Business tips
8
min read
You might think that blogs are no longer relevant in the digital era. But it’s not true. According to HubSpot, about 60% of people read a blog at least weekly. Blogging remains one of the efficient ways for marketers to engage with their target audience and achieve business growth. Overall, marketers who make blogging a priority have a 13x more ROI.
We at TodayMade saw many examples of how blogs with great visuals helped boost the reach for business, position a company as a respected voice in the industry, and attract new customers. However, with over 600 million blogs on the Internet, standing out from the crowd is as difficult as ever.
So, how to improve your blog? To help you out, we've collected some statistics and prepared blogging best practices and insights tailored to real user behavior. Sounds promising? Dive in and learn more then!
As of now, Google holds 92% of the global search engine market share. Created to benefit people, Google Search is still an automated algorithm-based search tool that requires implementing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies to increase blog traffic. The HubSpot surveyed web analysts who track site growth to identify the top strategies for ranking highly on Google.
What do they recommend to get more traffic to your blog? Web analysts mention conducting keyword research, and then optimizing content for target keywords and search intent. They emphasize that optimizing images for SEO and leveraging visual content to increase dwell time are also effective tactics.
McKinsey represents modern marketing tasks in the form of a circle divided into two main parts that foster the transformation of the CMOs’ work:
Using the right keywords in blog posts can help reach your users and significantly increase a blog post's traffic on the search engine results page (SERP). 40% of blog writers who conduct keyword research have excellent results. Usual keyword research includes identifying and evaluating such critical parameters as the monthly keyword search volume (the average number of times a keyword is searched for) and keyword difficulty rating (indicates how difficult it will be to rank highly for the term in Google’s unpaid search results). To get this necessary data, content marketers use SEO and keyword tools.
Today's most popular keyword research tools are SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console.
About 72% of marketers today use AI for different content tasks, from finding new topic ideas to creating drafts.
But this blog content strategy also helps them get good SERP results. The Hubspot statistics revealed that blog posts created using AI perform and rank better. What’s more, Google Search doesn’t rank AI-generated content lower. Its algorithm is based on high-quality and helpful content, no matter how it is produced.
However, we wouldn’t recommend relying too much on it. Yes, AI can help generate grammatically correct text and increase business productivity. But it can’t give a personal touch and unique perspective that human bloggers can offer. So use ChatGPT as an add-on to write blogs, but spend some time editing your text to ensure it sounds like a human, not a robot.
Organizing blogs into sections and categories simplifies navigation and lets website visitors find the necessary information. Plus, it adds hierarchy to your pages and improves your SEO. While talking about readers, 36% of them prefer blog headlines in a listicle form, like a table of contents. So, divide it into sections, organize posts and sub-topics under several main topics, and give them proper headline tags.
For example, let’s look at Eleken’s blog, which we worked on. All blog topics are organized into 4 categories: design process, SaaS business, product design, and design team. To help readers find information they want more easily, we added two search options: they can choose whether to read the latest articles by clicking All topics or opt for the most popular ones.
There are many different ways you can organize a blog, but readers like helpful and engaging content. For example, 77% of readers prefer how-to articles. Other popular blog formats are news and trends, guides, opinion articles, interviews, research, and so on.
Also, readers are fond of interactive content that brings value and helps them through tools like quizzes, e-books, infographics, checklists, calculators, and the like.
For example, for Eleken, we created the design for a collection of practical e-books about essential topics like effective collaboration with designers or the nuances of UX research. While working on their design, we focused on embodying a modern, visually engaging style that complements their rich content.
To bring more traffic to blogs, it’s a proven practice to share blog posts across different channels. 90% of bloggers promote their blogs via social media, while 89% of marketers use Facebook to promote their business
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 84% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn as the platform that brings the best value.
Using social media networks allows bloggers to generate 100 social media shares on average every month. Let’s look at the Eleken e-books again. We made these resources freely available for everyone to gain valuable insights into the world of design and product development. As a result, these e-books were shared on LinkedIn and had over 2K views.
Medium has also found its niche as a go-to blogging platform and social network. The platform has around 100 million monthly readers and over 63 million registered users. The impressive statistic of generating over $16K per story in earnings fuels many bloggers to invest their time and energy in creating stories on Medium.
Another popular digital marketing channel is email campaigns. According to Statista, email marketing revenue was over $10 billion in 2023. To increase blog traffic, over 62% of marketers send emails. 67% of them admitted that their email open rates increased compared to previous years.
Another effective way to increase web traffic and capture the attention of your audience is to update your blog regularly. The statistics showed that publishing 16 or more blogs monthly helps generate 4.5 times more leads. Updating old posts is also popular among 70% of bloggers.
To get started, you can make a plan and set a schedule to publish new blog posts once a week, bi-weekly, or monthly. To inform your readers about new posts, use newsletters. More than 80% of marketers used email newsletters as part of their marketing strategies in 2022. To achieve the best results, they sent newsletters frequently and delivered on specific days of the week.
As an example, Medium sends newsletters with article digest every day.
We can confidently say that better blogging equals having cool illustrations. People are highly visual creatures and process visual impressions 60K times faster than text. The right visual communication evokes emotions, curiosity, interest, and desire to buy. Marketers admit that content with images gets 94% more views.
Many tech companies opt for integrating infographics to both increase engagement and simplify complex technical concepts. 56% of respondent companies use infographics for all promotional purposes, admitting that they are best for attracting the reader’s attention.
But like with any marketing effort, you should make sure your visuals align with your brand identity and are consistent across all channels. For example, for SEOCrawl, a set of tools for SEO professionals, companies, and marketing agencies, we designed not only their website but all the marketing materials, including email templates and even YouTube thumbnails. All the company marketing designs perfectly complemented their brand vision. Visuals were created with the intention of conveying information, updates, and insights to their audience in a visually appealing and engaging manner.
With our help, SEOCrawl managed to extend its reach through thoughtful design, inviting new users to explore their SEO platform.
Creating a great blog can be challenging. But with quality and engaging content, along with creative illustrations and appealing graphic design, you will turn your visitors into readers and then customers.
We at TodayMade specialize in designing for marketing and can help your marketing teams get any designs done at a reasonable price. We work using a subscription-based model: just one membership and a team of creative marketing designers, from illustrators to animators, are at your disposal. And if you want to learn more about our services, contact us today to see how we can fuel your marketing campaigns.
