How to Make Your Blog Part of Your Search-Driven Sales Funnel
The majority of business sites have blogs that are updated on a semi-regular basis. But very few of those blogs have a well-defined buying journey a reader could take should they land on a blog post with a buying intent.
In most cases, blogs have very little planning behind them. Businesses have blogs because they have heard they should regularly updated content being published on their sites.
But what should content be?
What could make a blog part of a sales funnel?
Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Ann Smarty, IMN’s analyst, are discussing an effective blogging and content creation strategy that would help commercial landing pages rank and that would take those readers down the sales funnel.
If you have had a blog for a while, start by analyzing search queries that are generating organic search clicks. You can use Google’s Search Console or your rank monitoring
Many of those search queries could have a commercial search intent, or at least semi-transactional intent, i.e. those searchers may well be interested in buying a product that solves the problem they are researching.
Once you identify those queries and your blog posts that are ranking for those:
- Update those blog posts to bring it back on top of your blog archives
- Add some calls to action: Make it obvious that there’s a product to be purchased that solves this problem or answers this question
- Link those blog posts to complimentary commercial landing pages that list relevant products
It is also a good idea to link to those blog posts from those commercial landing pages as well, create a circle of list that caters to one need. This will create a flow of link equity and prevent those blog posts from being lost in the blog archive.
Additionally, consider turning those blog posts into an ever-green content (a how-to, tutorial, etc.) that will never go old or get buried in the archives and will always remain closer to the top of the site architecture.
This should be an on-going effort as your blog grows and starts generating long-tail search traffic.
The nature of any blog is that older content gets buried in the archive, so those opportunities are slower vanishing as the rankings are declining. To prevent that from happening, keep a close eye on your (and possibly your competitors’) blog rankings.
If you need help identifying important SEO opportunities your site is missing, contact ninjas. We are happy to help!
