The Blog on Blogs: How to Decide if One is Right for Your Business and Tips for its Content Strategy 

Looking to start a blog? 

Last week, we looked at five tips for creating website content that supports your SEO and PPC strategies. We started by reviewing your data and doing a lead analysis, then a review of the landscape and your competitors. With that done, it’s time to create easy-to-digest content for a great user experience that integrates target keywords and their variations using B-SMART methodology naturally throughout. These tips are necessary for landing page content, but what about blogs? 

It doesn’t always make sense for a company to start a blog program, but if it does, you’ll need consistent planning and execution, plus blogging best practices to get started. In this blog on blogs, we provide tips on:  

• When does it make sense to launch a blog? 
• Blog planning and execution considerations 
• Blogging best practices 

With these considerations, you can make an informed decision on whether to add this element to your content strategy and plan and execute content that enhances your brand’s online presence.   

When does it make sense to launch a blog?  

What a blog can and cannot do for your content strategy may help with your decision to start one. First, blogs are unlikely to be a major driver of leads compared to your website pages. Those with lower resources may need to focus on keeping lead drivers like product pages updated. Managing expectations, especially in terms of leads, is critical to kicking off this type of effort. Like social media, direct return on investment (ROI) can be tough to track. 

Think of blogs as supporting players to your lead generation as they offer:  

• Additional sources for search engines to pull keywords for SEO  
• Customer education and engagement 
• Resources for your internal Teams   
• Additional entry points or paths to other pages on your site 

Blogs provide a chance to present additional helpful content that displays your brand’s expertise, experience, authority, or trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) while giving digital marketing a boost. They can aid in long, industrial buyer’s journeys that require extensive research. They can also offer Sales Teams or Customer Service Representatives resources to pass to customers to connect, keep conversations going, or answer questions in more detail.  

Blogs are also an opportunity to highlight thought leadership, a way to give your company an edge over the competition. By displaying your company’s understanding of an industry and its applications, or offering more perspectives on product uses, you could earn credibility with current and potential customers as well as prospective employees.  

However, a company can lose credibility when blogs aren’t updated regularly, so an established commitment is important. TopSpot recommends updating a blog at least quarterly. If you have a blog that hasn’t been updated for over a year, or if you feel you cannot commit to a blog program, a solution could be adding a resources section to your website. This could be a place to add older blogs (we rarely recommend total removal) and post dateless new items as articles—this way you don’t lose the impact of SEO and its entry points, but the relabeling will accommodate sporadic publishing without loss of credibility. 

Blogs should offer customers additional information, display your expertise, and offer internal Teams potential touchpoints all while utilizing your content strategy. 

Blog planning and execution considerations 

When developing a blog plan and executing it, there are four important considerations to keep in mind: 

1. Define your KPIs 

Knowing this isn’t a main lead driver, what metrics will you focus on to measure success? Remember that benchmarks can cause unrealistic expectations when based on industry standards and may not account for things like seasonality or changes in the search landscape.  

Consider tracking traffic and search landscape population to track growth and inform future topics. If you have LOOP Analytics and the User Behavior Reporting Tool, see if blogs get included in user’s conversion path or lead data. Also, check in with your internal Team to see how they engage with the content and how their customers engage. 

2. Apply Your Content Strategy to Planning 

Pull from the work done in your content strategy and utilize your blog as another opportunity to target keyword variations you want to rank for. From that upfront work, think about areas covered in your website content that could use expansion or industry topics your customers are interested in.  

Check out the competition too—what are they doing on their blogs, and would you engage if you were a customer? Identify gaps in content to go after or find topics that your company has a particular process or outlook on that you can counter with. 

If your Marketing Team utilizes a content calendar, take advantage of initiatives and align postings. For instance, if a case study or landing page on a certain material offered or used is planned, you can provide a supporting blog post with additional information. If one is not in place, now’s the time to establish one to align marketing efforts. All together, these tactics should provide a plan and topics to tackle in your blog program. 

TopSpot’s content calendar for February shows blog topics, distribution on social and email, and other channel activity. 

3. Execution and Distribution 

Some companies spread the responsibility of blog content, meaning roles outside of marketing may be used to create posts. This can ensure expertise and first-hand experience are displayed. Whether it is a single-source or Team effort, establishing roles and responsibilities is critical to rolling out a blog program that posts high-quality and consistent content. Be sure participants understand the goals and value of the program, plus communicate and document deadlines for drafts and review cycles.   

We cannot sing the praises of a content calendar enough as it can aid in Team communication and expectation, spur creativity, and help with distribution planning. When content is ready and live, follow-up efforts via social media, email campaigns, and internal communication increase exposure. 

4. Analytics and Measurement 

Give your blog some breathing room before going into this step, at least two to three weeks, then you can check your analytics against KPIs. Every quarter, consider comparing blog content and try to get a sense of what’s working and what’s not to improve the program going forward. See what topics are getting the most engagement and check your social media metrics to see which blogs are grabbing users’ attention. 

Blog programs take time to gain momentum, but with patience and these steps, you can get off and running creating fresh content for your digital marketing and items to enhance user experience. 

Blog Best Practices 

There’s a lot of material on best practices for blogging, but here are the main ones to consider: 

• Consistency: It’s worth noting again that a post cadence helps impact SEO as well as keeps your brand credible. Additionally, consistency applies to brand voice and style. 
• Content Quality: Don’t get too hung up on word count. Common recommendations say between 800 and 1000 words, but what matters is that your post’s goal comes across. A robust review cycle can also ensure your point gets across in an easy-to-read format. 
• User Friendly: Utilize headlines, subheads, bulleted lists, images, and other visual elements to make the content digestible and enjoyable.  
• Call-to-Actions (CTA): Every blog should have a clear purpose and next steps. Whether it’s a product page, form, or contact information, keep the user on track in terms of their journey. 

Speaking of CTAs, contact your Account Team for more on blogging, or if you are not a TopSpot partner, contact the TopSpot Team to learn more.