If you're like most B2B companies, organic website traffic is the number one driver of traffic to your blog. With that in mind, the best way to boost organic website traffic is to amplify what already works. This means finding what keywords are performing best and reworking your blog’s content and headers to boost their performance.
In this article, we'll walk you through the blog optimization process step-by-step to help you boost your company's organic blog traffic.
Related Content – B2B Blogging: How to Improve Website Traffic Using Content Marketing
The easiest way to identify what keywords are performing best, you’ll want to have the Google Search Console linked to your CRM/website hosting provider. If you do not have this setup, it's imperative you do so, as improving organic traffic is going to be nearly impossible without it.
Once the Google Search Console is set up, you’ll be ready to dig into the details of your blog’s organic performance. What you’re looking for is how your blog performs on specific search inquiries or “keywords.” There are two pieces of information you’ll want to analyze: impressions and average position.
Impressions refer to how often your blog was listed as a result of the keyword search query.
Average position refers to where on Google your blog was listed.
When analyzing keywords to optimize your blogs around, you need to strike a balance between these two performance metrics. On the one hand, you want to optimize around positions you’re already performing well in. On the other hand, it’s not worth optimizing around a keyword that has few impressions.
If you use HubSpot as your CRM, you can determine your blog’s keywords to optimize around through the following steps:
Using HubSpot, view the targeted blog’s detailed data.
There are two tabs: “performance” and “optimization.”
Under “optimization,” you’ll be able to see which search queries the blog is being discovered by.
Now that you’ve identified the keywords that are working in your existing blog content, you can better optimize your blog around them. To do this, you’ll need to identify sub-keywords and related keywords.
For example, if your blog is about “dish soap” and you’re trying to optimize around that keyword, you can improve performance by including sub-keywords such as “ivory dish soap” and “dish soap bars." Essentially, you'll look for any related keywords to "dish detergent.”
Doing this helps Google confirm that your blog really is about the keywords it thinks it’s about.
Related Article: How to Use Website Analytics to Drive Business Growth
To find out the sub-keywords and related keywords to the main keyword you’ve identified for optimization, you will need some help from SEO software, such as Semrush or Moz.
SEO software is not only able to tell you traffic analytics on your keywords, but it also informs you of the difficulty it will be for your blog to master the keyword. If you find your identified keyword has an incredibly high difficulty, it might be wise to try optimizing around a different one.
Related Article: How to Use Google Trends to Analyze Your Company’s Online
Your headers are broken down by number: H1, H2, H3, etc. Your H1 is the title of your blog, while your H2s are the main sections of your blog content. H3s, H4s, H5s, etc., are optional but not necessary.
Headers do two things for your blog: At the most basic level, they make your blog easy to read and skimmable (notice how we’ve used them throughout this page?), but they also establish a content hierarchy for search engines to analyze. Google, for example, is going to assume the content headers are a picture of what the rest of your blog content supports.
Once you’ve identified the keywords, you want to optimize around, rewrite your headers with those keywords and add the supplementary keywords to the body of your content.
Your blog meta description is what pops up under the search engine result for your blog. Essentially, it’s a summary of what your blog is about. Make sure it is under 155 characters long and includes your identified keyword(s).
Additionally, make the content enticing. When someone types in something into a search engine, they get a list of results. Your meta description should be descriptive enough that they click on your post over any other search option. Keep in mind, you shouldn’t be misleading. Don’t create a meta description that over-sells what you have to offer. You don’t want someone to click on your post and become disappointed when they click on your page and discover that your content has nothing to do with your meta description or title.
Lastly, go back through the body of your content. While avoiding “keyword stuffing,” go back and make sure your content contains your identified keywords. While the headers and meta description will do most of the work for you, you can’t forget to neglect the body of the text.
Pro tip: Add adjectives and adverbs! It seems simple, but it’s commonly overlooked. Here’s an example...
Example A: This blog will help you drive traffic.
Example B: This B2B blog will help you strategically drive website traffic.
While both sentences get the message across, “Example B” uses keywords (in orange) that help search engines understand more about the context of your blog content, which enables search engines to get your blog in front of the right audience.
Remember how we said to wait three months before trying to optimize your blog content? You’ll want to wait that same amount of time again because Google needs time to re-crawl your blog. To improve crawl speed, you can manually request a crawl.
It’s a good idea to track how those keywords in your blog were performing well for change after you’ve made these updates. You can do this by either tracking these positions manually or through the position tracking tool your SEO software should have.
Related Content: How to Increase Blog Traffic Using Data & Analytics
If your CRM/website host doesn’t show that your blog is performing well in any relevant keywords, then it's likely your blog is getting no organic traffic at all! This doesn’t mean your blog can’t be saved.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help diagnose the problem:
Depending on how you answered those questions, you may need to go back and correct some things. The preceding three steps work equally well when identifying new keywords to incorporate into your blog as well. Remember: when selecting keywords, you need to target searches that are both high-volume and achievable. If your website is not well-known and considered authoritative, it’s going to be nearly impossible to rank for searches that are highly competitive, regardless of how good your content is.
For example, if your website has a low domain authority, you shouldn’t be going after keywords with an incredibly high difficulty. You’d be spinning your wheels. However, if a keyword with high difficulty is still relevant to your business, don’t disregard the topic completely! Some of your blog content should be written to establish industry authority or as thought leadership. In those cases, you’re less concerned about keyword ranking and more concerned with educating your leads.
Lastly, there’s the idea of a topic cluster strategy. Depending on your CRM/website hosting service, you should be able to incorporate your blog into a wider pool of content called a “topic cluster.” If your blog content is part of a topic cluster, make sure it is linked to your pillar page and that your pillar page content links out to the individual blog. Developing a topic cluster strategy is an SEO best practice for content marketing. If you haven’t dove into this concept, we highly suggest it gets the biggest ROI on your blog.
Another great opportunity to link your blog content to other relevant content is through CTA’s. For example, if you’ve written an eBook that supports your blog content, add a call-to-action button inside your blog which sends the reader to your eBook. Your blog strategy should be cohesive enough that it’s natural to link out to your company’s other resources, from solutions pages to downloadable content offers.
Related Content: How to Improve Website Traffic Using Your Company's Blog
Whether you're new to blogging or you've been doing it a while (but you aren't getting the results you want), my team and I at Open Path Digital can help! We help companies from strategy and planning to execution and implementation. Our approach to blog optimization is simple, and we offer as little or as much assistance as you need. Schedule a call to learn more!
Nancy Kirchoff: September 2, 2021
The idea of a ChatGPT website builder is undoubtedly intriguing. You know that having a well-designed website is crucial for the success of any B2B...
Open Path: September 2, 2021
We find ourselves in the midst of the digital age, where marketing plays a crucial role. In this era,...
David Hardwick: September 2, 2021
It may sound simple, but to create an effective marketing plan, businesses must first understand their potential customers and how to engage with...
Open Path: September 2, 2021
When acquiring or transforming a business for market leadership, your decisions require valuable input. Effective delegation is vital to your success...
Crystal Huss
