One of the most common — and also among the most important — questions that prospective customers ask us is: “How do we get more traffic to our website?” Now, we know that we’d get kicked out of finishing school for answering a question with a question. But nevertheless, our response to this is: “What is your blogging strategy?”
The reason we change the paradigm here — from website traffic to blogging strategy — is because on today’s online landscape, there is simply no simpler, smarter, more effective or more affordable long-term (and sometimes even relatively short-term) traffic booster than to attract people to a website with a blog. And if you’re not totally on board with this, behold the following statistics courtesy of our friends at HubSpot:
- Businesses that blog have 97% more inbound links than those that don’t (inbound links are those that point back to a website from another website, and Google weights inbound links heavily when it ranks search engine results).
- 92% of businesses that blog multiple times a week have acquired several profitable customers entirely because of their blog.
- Businesses with active blogs generate 67% more leads than businesses with inactive blogs.
- On average, businesses that blog receive 434% more search engine indexed pages than businesses that don’t.
- Businesses that blog 20+ times per month generate 3.5x more traffic than businesses that blog 4 times per month.
- Businesses with 200+ posts in their blogs attract 3x as much traffic as businesses with fewer than 20 blogs.
Clearly, blogging isn’t a nice-to-have piece of the web traffic puzzle: it’s a fundamental pillar that delivers significant and sustained ROI. And so, with this in mind, here are 5 best practices to attract people to a website with a blog:
Best Practice #1: Use Relevant Content
Make content hyper-relevant by mapping it to buyer personas. Not only does this make blogs much stickier, but it’s an excellent way to generate traffic through search engines.
Best Practice #2: Pay Attention to Design and Formatting
Information design and overall blog formatting is a big deal. Nobody wants to read a wall of text or something that looks like it was dashed off in three minutes. Blog posts should look professional, be easy to read and scan, contain relevant internal and/or external links, and feature at least one relevant graphic or photo.
Best Practice #3: Optimize for One Keyword
Optimize each blog post for one targeted keyword (i.e. relevant, long-tail, supports overall keyword strategy of the website, etc). Just remember that the main audience is human beings and not search engine spiders. Keyword stuffing is a turn off and can even lead to a page getting de-indexed.Best Practice #4: Publish Often and Consistently
Don't launch a flurry of blog posts in a short span of time and then publish nothing for weeks, months, or even years. As indicated by the statistics above, the sweet spot in terms of frequency is 3-5 blog posts per week. Many larger companies publish daily or multiple times a day (which might be out of reach for many small businesses, but is something they can aspire to as they grow).
Best Practice #5: Drive Traffic Using Social Media and Email
Drive traffic and engagement by pointing to new blog posts across social media and through email newsletters. At the same time, make blog posts easy to share in order to increase visibility and engagement.
Learn More
To learn more about how to attract people to a website with a blog, contact the Leap Clixx team today. We know how to turn static or stale blogs into high-performance traffic generating assets — and we have the numbers and case studies to prove it.
For more information on how to turn your website into a lead generation machine, download our FREE eBook today:
Topics: Lead Generation
