The prevailing wisdom when launching a business is to include a blog on your business website. Incorporating a blog serves a number of purposes. It can be used to enhance your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It can be used to provide useful rather than merely promotional content. Or it can be used to demonstrate your authority and expertise in your field. For the purpose of this post, I shall look at another very significant reason to blog for your business, namely the use of blog posts as a means of bringing fresh traffic to your website.
I’ve had a blog on my business website since it was first launched. However, I’ve typically only been publishing posts about once a month. In fact I’ve written many more posts for publication on other business and technical sites and blogs than I have for my own. I’ve viewed my blog’s primary purpose as being to showcase my expertise, and to provide teasers for potential clients. I haven’t viewed it specifically as being a traffic funnel to my website. Until this week.
A couple of days ago I published a new post about how graphics card issues can cause computer startup problems. I then submitted the post to Google for indexing. After a few hours I Googled ‘computer startup problems brisbane’ and was very pleasantly surprised to find that my new blog post was ranking at the number one position on Google.
There’s obviously a great deal more involved in attaining the first position on Google than just writing a good blog post. It’s very difficult for a site to rank well unless significant SEO activity has been undertaken. This involves not just the creation of quality content, but also the building of authoritative backlinks to your site which give it standing in Google’s eyes.
Previously I’ve devoted the vast majority of my SEO effort to my product landing pages, and to my home page itself. A number of my landing pages have also attained the top position on Google. However, I’ve rarely considered my blog posts as being a way of funnelling potential clients to my site.
The reality is that blog posts are in fact one of the best ways to attract potential new clients to your business website. Google loves fresh content and of course every blog post has the opportunity to be completely fresh. If you’re anything like me, you don’t make significant changes to your home page or your landing pages that frequently. By contrast, you can post new blog content as often as you wish.
If you are going to publish blog posts with the purpose of funnelling potential clients to your business website, you’ll need to design these posts strategically. It may be that you’ll write different posts with different purposes in mind, and that not every post will be designed to be a traffic funnel. For the other posts you publish you won’t necessarily need to be as strategic in your approach.
Looking at the four posts I’ve published on my own blog this year, the first one was basically a welcome to 2021 post. The second was a teaser for an article I’d written about the potential loss of Google Search in Australia. The third was a round-up of a few posts I’d published on other sites. I consider only the fourth post, the one published this week, to be a potential traffic funnel for me. The previous three posts were written mostly with existing customers in mind and shared to my social media channels for them to read.
The distinctive of a post designed to function as a traffic funnel is that it is primarily written to target new clients. It may be of interest to existing clients, but its primary purpose is to drive new potential customers to your website. For this reason it needs to be designed with optimal SEO practices in mind so that it ranks as highly as possible in Google search.
In designing a blog post to function as a traffic funnel, there are four crucial factors you need to focus on for your post.
HTML title tag (meta title):
This is the title which will be displayed on the search engine results page (SERP). It should closely match the search term you anticipate a potential client using.
Meta description:
This is the text which will be displayed underneath the title on the SERP. You want this to be sufficiently appealing to attract a click from a potential client. It’s worth noting that Google may or may not use the description you provide. In the case of my own post referred to earlier, Google created its own meta description, using text from the blog post itself.
Blog post title:
Ideally this should align with your meta title, though this may not always deliver the greatest value. In the case of the post I’ve been referring to, I chose a meta title which would match a search term, but I chose a more descriptive title for the post itself.
Blog post content:
The content of your post should use relevant keywords liberally but shouldn’t be stuffed with those keywords. It’s not essential to use exact match phrases as Google is intelligent enough to grasp the meaning of the content if it is sufficiently well-written.
These four factors are key in optimising your content for SEO. You should also use keyword-optimised alt text for the photographs in your post. By focusing strategically on each of these factors, you give your posts the best possible opportunity to rank well in Google search.
Using blog posts as traffic funnels to your business website provides you with endless opportunities. As you work on your SEO in tandem with publishing high quality content on your blog, you maximise the likelihood of your posts ranking well and ultimately generating business for you. This is always the end goal.