Business blogging that brings customers, not just traffic

Three things changed in the last couple of years. Google's Panda update, rolled out in February, rewards sites with substantial, original content and punishes thin pages and article-farm copy. Social sharing on Facebook and Twitter now sends real referral traffic to posts worth passing around. And buyers research before they call: a prospect will often have read three or four pages about a service before they fill out a form.

HubSpot's survey data this year puts it plainly. Companies that blog get somewhere around 55 percent more site visitors and far more indexed pages than companies that do not, and businesses that post multiple times a week report noticeably higher lead volume than monthly posters. The numbers vary by industry, but the direction is consistent: every post is a new page that can rank, be linked to and be shared.

The single most useful exercise is to write down the twenty questions your sales team or front desk answers every week. Those are your first twenty posts. Beyond that, work through these categories:

• Price and cost questions. "How much does a kitchen remodel cost in Phoenix?" Almost nobody in your industry will answer this publicly. Be the one who does, with honest ranges.
• Comparison questions. Product A versus product B, in-house versus outsourced, repair versus replace. Buyers search these constantly.
• Problem posts. The symptoms a customer notices before they know what to search for. A plumber writes about "water heater making popping noise," not "water heater services."
• How-to posts for the parts you do not sell. Teaching someone to do the easy part builds trust for the hard part.
• Local and seasonal posts. What to do before the first freeze, what a new state regulation means for homeowners, what changed at a local permit office.
• Behind-the-scenes and case posts. How a job went, what the problem was, how it was solved, what it cost in time. Keep client details anonymous unless you have permission.

Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (free, no account spend required) to check which phrasing people use and roughly how many monthly searches each gets. A post aimed at a phrase with 200 exact-match searches a month, where the current results are weak, is often worth more than a post on a 20,000-search phrase you will never rank for.

What not to write: press releases, "we attended a conference" recaps, holiday greetings, and posts about your new logo. Those are fine for a company newsletter. They do not get searched for and they do not get shared.

Decide the cadence on the lowest-energy month of your year, not the most enthusiastic one. Write posts in batches: two hours on a Friday afternoon can produce two drafts if you work from the question list rather than a blank page. Keep a running list of ideas in a Google Doc or a plain notebook, and add to it every time a customer asks something.

Length matters less than people think. A 400-word post that completely answers one question will outrank a 1,500-word post that rambles. Aim for 500 to 800 words as a default, longer only when the question demands it.

1. Self-hosted WordPress on your own domain. Not a free Blogger or WordPress.com subdomain. Hosting runs $5 to $15 a month on a shared plan.
2. Readable URLs. Set permalinks to /%postname%/ so a post about water heater noise is at /water-heater-popping-noise/, not /?p=142.
3. A real headline and a real meta description. Install an SEO plugin such as All in One SEO Pack or WordPress SEO by Yoast and fill the title and description fields for every post. The title is what Google shows; make it the question, not a pun.
4. One clear next step on every post. A sidebar form, a phone number, a link to a relevant service page. A post that answers the question and then stops has done half the job.
5. Sharing buttons that work. Facebook Like, Tweet, and the new Google +1 button. Place them at the end of the post where someone who finished reading will see them.
6. An email list. FeedBurner email subscriptions are free; MailChimp is free up to 2,000 subscribers. Email subscribers come back; RSS readers mostly do not convert.
7. Images with descriptive file names and alt text. Google Image Search is a surprisingly steady source of visits for product and before-and-after posts.

Traffic is a vanity number until it is tied to an action. Set this up before you publish post number one.

Goals. In the Google Analytics profile for your site, create a goal for each conversion: thank-you page after a contact form, thank-you page after a quote request, newsletter confirmation page. Give each a dollar value if you can estimate it. If an average lead is worth $150 to you after close rates, enter $150.

Content segmentation. Build an advanced segment for visits that landed on a blog URL. Now you can see how many goal completions started with a blog post, which is the number that justifies the time.

Top landing pages for the blog. Sort by goal conversion rate, not visits. You will usually find that a handful of question-and-answer posts produce most of the leads, and that the posts with the most visits are not among them. Write more of the former.

Traffic sources by post. Organic search, Facebook, Twitter, email, and referral links from other sites. This tells you where to spend promotion time.

Monthly scorecard. Four numbers are enough: blog visits, blog-assisted goal completions, number of keywords sending organic traffic (Traffic Sources, Keywords), and email subscribers. Review on the first Monday of the month.

Give it six months before judging. Posts take weeks to be indexed and rank, and the compounding effect is what you are paying for. A post written in January will often still be the top lead source the following December.

• Writing for yourself instead of the searcher. If the post would not make sense to someone who has never heard of your company, it is a better post.
• Buying cheap articles from content mills. After Panda, thin spun content hurts the whole site, not just the post.
• Stuffing the keyword into every sentence. Use it in the title, the first paragraph and a subheading, then write normally.
• No promotion. Email the post to your list, share it from the company Facebook page and your personal profile, and send it directly to the three customers who asked the question.
• Ignoring comments. Spam filtering with Akismet is free; a real question in the comments deserves a real reply.
• Judging on page views. The post that gets 40 visits and two quote requests is worth more than the one that gets 4,000 visits from a Digg spike and nothing else.

We start with discovery: your sales conversations, your existing search traffic, and the questions competitors are not answering. From that we plan a twelve-month editorial calendar tied to specific service pages and specific goals in Google Analytics. We build the platform properly (WordPress, tracking, forms, email capture) so the measurement is in place before the first post goes live. Then we improve monthly: which posts earn leads, which phrases are close to ranking, where the site structure is holding content back. Brand voice, growth targets, web build and tracking are handled as one piece of work, because a blog that is not connected to the rest of the site does not sell anything.

A representative engagement is in our content work: a services business with a site that got traffic but no inquiries. We rebuilt the blog around customer questions, set up goals and segments, and used the data to double down on the handful of topics that actually produced quote requests. The traffic grew, but the useful change was that the owner could finally see which posts paid for themselves.