buyer’s journey, and then orchestrated a path that educates your leads toward the decision that is most right for them.
When you’re fighting for the user, you’re always on the lookout for ways to help the user understand an idea, rethink a misconception, or save time and money.
Once you’ve invested in your leads, they will be much more likely to do business with your business.
How You Should Blog
Build Domain Authority For Broad Keywords
Broad keywords are the words that you would love to rank for, as they have the highest amount of traffic and will bring the most leads. For Pappalardo Digital, we want to rank for broad keywords like “inbound marketing”, “website design”, and “video production”. Unfortunately, these keywords are really broad and there si a ton of competition for them. If we’re ever able to break into the front page on Search Engine Results pages, it will likely take a really long time. In addition, there’s so much content being published around these topics that it will be hard to maintain these rankings if we did rank.
To remedy this, we will need a long-term strategy where we write lots of articles that surround each of these broad keyword ideas.
We’ll write what’s called a Pillar Page around each of these, which is a high-quality blog post that talks in great detail about the topic. This page will link to lots of supporting articles, which will, in turn, link back to the pillar post.
To create your list of supporting articles, make a list of questions that you, your sales team, your customer service team, and your marketing team get asked regularly. Then make a list of everything that you wished your new clients knew about your service, product or industry in general. Once you have that, make a final list of knowledge that you have in your brain that you want to distribute to the world.
You can use a tool like SEMRush’s Keyword Magic tool or HubSpot’s Content Strategy tool to discover even more topic ideas. Just keep depositing articles into your blog account, and you will start seeing dividends before too long.
