(and it’s pretty significant!)
by Allison Hester, Editor
from the November 2012 issue of eClean magazine
As the weather turns colder, many contractors use the slower season as a time to work on their marketing strategies.
If you are looking to increase your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, bring in more web traffic, and generate more leads, perhaps one of the smartest marketing strategies you can implement is also one of the least expensive – blogging.
Blogging? Really? Yes, really.
Maybe the following will help put it into perspective.
The Hubspot Study
A recent study by Hubspot – a company that specializes in software for inbound traffic – analyzed “the relationships between key inbound marketing activities and the volume of traffic and leads that correlate with those activities.” Specifically, they studied 7,000 businesses, looking at their websites, blogs, and social media accounts. What they found is that sites that blog have higher website traffic than those that don’t. Even more, those that blog often have much higher traffic than those that don’t.
Following are some specifics of the Hubspot study:
• Business-to-Consumer (B2C) sites that post one to two blogs per month produce double the traffic of those that don’t.
• B2C sites that post 15 or more times a month get five times (or more) traffic than those that don’t blog at all.
• Companies that increase their blogs from three to five times per month to six to eight times a month almost double their leads (not just their traffic).
• Business-to-business (B2B) companies that blog only once or twice per month still generate 70 percent more leads than those that don’t blog at all.
• Small businesses seem to see the biggest gains in traffic when they publish blogs.
• Keep in mind that your past blogs are indexed in the search engines, so you can still generate traffic from them months after they are first published. The total number of blogs on your site impacts your traffic as well. According to the study:
• An average company will see a 45 percent growth in traffic when increasing their total blog articles from 11 to 20 to 21 to 50.
• B2C websites with a blog total above 100 can expect a traffic increase of 59 percent.
So, in a nutshell, if you’re wanting to increase your website traffic as well as leads, blogging is a smart, inexpensive, and easy way to do this.
We Want to Help
To help you get started with your own blogging, we will be doing some blogging of our own. Starting December 1, eClean will be posting daily blogs to both help teach and encourage you to implement this important marketing tool.
Until then, you can see the results of the Hubspot study for yourself by visiting their website.
