Blogging for business is an intriguing notion. Nevertheless, in the majority of situations, there is little consideration of how these blogs fit into the bigger corporate objectives. Someone on the team is simply assigned to consistently publish material, and they do so.

A company blog is typically an island inside the organisation: No one knows if it is producing traffic, revenue, or rankings because there is likely little to no measurement.

Yet, despite a lack of preparation or measurement, there may be some incoming traffic.

Blogging is an effective method for achieving “accidental ranks” (those you didn’t necessarily plan for) and discovering additional search-driven revenue channels. Yet, many business owners and marketing managers are unaware of their blogs’ search engine rankings. So, there is no predetermined purchase route for a person who comes on a blog article.

There may be visitors, but a blog stays an island. How therefore can you include your blog into your entire marketing plan in order to convert these clicks?

In other words, let’s determine if we should be concerned in the first place. Often, the 20/80 rule applies to blogs as well: 20% of your content will generate 80% of your visitors. Thus, you must determine which 20% of your blog’s content genuinely drives visitors.

Here’s how to do it quickly in Google’s Search Console:

• Navigate Performance > Create a filter to see all the pages that contain “blog” (or whatever domain or subdomain you have your blog at) and click on the “Pages” tab.

• The list is going to be sorted by the number of clicks your blog is driving.

Ensure that your blog clearly communicates that it is a business blog and that you are selling something. Specify the primary conversion funnels that your audience should follow.

At a minimum, there should be a site-wide call to action (CTA) encouraging readers to check out your product or items; however, it is preferable to construct customised CTAs and lead generation forms that are more aligned with the searchers’ goal.

Hubspot is an excellent example of contextual CTAs that vary every post and engage readers by offering “upgrades” to the article’s content.

There are several other content-based B2B lead generation tactics, but contextual CTAs are also effective in e-commerce and retail.

Another good example of contextual CTAs is HomeDepot (and automating them). They constantly display relevant items alongside each of their guides. Not only are these items useful for following the lesson and resolving the searcher’s issue, but they also set the proper expectation that there is a company behind this content:

Look at your blog and open any particular article. Do you provide readers methods from that blog to follow the sales funnel? You may also like to use a heat map and button click tracking to have a deeper understanding of how your readers engage with your blog content.

An essential reminder: blog ranks will always decline.

The core of any blog is that when new information is added, previous stuff moves lower down the archive and away from the homepage. Gradually, but unavoidably, this material will lose its rating.

So, you should routinely examine your blog’s traffic and ranks, as sites tend to lose rankings over time. You can accomplish this with the same tools. The “Compare” tool in Search Console enables you to view pages losing clicks…

Click the “Click difference” header twice to sort by pages that lost the most clicks. You can only go as far as 16 months back, though.

Once again, after you have set up tracking, the Moz Pro rank tracker will identify which keywords are losing ranks. You may compare your current keyword rankings to those you held when we began tracking that term.

What should you do now that you have a list of articles that are losing rankings?

Is it possible to salvage this item?

Determine first whether this is anything worth protecting. There will always be ranks that may be disregarded. They include old news or press releases, articles that have little possibility of turning readers into purchasers, expired product reviews or listicles, etc.

Refresh the content

If the page appears to be ranking for anything with transactional potential, consider whether the content should be updated to better correspond with the keywords and contextual CTAs. If you generated a new video after writing that article, so you can now include it.

Also, study your organic competitors to see where they might be better. You can use IMN’s Side-by-Side Tool to see the content of pages that gained rankings that you lost. The tool will compare various important on-page elements like titles, subheadings, keyword usage, etc. This will give you lots of clues about what needs to be expanded, added to, and improved.

SE Ranking on-page SEO checker is another great tool to see where your content needs to be updated and optimized better based on your competitor research:

Using SEO change monitoring, you can also be on top of your competitors’ content updates so that you can timely update yours and avoid losing rankings.

WebCEO is another cool tool that analyzes around 30 competing URLs for your target search queries and suggests what needs to be added for your content to catch up with your competitors:

I’ve also written a very extensive guide on identifying and renewing your outdated content with many more ideas and techniques, and the following are additional recommendations on doing a content audit.

Then, republish your updated material with a new date to return the piece to the top of your blog’s archive. It is particularly critical to match seasonal content updates with the forthcoming holiday or season.

Based on these keywords (i.e., their relevance and search traffic), you may choose to make this page more evergreen and prevent it from being lost in your blog’s archives. Internal linking is one method for doing so.

You can link to this page from static landing pages that always exist at the same level in the site’s hierarchy. Instead, include static “Featured guides” sections that connect to these essential blog entries. Here’s an illustration of a product category page that links to related guides: