Have you heard of hub-spot? They’re a major hitter in the world of internet marketing. Each year they publish a very comprehensive survey which covers all aspects of internet marketing. Their most recent release (2010), called ‘The State of Inbound Marketing’ contained some really interesting data about how effective blogging can be for attracting new customers online.

Blogs are important and effective

Amongst a lot of other information, the report said that over 85% of the 230 businesses surveyed, reported that their company blog was ‘a useful part of their marketing strategy’. More interesting was the fact that over 60% described their blog as ‘important’, while 25% described it as being ‘critical’!

Search Engine Optimised Blogging will attract new customers

Overall, this means that the use of blogs to communicate with customers, continues to bring success to businesses who do it properly. But how does it work? There are two competing factors when writing blog posts:

• SEO blogging to rank highly in the search engines for relevant keywords and phrases, and
• Writing for your readers in a way that is easily understood

SEO and blogging are both easy once you know how

The whole point of writing a blog post is to attract people to your website who have a need for niche information. By keeping your posts rich with useful information that is restricted to a narrow topic, your blog will be recognised by Google as having specialist content. This will be rewarded with a high search ranking.

DIY guide for SEO Blogging

The best guide we’ve found for helping new bloggers to write Search Engine Optimised blog posts is Glenn Murray’s ‘SEO Copywriting – A Practical Guide’. This ebook clearly lays out all of the factors that you need to be aware of when blogging for business. It describes the battle between SEO for Google, and persuasive copywriting for your readers.

Each SEO focussed blog post is another ‘hook in the Google stream’

With a blog based website framework such as Wordpress, you have the potential to drop an unlimited number of SEO hooks into the Google stream. Every blog post is an opportunity to attract new visitors looking for solutions to their problems. The solution you give them will be a blog post that leads them to your products or services.

Two examples of how blogging will increase your site traffic

As an experiment, we decided to write two blog posts designed to attract two separate customer groups to this website. We applied some basic SEO techniques, and a few advanced ones as described in Glenn’s SEO ebook, and produced the following results:

1. Targeting the phrase ‘SEO Agencies Norwich’ (Page 1)

2. Targeting the phrase ‘Fixed Price Website Packages’ (Page 1)

Not only did both of these posts achieve page 1 on Google, but they also (and more importantly!) resulted in an increase of visitors to our website. You can see that our targeted keywords were responsible for the majority of traffic the following week:

You can do it!

Writing effective SEO blog posts is achievable providing you follow a set of basic rules and principles. The best place to start is with ‘SEO Copywriting – A Practical Guide’ by Glenn Murray. He’s probably the best in the world at writing web content that gets noticed by Google, while still compelling visitors to become customers. This is a specialist skill, and you could learn a lot from him.

For more information, check out our blog post title ‘SEO Copywriting’. Lastly, let us help you to become a better business blogger.

Leave a comment below with your biggest concern or frustration about blogging, and we’ll help you out!