This week I have been discussing one website traffic generation idea each day.
Yesterday I talked about developing a website tool to help your potential customers as a method of generating traffic.
And on Monday we looked at using Google Ads to drive traffic from Google Search.
Today we will look at writing blog content to drive organic traffic from Google Search.
Only Consistency Over Time Drives Growth
The image below is a screenshot taken from a client’s Google Analytics, which nicely demonstrates the impact on organic traffic of consistent blogging over the course of 1 year.
The blue line represents organic traffic from the current year and the orange line represents traffic from the previous year.
This is a B2B client in the immersive technology space.
In addition to a year on year 240% increase in search engine traffic, lead volume has gone from 0 to averaging 20 leads per month.
Regular blogging is a scalable traffic generation strategy that builds brand awareness and trust over time.
I would argue that for B2B businesses, whose prospects use Google for research, it is essential for the long term survival of the business.
Why?
Because at any one point in time, an average of only around 5% of a B2B business’ target customer base will be in the market to buy (Source: Professor John Dawes, The B2B Institute).
In order to reach the 95% that aren’t currently ‘in-market’, blogging is an effective way of keeping under the prospects’ radar until they are ready to buy.
And when the prospect becomes ‘in-market’, they do a Google search for the specific business in question, because they have come to know and trust that company over time.
Blogging is a Business Investment
Blogging a few times sporadically won’t move the dial towards sustainable lead generation and increased organic traffic.
It requires consistency and patience.
In the example above, the client was blogging 4 times a month over the course of a year.
If business owners push back on this level of content production, I’d invite them to perhaps look at it from another perspective.
- Blogging is an investment that will pay dividends in terms of brand awareness, organic traffic and regular website leads in the long term.
- It builds trust with a business’s target audience. This indirectly benefits sales pipeline and revenue. This is particularly important for products and services that are high value and have a long sales cycle.
- In the next few years, more and more B2B buyers will be turning to digital channels for information sought in the purchase journey (according to Gartner 80% of sales interactions will occur in digital channels).
- If your clients are on Google, you will likely need to pay for ads if there is no visibility in organic search. Comparing Search Marketing to the housing industry, SEO is akin to homeownership (investment/building equity) whereas Google Ads is comparable with renting (spending assets for short term benefit).
Only one strategy will result in long term benefits to a business.
Lack of Resources to Produce Regular Content
It can be a challenge for businesses to resource content production adequately.
Below are a few tips on how to get more content from limited resources:
- One Topic Many Formats - When considering ideas for content, anticipate how one topic could be subdivided into different formats eg blog, social posts, video, podcasts etc. This will get you more ‘bang for your buck’ enabling audience reach on multiple digital channels
- Outsource Content Product - Sites like UpWork, PeoplePerHour, Fiverr etc have literally 100s of top rated B2B writers that can help ease content resource bottlenecks.
- Focus Only on Producing Relevant Content - This may sound obvious. What I mean here is only produce content that is relevant and of interest to target customers. Do customer and keyword research to determine what topics would drive the right type of visitors to the website. I see some companies publish company news type items on a blog. This may be of interest to people already familiar with the business, but will this type of content drive new prospects to the website?
- Refresh Old Content. Web content tends to degrade in terms of organic performance over time. Refreshing old content with updated information, is a quick win in terms of increasing organic traffic.
So there you go! Idea number 3 for website traffic this week is regular blogging.
Tomorrow we will explore an overlooked, but effective, method of driving targeted B2B traffic.
Until then, wishing you all a productive Wednesday!
