How Blogging Increases Traffic and Generates Leads

Posted on 1st November 2012 by The Marketing People

A recent HubSpot report shows that blogging can increase traffic to your website and the number of leads you generate.

HubSpot looked at over 7,000 B2B and B2C businesses to see how the frequency at which they blog. The number of landing pages and pages they have, affects the amount of traffic to their website and the number of leads they generate.

What the report showed

The report contained a few really important statistics, that really should be enough to convince any business to take up blogging;

B2B and B2C companies who blog 15 times, or more, a month will receive 5 times more traffic than those who don’t blog at all.
Companies with between 51 and 100 pages will generate 4.8 times more traffic than those with less than 50 pages.
B2B companies who blog just one or two times a month will generate 70% more leads than those who don’t blog at all.
Companies with 10 to 15 landing pages see a 55% increase in leads in comparison to those with less than 10 landing pages.

What does it all mean?

While those statistics are very impressive. What do they mean and how do the increase the traffic to your website and help you to generate leads?

If your blog is part of your website, for example www.themarketingpeople.com/blog, each blog post you create will be generating a new page on your website.

First of all, this will be doing wonders for your SEO. As search engines will view this as your website being updated and search engines like websites which are regularly updated. Why? Quite simply, if your website is being updated often, the information should in theory be up to date and relevant.

If you’re producing high quality content which contains the right keywords you’ll start showing up in the search results more often. Which will increase the traffic to your website. Also, the more content you’re producing the more opportunities you have to send people back to your website. Whether that’s via email or social media.

The more useful content you’re putting out, the more likely you are to gain leads. Because you may well be answering someone’s query or showing that you can solve a problem the reader has.

Regularly producing content may help you to gain regular visitors and leads as they will realise that you’re knowledgeable in your area and your content is of use to them.

The advantage of creating more landing pages is simply that you’re creating pages for more of your services or products. This means you’ll be appealing to more people and can send people back to a landing page which is relevant to their needs. Which in turn will help you to generate more leads.

Other good reasons to blog

As well as having huge SEO benefits, there are other reasons why blogging for business can be beneficial.

Here are another five reasons to blog for your business:

Brand development

Your blog is a great place for you to develop your brand. You can get your tone of voice and beliefs across to your customers easily. And will begin to build credibility with your content as they will see you as an expert in your field.

Customer loyalty

It’s not easy to gain loyal customers nowadays as more and more people shopping around for the best deals.

If you’re regularly producing interesting and helpful content, people may become regular visitors to your website. The more time they spend on your website, the more opportunities you have to make a sale.

Not only that, but if people like your tone of voice, your brand and the brands beliefs and become loyal customers. Even if it means they have to spend a little more

It’s cheap

While blogging isn’t exactly free as you’ll pay in the time spent creating content and for the initial set up of the blog. It’s certainly not the most expensive option in comparison to a PPC campaign or newspaper advert.

Great PR opportunity

If you’re about to launch a new product or service, have an upcoming event or offer, what better place to promote than on your blog?

Make sure the blog includes a link back to the product, offer or event page. To encourage people to find out more about the product/service and buy it.

Feedback

More and more people now buy based on feedback and reviews from people who have already used the product or service. So encouraging people to comment and leave feedback can help you to increase your sales.

Need a blog?

So you’ve realised that blogging about your business could be hugely beneficial to your business, now all you need is a blog.

In order for your website to gain an SEO benefit from blogging the blog needs to be integrated into your website. If your blog is hosted on a platform such as Blogspot or Tumblr, none of the SEO benefit will be attributed to your website.

We regularly create integrated blogs for our clients, which look exactly the same as the rest of their website, and even create content for some of them.

If you need a blog integrating into your existing website, or perhaps you need someone to create the content for you, get in touch with us now to find out how we can help you. Give us a call on 01543 387 047 or drop us an email on contact@themarketingpeople.com and let’s talk about what we can do for you and your business.