Why Blogging Is Absolutely Still a Thing

The world of digital marketing changes so quickly, that you may find yourself wondering: Is blogging still a thing?

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer that’s valuable to your company is contained in this: a blog post.

This blog post is itself an example of why your company should be blogging. This post is all about providing answers and information that helps people, in this case, small business owners. And while it’s true that Google Trends has shown a steady decline of interest in blog posts in recent years, a 2020 HubSpot study found that 60% of people still read a blog at least once a week.

Providing good information is exactly how you earn the favor of search engines, which have the potential to make or break your business. Most businesses know that ranking on Google and other search engines can help their bottom line, and they’re right. Since it dominates over 90% of the global market share, we’ll be focusing mainly on Google in this post.

So, how do blogs play into this?

Consider this: 47% of buyers view 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative, and companies with blogs tend to get 67% more leads than those who don’t have an updated and optimized blog.

And search engines are a key part of people finding your blog posts.

Sometimes businesses just aren’t clear on how this works from content production to lead generation. Let us break it down for you.

Give Google the Goods

First, think about what makes Google such a huge player in many people’s lives: it provides information to those searching for it. Google isn’t providing the knowledge. Google is the vessel for getting people the information they’re searching for.

Your company should be the one providing that knowledge.

Google doesn’t employ thousands of people to write expert-level articles to address all the search queries it receives.

Instead, Google looks for the people who are actual experts in their field who are sharing information via their website. The great news for business owners is that anyone can become an expert in Google’s eyes. If the information provided by a business on their blog is good, Google rewards the business by moving this information to a higher spot in search results.

Consider these stats:

• Approximately 75% of clicks are to websites listed on the first page of Google search results.
• Sites that rank number one for a search query get about 33% of those clicks.
• Sites in the top three spots garner almost 60% of the clicks of searchers.
• There are around 1.2 Google searches per year worldwide.  That’s 3.5 billion searches per day or more than 40,000 search queries per second just in the time you’re reading this, according to Internet Live Stats.

This means that there are plenty of opportunities to be the subject matter expert in your industry and provide the knowledge people and search engines crave.

Theoretically, this is the chain of events that should play out if you are blogging:

But what if it doesn’t?

“We Tried, It Didn’t Work”

A common story we hear at Oozle Media from companies we work with is, “We blogged for a little while. It didn’t do anything for us.”

When we push to learn why we find there are common reasons blogging efforts can look like they “didn’t work.”

The blogs were not optimized for search.

They were written and posted, but the technical components that allow the content to rank on Google were never put in place. The blogs never ranked, which means few if any people saw it, and no additional lead opportunity was created, which, of course, resulted in zero new sales.

The blog topics were not strategic.

How can you know what topics are getting searched the most and are most relevant to your company if you’re not doing keyword research?

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Writing blogs without this information is the digital marketing equivalent of putting on a blindfold and shooting a machine gun hoping at least one or two bullets hit the target. The people who are getting a return on content marketing are snipers.

There was a misunderstanding of the customer journey.

Some companies don’t realize that people are reading their blog posts long before they ever converted. Without proper analysis, it’s unlikely to know which blogs led people to fill out a form, or were part of leading people to fill out a form, so all the blogs were marked as a waste of time.

Read More: How to Target Your Audience With Blogs

They weren’t promoted properly.

Even if some companies do have a wonderful blog that is based on keyword research and properly optimized, they failed to promote the blogs to their audience. Writing and publishing a blog is only half the battle. Without thinking about the different avenues to connect users to your content, your blog is only going to reach a fraction of your audience.

2022 Blogging Trends to Look Out For

Now that you know blogging is still a thing, there are a few things to consider when building your own blogging strategy for 2022:

• Video can attract 300% more traffic. (Marketing Sherpa)
• Google’s increased focus on user intent with their BERT algorithm update means you should focus on user intent too. (Content Marketing Institute)
• About 87.5% of marketers use visual pieces in over half of their blogs. (Venngage)

This means more and more people are focusing on getting their answers in visual and engaging ways. If your blogs aren’t written to be the best answer and if that answer isn’t available in both a written format and visual format like video, you could be missing out on valuable traffic.

Call in the Professionals

Businesses who are blogging and not seeing a benefit are usually suffering from some form of, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” This is why you hire an agency. A reputable marketing agency can help bridge the gap between what you “don’t know” and a holistic marketing strategy. If your current content strategy doesn’t include promotion of consistent, optimized, relevant blogs, along with analysis of the results of those blogs, it’s likely you’re not seeing the full ROI on your time spent.

Look at the big picture. Blogging is an extension of your overall marketing strategy. Sure, it may not work for every brand because not every marketing tactic will be impactful for every single brand. That doesn’t mean blogs are going away anytime soon since they continue to provide value to businesses and consumers alike.

Many businesses aren’t blogging because they don’t have the resources or the time. Even more, businesses aren’t blogging because they think it’s an outdated or failed marketing strategy. If you did a SWOT analysis for your business, list blogging as an opportunity for 2022 and contact Oozle Media to design and execute your content marketing strategy.

If you’re ready to take a crack at blogging yourself, check out our 10 Tips for Writing Great Blogs or 5 Types of Blog Posts That Provide Value to Your Audience.