A company’s blog is arguably its most valuable property when it comes to content marketing. You own and control it, unlike most all other channels. However, it’s only going to drive value if it’s relevant and compelling to your audience. So how do you keep your blog relevant? And what’s the best way to update your blog with fresh content? What’s the ideal process for this?
These are critical questions that should be part of your content strategy. It also requires a commitment from your enterprise content team to ensure you consistently publish content and distribute it to expand your reach.
In this post, we’ll discuss the benefits of blogging and the specific steps to take to keep your blog relevant.
Blogging Is a Long-Term Content Marketing Strategy
Blogging isn’t a novel concept, and it’s hard to find websites that don’t have them anymore. However, that doesn’t mean that every website with a blog is successful. There are many blogs out there that do little to move the needle on driving traffic and generating leads. When you have a solid content plan for your blog, pay attention to content analytics, and dial into customer needs, you can reap the benefits of it, including:
- Driving traffic: In most cases, your buyer starts their journey for a solution via search. Ranking well organically for key terms improves your chances of pushing more traffic to your website. A customer is more likely to begin on a blog page than your home page. As such, making it relevant matters in terms of how long they’ll stick around. In general, companies with blogs receive roughly 55 percent more traffic than those that don’t.
- Creating leads: Since you are receiving more visitors on your site, that delivers more opportunities for leads. As long as that content addresses buyer needs and answers questions, they will appreciate it and be more likely to convert. Companies that blog average 67 percent more leads a month than those that don’t.
- Improving your brand’s authority: Your blog is the spot to showcase your thought leadership. Educational and helpful content builds trust with your audience and elevates the credibility of your brand. Blog content is a clear way to differentiate your brand and tell emotional stories that connect with audiences.
Keeping Your Blog Relevant and Updated Comes with Challenges
Any company can blog. But, if you’re going to invest time, money, and resources into this medium, you want it to meet your objectives around traffic, leads, and brand awareness. That’s often challenging, no matter how big your team is or how talented your content writers are. Much of it comes down to logistics.
Challenges include:
- Managing content workflows
- Lack of resources, including writers, designers, SEO specialists, and other key team members
- Siloed teams – they hinder collaboration, which is necessary to turn out high-quality content
- Approval processes that create roadblocks
- Topic ideation burnout
- Changing customer needs and industry disruptions
- Understanding content performance and using insights to improve future content
These seem like big hurdles, but they are solvable when you have the right tools and processes. Overcoming these challenges requires a carefully curated step-by-step approach.
The Key Steps to Keeping Your Blog Relevant and Updated
Step One: Create a Blog Strategy
This is the foundation of a well-performing blog. It should include:
- Content pillars (the main themes you write about)
- Blog parameters around optimization, word count, data sourcing rules, syntax preferences, internal linking, and more
- Specific goals for the blog regarding return (traffic increase, time on site, etc.) and frequency (i.e., six new blogs a month)
- Throughput and workflow process in which you define all the tasks it requires to create a blog and map it out using your content marketing platform
- Voice and tone guide to ensure consistency across multiple writers
This strategy is your starting point.
Step Two: Know Your Audience and What They Need
No matter how well-written, your content will fall flat if it doesn’t align with customer needs. Your brand has to walk in step with them, understanding new and emerging pain points. Do this by:
- Getting feedback from sales and customer-facing employees about their conversations with buyers
- Staying up to date on the industry by frequenting industry association websites, reading the news, and being aware of disruptors such as new legislation
- Monitoring what your viewers share and talk about on social media
- Reviewing content analytics to see what topics most resonate with your customers
Step Three: Target the Right Keywords
Image: SEMRush
As a precursor to this step, it’s important to note you should write for humans first, Google second. However, keywords certainly have a prominent role in blogging. There are likely lots of critical keywords within your sector. But what makes it the “right” keyword?
- It directly relates to your customer’s needs or pain points and your solutions.
- It has significant volume.
- Competition for the keyword is moderate (in some highly competitive industries, this isn’t an option).
- It makes “literal” sense. What we mean by that is that some keywords seem like they are a good fit. But, when you Google them, the content isn’t really what you do. You need to validate their relevance.
Step Four: Make Your Blogs Highly Consumable with the Right Structure and Additions
A block of text on a blog page isn’t inviting. It will likely cause a bounce quickly. Instead, follow best practices on structure. Use short paragraphs, bullet points, headers, and other ways to break up the text.
Adding images and video to your blogs makes them more engaging as well and creates visual interest.
Step Five: Keep Refining Content
Once you publish a blog and amplify it, the project isn’t “over.” You’ll continue to monitor its performance regarding traffic and organic rankings. If it starts to fall or the content becomes out of date, it’s time to refresh it.
Keep Your Blog Fresh with the Right Technology
Managing these steps and the overall workflow of blogging isn’t easy. The more content you produce, the more complicated it can be. When you have a technology platform that supports you, everything is easier. See how our solution works today by starting a free trial.