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There is no B2B website without a blog section. Today, creating blogs is a must for companies to drive traffic, build authority, and establish themselves as thought leaders in the industry. But creating such valuable assets doesn't come free.
You need to invest time, money, and resources to create blogs that your intended customers would want to read and drive the customer through the sales funnel. In short - your blog should be tied to a strong ROI. Tracking your blog’s performance regularly and frequently will help you gauge how your blog performs. Moreover, you need to know how to increase blog traffic fast.
Your blog's analytics will not only tell you how many people are reading your blog, but it will also tell you who is reading it. But before all of that, you need to understand how your blog gets popular or goes viral?
Blogs were initially meant to express your thoughts or opinions on one topic. Although blogs have evolved a lot since then, the basic concept remains the same. So, if you want to create a popular blog, pick up a topic and write on it frequently.
An excellent way to get started is to choose a few broad content pillars and then create blogs around those pillars. That will ensure that you are not drifting away from the subject. .
Unlike articles, blogs are meant to have a conversation with your audience. Instead of talking down to your audience, keep the tone like chatting to a friend and not like you are writing a sermon. Keep it crisp and easy to read.
Your audience is coming to you — to learn from you. So be there for your audience. For a B2B company, this means giving a sneak peek of your behind-the-scenes. How your employees spend a day in their jobs, celebrate wins, and a quick video on what your employees love about their job can all help you build authenticity.
Think of any of the top blogs that you visit. Why do you visit it? It’s most likely to consume the value that they offer. The same goes for your blog too. It’s okay if you write one post a week or one post a month —- but write only when you have something valuable to offer to your audience.
Creating great blog posts is not enough. You need to present your blog to the world and drive traffic. But how do you do that blogging hack?
Google gives priority to websites that have fresh content on them. So write and publish your posts frequently.
You may be writing a stellar piece of content, but if it’s a large chunk of text, your readers will bounce off. Here are some things that you can do.
Every time you publish a blog post, it gives the search engine to index it increasing its chance of getting found. Publishing content that your audience wants to read and to help the search engine find it quickly creates a WIN for you. So, follow all the best practices for search engine optimization and create a stellar content piece. Some of the things that you can do:
Once you publish the post, let the world know! Share it on your official social media channels. Also, make it socially shareable, so it reaches more people. You can do this by including social media buttons on your blog post.
Write on evergreen topics that are not seasonal or on trends – but answer recurring questions for your audience. ‘How to’ blogs are some of the most popular content types for evergreen topics.
Targeting long-tail keywords can help you generate traffic fast for your blogs. Long-tail keywords are super niched and usually have less competition than short one-word ones.
In the first figure we did a keyword search for a more generic keyword - blog traffic. The result shows it’s a high volume keyword and difficult to rank.
In the second figure, we did a keyword research for a long-tailed keyword – blog traffic for a business blog which shows it’s possible to rank for this keyword.
Grab the attention of your reader with a catchy headline. Try to address a pain point and its solution through your headline. Here’s an example:
Are you struggling with your Blog Ranking? Try these five blogging hacks to give it a boost now!
Include your keyword in the blog URL too. Search engines can read the URLs, so you should optimize them too using your targeted keyword.
Here’s an example:
Bad URL: www.example.com/56989 is not well written URL
Good URL: www.example.com/example-page-url
Now that you are creating your business blog, it’s time to measure your traffic — one of the most important metrics to measure blog performance. This shows how many people have visited your blog during a given time frame and from where they are arriving at your blog. The best tool to measure your blog traffic is Google Analytics. It’s a free tool and offers a robust reporting structure.
Two main insights that you derive from Google Analytics are:
1. Page views – Indicates how many people are viewing your post
2.Traffic source - Denotes from where people are arriving at your blog
These two metrics will help you understand which are the most popular topics to create content on similar topics and focus on traffic sources from where you are getting the majority of your traffic.
Increased blog traffic means —-
We asked some industry leaders how to increase blog traffic for the B2B blogs. And we have some fantastic responses that we would love to share with you!
“The most important thing I did to increase the company blog’s traffic is regularly updating the blog by adding NLP, FAQ, and visual assets” — Natalia Brzezinska, Marketing & Outreach Manager at PhotoAiD.
Don’t create your blog post and forget about it. Keep updating them with recent data, user-generated content, and visual assets like infographics to keep it fresh. A great way of doing it is to do a quick search and see the relevant questions people are asking. Cover them in your blog as an updated FAQ section.
“The most effective strategy that we have used to increase traffic to B2B company blogs is to use keyword research to identify the keywords with the greatest opportunity in terms of relevance to the business and ranking opportunity and create and optimize blog posts to target those keywords.
When sourcing keywords for our blog posts, we determine the value of keywords based on several factors, including search volume, keyword difficulty, the ratio of articles compared to landing pages ranking for that keyword, and the keyword and SERP space relevance.
This provides us with an opportunity score which helps us determine which keywords are worth targeting with an article. We then use an AI content optimization tool like Surfer, Clearscope, Frase, or MarketMuse to ensure that our articles cover all of the necessary subtopics related to the primary keyword to show Google our content is worthy of a high ranking.
Begin with a keyword research tool like Semrush to analyze keywords that you want to rank for. Then use tools like Surfer or Clearscope to ensure your article is well-optimized.
“Interlinking of blogs have helped us tremendously to increase our blog traffic” –Tomasz Dutkowski - Grafika.
Always interlink blogs, both to internal resources and external resources.
Show some love to your blog posts! Share them on social media from you company page. Encourage your leadership team and employees to share the blogs or key takeaways from their social handles as well!
“We've mainly done three things to increase the traffic on our blogpost. Our long-term strategy is to increase organic traffic by building backlinks, optimizing on-page SEO, and making sure we create topic clusters and have a fast website. Today, we have more than 4000 monthly visitors in the cyber security niche.
Our short-term strategy was to use paid ads to get people to know the blog. We pushed blog posts through Facebook Ads + LinkedIn to gain traction.
The third way is to use our newsletter. We try to get people to sign up for our newsletter through templates and white-papers, and then we push their content each month from our blog. This also drives visitors to our blog post and makes it possible for us to tailor the experience according to where in the customer journey they are.”
“One strategy that's increased traffic for our B2B blog is seeking out world-class experts on complex topics to contribute articles.
For one target keyword, this angle helped us outrank more authoritative sites. This was possible because we collaborated with a domain expert and deep-dived into the topic. Within two months of publishing, we drove over 10,000 new visitors per month without any active link building.” - Zach Grove, Growth Advisor, ZachGrove.com
Go beyond what is already available on the internet. Reach out to industry experts and SMEs to get their POV on the topic. Include them in your blog ( like we have done in this article).
If you are investing in content marketing for your B2B business, having a blog is not just enough. You need to work on it consistently to drive more traffic, generate leads, and establish yourself as an authority. Along with the best practices for gaining traffic, these six real-life blogging hacks will help you to gain more traction for your blog. Try them and let us know how they work!
Ira is a writer and blogs about her love of words. She has been responsible for creating powerful and effective content that attracts and retains customers. A blend of her humble writing experience and an endeavour to inspire people with her words is on her table now. She is an avid reader and a music lover too. She loves to devote time each day to yoga and meditation in addition to going for walks.
