Conversion Rate Optimization Specialist

Here’s a quick question. When’s the last time you updated your blog? Or how about this: Does your business even have a blog? You’re not alone. Tons of businesses ignore their blogs, all for a variety of reasons. Some say they don’t have the time. Others don’t think it?s worth the effort. Still, others believe that blogging doesn’t work for their industry.

If any of those excuses sound familiar, it may be time to adjust your way of thinking with regard to your blog. The truth is that your blog is one of your most powerful marketing weapons. It has the ability to drive traffic, advance the sales cycle, and convert traffic into leads.

In fact, marketing company HubSpot says that business-to-business companies who blog regularly get 67 percent more leads than their non-blogging competitors. HubSpot also says that companies who blog have almost twice as many incoming links than companies who do not blog.

The verdict is in. Blogging unequivocally leads to more traffic and more leads. It also leads to more sales. Here are three big reasons why.

Blogging boosts your search engine ranking.

Website size is one of the most important factors in calculating a site’s authority and its relevance to a search term. Consider your site. How many pages does it have? If your site doesn’t have many pages, it’s probably not ranking well on Google and other search engines.

You can change that by blogging. Every time you create a new blog post, you’re adding a page to your website, which increases your site’s authority.

The new post also gives Google and other search engines a new page to index. If you’ve worked with your conversion rate optimization specialist to strategically place keywords throughout the page, you should see a search engine ranking boost.

Blogging advances the conversation.

Customers are making more of the buying decision on their own than at any point in history. According to the Challenger Executive Board, B2B customers are making nearly 60 percent of their purchase decision before they even talk to a sales representative.

Why? Because they’re doing research online. They’re answering their own questions and overcoming their own objections. For many companies, the blog has replaced the salesperson in the?early stages of the sales cycle. By the time the customer speaks with a salesperson, they’re already well-informed on their solution options and pricing.

If you’re not providing answers and information on your blog, you’re missing a valuable opportunity to communicate with your prospects. And if they can’t find the information they need on your site, they may take their research – and their business – to one of your competitors.

Blogging converts traffic into leads.

This is what separates highly effective websites from merely average ones. The goal of your website should be to generate sales leads that you can take action on. To do that, you need to have a process in place to convert anonymous traffic into actionable leads.

Your blog plays a big role in that process. You should place strategic and relevant Calls to Action throughout your blog posts. The CTAs can be for an online webinar, to download a whitepaper, or even to sign up for a consultation. If you’re not doing this, then there’s no way for you to know who has visited your site or to follow up with them.

A conversion rate optimization specialist can help you implement all of these action items. For more information, take one of our Inbound Marketing Assessments. We’ll review your site and have a conversion rate optimization specialist contact you to discuss opportunities for improvement.

Should You Blog For Your Industry?