Business blogging can be crucial to a successful SEO content marketing strategy and ultimately the success of your online business. Many entrepreneurs have a false idea of what business blogging is. They know that a blog is necessary for a site to inform your customers or potential customers. They may even know that it could help drive traffic. However, most lack a complete understanding of the true value of a business blog.
A business blog is nothing less than an engine to drive traffic and sales to your site. When done right, it can be a key component of your content marketing strategy. A proper business blog can be a difference between a blog that can drive leads and traffic to your site without having to spend an arm and a leg on ads to promote your site and your website that no one, including your potential customers, knows about.
A successful business blog has three components:
SEO-based content writing
Established topical authority
Effective copywriting
In this article, I discuss each of these components and explain how you can build each for your own business blog. Read on to learn more.
What is business blogging?
Business blogging refers to writing blogs designed to drive traffic and ultimately leads and sales to your website. The main point of a business blog is to drive sales and profits. True. However, this is not all that it does. For your business blog to work, you need to have a holistic content strategy.
This means a blog that caters to every customer regardless of the stage of the customer journey that they are in at the moment of visiting your blog. So, how is this done? To understand the process, you should be familiar with the idea of the sales funnel. There are typically three stages to a business blog:
TOFU (top of the funnel)
MOFU (middle of the funnel)
BOFU (bottom of the funnel)
TOFU describes people who are at the earliest stages and merely aware of your product or service. MOFU are those potential buyers who are interested in learning more and may be willing to, and BOFU are those who are ready to buy. The way sales conversion works, at any given time, only a tiny percent of customers who are aware of your product or service would end up buying it.
This is where business blogging comes in. The sales funnel is a process that begins with awareness and ends with a purchase. A properly functioning business blog will simultaneously catch all customers at various stages of the process.
This means customers who are aware of your product or service will eventually be converted when given enough time and the right opportunity. In that regard, your business blog is responsible for nurturing potential customers.
Regardless of the type of blog, you need to make sure that you are writing on topics that people are interested in. More than that, you should write in a way that makes it easy for them to find this information on Google.
To do so, you need to implement the three strategies I mentioned: 1. An SEO-based content writing strategy; 2. Establish topical authority; and 3. Practice effective copywriting. Let’s look at each in turn.
1. How to create an effective SEO content strategy
Creating an effective SEO content strategy for your business blog means doing keyword research to make sure that the topics you are writing about are what your potential customers are looking for. Keywords are simply the terms that your potential clients type into the Google search bar to find information, products, or services.
The best way to conduct keyword research is to use SaaS tools designed for that function. There are quite a few; however, the most popular include:
SemRush
SurferSEO
Ahrefs
Ubersuggest
In addition to these, Google Search Console has a number of features that show you what search terms or “queries” are being used by searchers to find your published articles. However, Google Search Console works after your blogs and blog articles have been published.
What we are concerned about here is how to start your business blog. When building a blog or writing individual blog articles, you should begin with what the customer is searching for and work backward from there. The best keyword research tools will give you an idea of the search volume, keyword difficulty, and the commercial value of the search terms or queries.
The above graphic is a screenshot of the keyword “best specialty coffee” in SemRush. It shows that the number of searches for that keyword is 790 and that the difficulty is 21%. The table breaks down all the information and its various meanings.
Term | Meaning | Value |
Keyword volume (KV) | This describes the number of times the term is searched for every month. | It helps you decide whether or not the search has a large enough volume to write a blog article about. |
Keyword difficulty (KD) | This describes how difficult it is to rank for the keyword. | It helps you decide whether or not a keyword is too difficult to rank for. New sites should focus on words with low difficulty — that is, from 1–20. |
Intent | This describes the customer’s intention in using the keyword. Are they interested in information or purchasing? | Commercial intent means the customer wants to buy. So this indicates which keywords can drive sales vs those that drive traffic. |
CPC or Cost Per Click | Cost Per Click is the cost of advertising for a term in Google Ads. | CPC can act as a proxy for the commercial value of the keyword. It can help you decide if a term is valuable enough to focus on. |
In addition, to these basic terms, a proper SEO content strategy also takes into account backlink building and internal linking strategy. Backlink building refers to other sites linking to your site, whereas internal linking means interlining within our blog and website. To learn more, please check out this prior article: SEO Content Writing: A Brief Introduction.
2. How to establish topical authority
Establishing topical authority for your business blog is a matter of building cornerstone and pillar pages that cover a topic broadly and branching out to other related articles that support the cornerstone page with articles that go in depth. Ideally, a properly built website has several silos — that is, a cluster that includes a main cornerstone page and many supporting articles.
To do so, you need to plan ahead by building topical authority maps, that is, a map that lays out beforehand what your clusters of cornerstone and supporting pages will look. Building a topical authority map is a complicated process. It involves 1. Relying on your knowledge of a topic; 2. Using SEO tools to analyze competitor sites; and 3. Doing a qualitative analysis of competitor or relevant sites. In short, it’s a mixture of intuition and diligence.
What is topical authority?
Topical authority describes the process of a website or business blog covering a niche topic widely and deeply enough to satisfy the range of possible questions that interested searchers will have about it. Topical authority is a rather subjective topic. Every SEO tool claims that they have features that will help you build topical authority. And some of them can be quite useful.
However, you should remember that these keyword software tools are only as good as the data they have. They rely on Google for data, and Google is a commercial enterprise that as much as possible keeps its data as a trade secret. So, just remember that you are working with incomplete and possibly erroneous data.
What is the rationale behind topical authority?
According to the experts, topical authority works because it makes life easier for Google. Google spends a tremendous amount of energy to bring your blog and website results to searchers using the Google search bar costs energy.
Therefore, Google saves energy by prioritizing websites that have complete information. This reduces the need to crawl several 100 websites with the same information scattered among them. For a clearer explanation, check out this video:
Topical authority means nothing if you don’t link it to the rationale of your business — driving leads and sales. You do this by linking your cornerstone pages to your service or product pages, where customers sign up for products and services. Topical authority is closely related to niching down. However, you should not overdo it. Your niche should remain broad enough to attract a large enough client base that makes your website commercially viable.
3. How to implement effective copywriting
Effective copywriting is the art of writing copy to drive sales. Blogging or long-form copy is the key to driving traffic to your site. By definition, the majority of blog articles on your business blog are going to be TOFU and MOFU. These are blog articles where the customer is simply aware and possibly interested in buying your product or service.
Copywriting proper is where you use persuasive language and tactics to drive sales. Copywriting is essential for the following parts of your website:
Product pages
Service pages
Landing pages
CTA buttons
With copywriting, the main goal is to capture the reader’s attention and convince them to buy. For example, copywriting on a landing page would include aspects such as:
Social proof or testimonials to show that others have tried the products
Time limits to create a sense of urgency
Creative pricing to give the impression of cheaper prices, such as $9.99 instead of $10.00.
Unique messaging that stands out from the competition
To learn more about effective copywriting for your business blogging strategy, with a focus on headline copywriting, check out this article: Tips for Headline Copywriting.
EminentEdit's business blogging services
EminentEdit provides blog writing and building services aimed at optimizing your business blog for the Google search engine while writing content that appeals to readers. At EminentEdit, we know well enough how crucial your business blog is to your content marketing strategy. We know exactly what it takes to rank a blog and use it to drive traffic and sales.
EminentEdit provides editing and proofreading services that are:
More importantly, we are adaptable to your specific needs. | Get in touch with one of our representatives for help in editing your blog We know what you want to say. We help you say it better. |
Our business blogging services don't just start with individual blog articles. We help with keyword research and in creating a grand overall strategy for your website. Our blog writing services include the following:
Help in building topical authority
Substantive editing to improve the quality of your writing on a sentence level
Editing existing blogs to improve SEO performance
Proofreading to make sure your writing is grammatically correct with proper spelling and punctuation
Get in touch through our contact page here: CONTACT US AT EMINENT EDIT. Good luck with your research writing!
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, November 30). Business Blogging: A Strategy for Success. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/business-blogging-a-strategy-for-success |
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