If you are running an online business, it’s highly likely that you have a blog. But what's its purpose?
Most people in the digital world blog these days, predominantly as a content tool to attract a new audience and / or keep their current audience engaged.
Blogging serves a multitude of purposes including sharing knowledge and expertise, educating your audience, attracting a new audience and generally sharing useful and engaging content with your community.
Why we love to blog at Adido!
Sharing knowledge and wisdom
Our core purpose is to get our knowledge onto paper (digitally) from our experts so others can benefit from it. Whether you’re a client or not, we love to share our thoughts and help wherever we can.
Learning from one another as our paths often cross
In our digital marketing agency, we like to learn about what other people in the team do. Even if you’re not a PPC, SEO, or website development specialist, it’s interesting (and useful) to read their blogs. For example, whilst you might never need to conduct a technical SEO site audit, understand how to optimise Google Ads, or know why good UX is important, whether you work client-side, or agency-side, expanding your knowledge is always a sound investment of your time, especially as these disciplines overlap and/or support one another.
Fresh content to keep our users coming back
Writing relevant and timely blogs is one of the best ways to keep our website content fresh. We all follow and read other experts in our respective fields and also pride ourselves in keeping up to date with the constantly changing digital world. For example, as an agency who deliver top results for their clients, we have been getting to grips with Google Analytics 4 and sharing our learnings.
Demonstrating our expertise to a wider community
Writing blogs is the perfect way to demonstrate our expertise to our target audience. When potential clients are researching digital marketing agencies, knowledgeable blogs help to reassure them of our credibility.
Educating our sales team
Writing sales proposals is a lengthy progress, and we like to get it right. Lifting content from blog articles helps because we can pick out key information from the relevant experts within the team. We recently used some content from our blog about how to increase app installs as part of one of our pitches.
Engaging with our clients
It’s also invaluable to have plenty of well written content so that we can share specific articles with clients/prospects to help them to understand where we're coming from with our approach.
SEO benefits too
This may be an obvious point coming from a digital marketing agency, but well written and well researched educational blogs will always help SEO rankings.
Keeping us social
Brilliant blogs keep us active in the social media space, giving us something worthwhile to post and share. In turn, this can attract new followers, and keep our community engaged.
Making sure we're up to date
Researching and writing blogs keeps us educated and up to date with what is happening in our industry.
So if all of these things can work for us, you might find your approach to blogging can be just as rewarding!
I find blogging quite cathartic. Often I write in response to client questions or challenges with a view to offering my advice to others in a similar boat. Blogging also stimulates me to learn and broaden my knowledge so as to introduce others to what I have discovered. And finally I like reading the blogs from the team so that when I am representing their specialism I am more informed on their discipline, and can offer sound reason and explanation.
Blogging for SEO
From an SEO perspective, blogging is a tool that we use to achieve two main goals:
1. To attract new organic traffic through relevant, optimised blog content
2. To support the rankings of existing, commercially focused landing pages.
Attracting organic traffic to your blog is a great way to increase the visibility of your brand to an audience that is interested in your niche but perhaps haven't heard of your brand before. Getting this traffic to arrive organically means conducting keyword research as one of your first steps.
You need to ensure the keywords you are targeting are a good mix of relevant, achievable (to rank for) and worthwhile (have search volume).
Relevancy is one of the most important factors, and it leads us on to our second goal.
By writing blogs which are relevant to your main service / product, you can then link internally to your product / service landing pages from your blog, using keyword optimised anchor text using the keywords you want those product / services pages to rank for. This builds a strong architecture around those landing pages, and when Google sees highly relevant content linking to the product / service page using keyword anchor text, it sends good signals that these pages should rank for X, Y, Z.
There are so many good reasons to blog, and each blog will have a different purpose, but just make sure you know what that purpose is before you start!
Our top tips for blogging
- Understand and think about your target audience.
- Keep your blogs fresh with engaging content.
- Summarise / ensure that your main points are clear, remembering that a lot of visitors to your blog will be skimming through it or speed reading.
- Be consistent (there’s nothing worse than visiting a website where their last blog was written two years ago!).
- Be original, educational and display your knowledge.
- Share your blogs across your social media and use them to engage in conversations and debates in your channels.
- Make your CTAs clear throughout the piece so that an interested reader has an obvious journey of where to head to next.
- Categorise your blogs so that readers can easily find the information they are looking for.
Blogging is brilliant!
Unfortunately, in some companies, blogging is always the first task to fall to the bottom of the 'to do' list.
But remember, blogging provides invaluable content, helps your clients, engages your community, attracts new people from your target audience and keeps you up to date with the latest changes in your specialist area.
Read some more of our blogs, or write your own today!
