How Can New Businesses Establish Themselves Online? Content!
At Formada, we* talk a lot about the power of content, because content is a genuinely powerful and effective tool for achieving your business goals.
Every marketing medium you think of is essentially an empty vessel. What you fill them with determines how your business will be perceived. It influences whether or not you will be chosen over your competitors.
By that measure, our team really focuses on the quality of the content over the quantity that we create for our clients (though the latter has an impact, too).
Why does quality matter? To put it simply, both search engines and the people who are searching online for products and services like yours are seeking information that is fresh, relevant, and useful. Search engines are essentially scanning content for certain keywords and phrases, the structure of the content, and relevance to what people are searching for.
And once a person is on a site, they’re searching for the content that speaks to them and their needs. Quality content — in both senses — will always win.
So when a locally owned and operated audiology startup asked for our help in increasing their site’s organic traffic, we made blogging a central part of their content strategy.
Using Blogging To Bolster Your Business’s Visibility
This audiology practice, while a new startup, was founded by seasoned industry professionals. Their experience gave them a leg up in understanding what a powerful tool their website is to their brand.
In addition to regularly creating and publishing detailed services and product pages, we focused on blogging to help improve their site’s organic traffic.
One of the big benefits of blogging is how detailed you can get on a subject. Whereas services and product pages are designed to be very action-oriented, blogs can stretch out and really get into the minutiae of a subject.
Consistently updated content helps build authority in search engine results pages (SERPs), giving potential new patients a place to find the practice organically, engage with the brand, and make an educated choice based on the quality of the content.
Again, this is one of the reasons that a blog can be such a powerful owned media tactic.
It’s your site. Everything is entirely in your control. It’s relatively inexpensive compared to other tactics. You can combine keyword research with your professional expertise and your understanding of your customer base’s needs to create content that presents you as the authority that you are in your field.
Credibility. Authenticity. Trust. It’s all there if you know how to present it.
Publishing Blogs Consistently Is Key
Now, consistency is always key, but it is especially so if you’re building on a new brand, as we were in this case.
We needed to show search engines that we were consistently adding new content to the site to provide value to users, and so we started with two blog posts per month — we’re still doing that now, in fact.
A side note: Even just one blog per month is so much better than doing nothing at all. We work with a lot of clients who see value in a single monthly blog, and we also work with clients who see incredible value and results from posting twenty blogs per month.
The volume that’s right for you depends on your goals, industry, competitors, budget, and more. The point is that results can only be derived from doing something that’s relevant to your audience, and doing it well.
With this project, we saw a big opportunity in providing content that would prioritize users over search engines.
Why? Well, we wanted to answer questions that real users might have about their hearing healthcare and related services.
And while we were sure to balance this user-first approach with SEO best practices (like targeting keywords that had significant volume, leveraging long tail keywords, and using questions and answers in our H2s and body copy), ultimately our approach was unique in that we cared more about catering to users than search engines.
Make Strategic Decisions In Your Blogs To Create Differentiation
Generally speaking, our strategy in creating differentiation was to prioritize content that answered user questions and tackled topics that were fairly uncrowded in the SERPs so we had a better chance of ranking and capturing that search volume.
There are a lot of opportunities that can be won in focusing on hyper-niche content. This doesn’t mean that you ignore the general topics, however. It’s still important to speak to all of your audience’s most general questions while also diving deeper into the specifics.
With this business, we did just that — wrote to their audience’s general queries, like “How does hearing work?” while also speaking to more specific questions related to ear crystals, vestibular testing, and more.
Additional details like calls to action and internal and external links are vital to creating a better user experience. Tell people what you want them to do. Give them opportunities to learn more and develop deeper trust — increase engagement, push them deeper into the funnel, and create conversion opportunities in a way that feels natural and useful to the reader.
This is all great in practice, but what do the results actually look like? Well, let’s get into them.
The Results You Can Achieve From Well-Written, Regularly Published Blogs
Between the dates of June 2021 and July 2023, organic blog sessions grew from 7 total sessions to 14,078 — a 201,014% increase!
Over that same time period, blogs alone have driven over 88,000 organic sessions to the site and account for 85% of all organic traffic to the site.
Since June of 2022, blogs represent nine of the site’s ten top organic traffic-driving pages, and three of those blogs have driven more organic traffic than the home page itself!
While we tend to focus on prioritizing users when writing content, this approach can also have a positive effect on ranking and search performance. Since April of 2022, the average position for the site has improved by 50%.
In this same time period, the site’s click through rate saw a 110% increase.
Some of you might be thinking, “I don’t want to wait months or even years to get results” and while I understand that reaction, it’s important to remember that blogging is a long-term strategy designed to help you earn long-term, sustainable results.
That said, while it usually takes at least a few months for new content to start driving any notable traffic on a website, we almost always see our new content start performing well within a month of publishing. This shows that we’ve built very strong trust with Google that our content is valuable to users.
Delivering value to your customers is what we’re all about. We want to help businesses deliver great brand experiences to their new and existing customers, and content is just one way in which we can showcase that.
Want To Boost Your Visibility Online? Let’s Talk!
Interested in learning more about how blogs can help boost your business and give your customers the information they need? We’d love to talk to you! Contact us to learn more about blogging, content strategy, and more!
*Special thanks to our VP of Content, Natalie Nygren for her assistance with this blog, data organization, and perhaps most of all, for making our Content Services some of the best in the business!