A blog is one of the most essential pieces of any content marketing strategy. It’s the basis for all of your content and how you address questions, challenges, and goals for your audience. It’s why for 55% of marketers, blogging is their top content marketing priority.
The right blogs can help each of your buyer personas find you online. This results in:
- Driving more organic traffic to your website: Websites with a blog tend to have 434% more indexed pages and receive 97% more links.
- Improving conversions: 66% of B2B marketers who use blogs generate more leads, and marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI.
- Quality content: Quality of content is rated the #1 most important success factor among all bloggers
But writing quality blogs isn’t easy. You have to answer a lot of questions:
- “What topic should I write about?”
- “What do my buyers want to read about, and what will attract them to my blog?”
- “What types of blog posts should I write”
- “How many blogs should I publish weekly?”
- “What type of promotion is required?”
It’s only after answering all of these questions that you can create a valid blog strategy that’s a successful part of your B2B content marketing plan, which is why it’s vital to analyze your blog.
The Importance of Analyzing Your Blog
You won’t know how to get the best results if you don’t first take a look at how your best blog posts perform. The key is to look at every aspect of your blog to determine what works and what doesn’t, so you can optimize your strategy.
To do that, you should run a blog leads report, which should be available through your marketing software. This report will help you calculate the number of leads your blog generates as a whole, so you can pull out your top ten performing posts to see what made them so successful.
Once you have your top ten highest performing blogs, take a look at what makes them successful. Things you’ll want to consider, include:
- What type of post was it? Was it a straight blog post, a video post, an infographic, a listicle, etc.?
- Where did your readers come from? Did you get the most readers organically, from social media, through referrals, etc.?
- What was the topic? Was it a “how to” blog, did it provide a sneak peek of your company, did it go in depth into a certain area?
- How did you promote those top posts? Did you use social media, organic traffic, email, or something else to promote your top posts? Some channels may be better than others, so keep an eye on the best channels so you invest your resources appropriately.
- Who was the author? Certain people on your team or guest bloggers might write the best content. Your goal should be to allocate more resources for your best-performing bloggers as needed.
Then, once you’ve answered the basic questions and pulled out as many insights as you can, it’s time to go deeper into how each blog performed based on its traffic numbers and conversion rates. Overall, there are four potential scenarios to look out for, and in each case, there are actions you can take to improve your results.
How to Improve Your Blogs’ Performance
Each of your top posts should fit into one of four categories:
- Low traffic but high conversion rates
- High traffic and high conversion rates
- High traffic but low conversion rates
- Low traffic and low conversion rates
The end goal should be to fit all blogs into category two—high traffic and high conversion rates—and there are steps you can take to get there.
Below, we’ll break down what that looks like and how you can make a solid blogging plan for the future.
5 Steps to Improve Your Blog Traffic
High conversions rates with low traffic is not a bad place to be. This means your blog is driving high-quality leads, which is exactly what you want. However, to grow your blog and website, you need to increase your traffic while still keeping that high conversion rate, which requires you to take a few essential steps.
Step 1: Improve Sharability
Make it easier for your readers to share your blog by including social sharing buttons and links such as “tweet this” throughout your content.
Step 2: Distribute Your Blog to Your Audience
Don’t just rely on organic content or audience sharing. Send out your blog to your audience via email or through social media. Get your blog into the hands of your readers where they’re at.
Step 3: Optimize Your Blog for SEO
You can get more organic traffic by optimizing your blog posts for SEO. This means ranking for keywords (Google’s Keyword Planner is a great tool) and linking to other blog posts on a similar topic (which keeps readers on your blog longer and drives traffic to other blog posts and gated content offers).
Step 4: Focus on Key Channels
Look at where you got your blog traffic from. If certain channels perform far better than others learn to focus on those channels. You don’t have to get traffic from everywhere, just from the places where your audience wants your content.
Step 5: Utilize Influencers
Build relationships with other bloggers and influencers in your industry. These individuals are invaluable for helping you reach a wider audience. They can help promote your content by sending it out to their own large audiences, which will ultimately bring in traffic to your blog.
Just remember to keep an eye on your conversion rates as you continue to attract traffic. You don’t want to sacrifice your conversions for more traffic, so keep your blog quality high.
4 Steps to Improve Your Blog Conversions
If you’re attracting a lot of people to your blog but they’re not converting, it’s not an ideal situation. It could mean that you’re not attracting the right quality visitors or you’re not writing interesting content for your target audience. In either case, you’ll need to take a hard look at your content to see how it aligns with what your audience wants.
Another possibility is that your content is totally fine, but your message is getting lost and readers don’t know how to convert. If your blog readers are interested in learning more, but they don’t have a clear path to the next step, then your content isn’t doing its job.
Here are a few steps you can take to improve your conversions.
Step 1: Review Your CTAs
Where are your calls-to-action placed in your blog? Are they clear and do they make it easy for your visitors to convert? Do you provide multiple opportunities to convert? The goal is to make your CTAs highly visible and easy to follow.
Your CTAs also need to be on topic. The last thing you want is to confuse your website visitors with a CTA that doesn’t match your blog; it needs to relate and be compelling. A CTA that just says, “Buy now” isn’t going to be successful. It needs to compel someone to convert into a lead by making your website visitors curious and interested in more.
Also, keep in mind that, if your readers can find your CTA information somewhere else on your website, then the need to convert is not as strong.
Step 2: Look at Your Content Strategy
Does your content align with your target audience? Are you choosing the topics to write about because they answer a common question or are relevant to what your audience wants? Your content has to match your audience’s pain points, goals, questions, etc. or it won’t do any good.
Step 3: Evaluate Your Keywords
How are you ranking for keywords? Are you ranking for keywords that are important to your business and your audience? If not, then you need to optimize your blog posts for the keywords that your buyers are searching for.
Step 4: Analyze Conversion Rates by Channel
You should already have analyzed the top channels for traffic, but knowing the top channels for conversions is just as vital. Look at each channel to see which one provides the best conversion rates. While Twitter might send you the most visits, if it isn’t bringing in quality traffic that converts, it might make more sense to consider another channel.
Just remember that if you have low traffic and low conversions, don’t start with improving your conversions first. You want to start with traffic. The reason why is because it’s difficult to convert when you don’t have any customers. Only after successfully increasing your traffic should you shift your focus to conversions.
Final Thoughts
Improving your blog’s performance is a constantly evolving process that must be undertaken on a regular basis. You should review your top ten blogs quarterly, at the very least, and then take the necessary steps to improve your traffic and conversions.
Remember, your audience is always adjusting, even by small degrees, and that could change what you need to do to be successful. Don’t be afraid to make drastic changes when necessary to get the results you want.
