How Blogging Drives Customers to Your Website
Published on October 21, 2021
Do you want to truly drive traffic to your website? Read on...
You can't read an article, a post, or a tweet from a digital marketing firm or an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) outfit without reading a mention of "blogging". Sure, it's a buzzword.
We made it up about nine or ten years ago. It's a concatenation of "web logging". In its original form, blogging essentially functioned as an online journal; today, it refers to a variety of multimedia content curated and kept in the same place.
Whether you're creating an up-to-date journal for your company, keeping your content fresh with regularly posted information about your offerings, or actively writing creative posts in the form of listicles, quizzes, or infographics, it all effectively works the same way. And it has been recognized as one of the top ways to bring in customers for businesses of all sizes. Why, you ask?
It comes down to the fundamentals of SEO:
- Blog articles provide postable, linkable content, which ultimately create an avenue for backlinks (links from other websites back to your website)
- Search engines love large websites, and each blog article is a webpage in-of itself. Think of it as an equation: More blogs = more website content = larger website = your goal of more search engine hits
- Each blog is an opportunity to highlight a different assortment of keywords, which allows you to create opportunities for your website to show up in more searches
...but there's more! Blogging helps provide credibility for your company by establishing it as a knowledgeable, industry-aware resource for its community. It is, in short, an easy way to provide cost-effective marketing for your company, while communicating that you are thoughtful and conscientious of customer relations and your online reputation.
In short, if your website provides updated, relevant, and useful knowledge that your clients are interested in, you are, in turn, increasing website traffic and leads while building strong relationships with your clients.
So...how does blogging increase website traffic?
When we speak with small business owners about blogging, or some other form of content creation, they typically want to know what kind of impact blogging will have on their bottom line: website traffic and lead generation. What's the concrete, measurable return on their invested time, energy, and/or money?
A recent study from HubSpot found these factors yield a significantly positive impact on leads:
- Indexed pages in Google
For every fifty to 100 pages of indexed pages in Google, leads achieved double digit growth. Lead growth experiences significant acceleration for customers with more than several hundred indexed pages. - Publishing and growing blogs
Customers with blogs gathered 68% more leads than customers without blogs. Growing articles starts to impact lead growth once 20+ articles become available. - Using Twitter and growing followers
B2C (business to consumer) customers using Twitter generated two times more leads than customers without a Twitter account. Twitter users with several hundred followers had approximately twice as many leads as Twitter users with followers in the double digits. Routinely posting your new, fresh blog posts to Twitter - or other proven social media platforms - is a great way to increase leads while further establishing your brand's identity.
More Website Content = More Website Traffic
A practical way to approach content marketing is to, in essence, count each blog article you write as a webpage in of itself. If your website has more webpages, search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! will consider it more valid. More content also equals more keywords targeted to more specific, relevant searches, in time leading to more hits.
Another recent study from HubSpot should help shed some light on how this works. They surveyed over 7,000 businesses active in blogging and social media, with some pretty incredible findings. Take a look:
As the number of pages your website has increases, so does the amount of traffic. Serious acceleration occurs once your website has around 400-500 pages, as you can see.
How often should you blog?
So, we can see that the more you blog, not surprisingly, the more traffic your website will get. Does frequency play a factor? Yep! Let's look:
There is a pretty direct and steady correlation between post frequency and increased hits. Posting just three more articles a month can double your inbound traffic! It doesn't take a lot of effort to get the ball rolling.
If you build it, they will come
Once they have published between 50 and 100 blog posts, businesses typically experience a steep increase in hits. Keep this in mind when your company begins blogging. if you are patient and consistent, giving the blog time to grow, it will yield results.
Are you creating fresh, relevant, and credible content on your website? How many pages of relevant, traffic-generating content does your site have? 200 pages? 100? 50? Less?
Not sure how to get started? Our team has a proven track record with SEO-focused content creation for businesses of all sizes. Drop us a line or give us a call so we can talk strategy!
