Company blog – the silent killer of your content strategy?

Why you should write a company blog

With that said, we start this guide by separating blog articles from everything else.

On your blog, there is no room for:

❌ Product brochures

❌ Company news

❌ PDF resources

❌ Case studies

All of these formats deserve a dedicated place on your website.

Instead, our blog relies on creating bottom of the funnel content to increase the reach of our brand.

PS If content marketing isn’t your thing, your blog can be all about company news. But once again, that would be the only thing that goes on there.

Running a company blog is a massive operation

Before you get started…

If all you need is to come off as an active company, don’t run a blog. It’s way too much effort for the value you’ll get out of it.

Opt for company news instead. These will be much easier to write.

Writing blog articles is a complex process and you might get discouraged at the thought of writing one. That’s how “dead” company blogs start.

If your team is already spread thin, the prospect of writing a blog article will be too daunting to keep the blog alive. That creates unnecessary pressure and stress for the team.

How to write a company blog article

We’ve published our entire process of writing blog articles, for free. For the purpose of this article, we’ll sum it up to give you the necessary context:

1. Focus on optimising your SEO meta title. Including the right keywords in there has the best impact/effort ratio out of anything you can do for your articles. Of course, writing a quality piece is your priority – but optimising meta titles can work like a magic wand.
2. Don’t just repeat what others have already said. Adding context to the top3/5/10 articles sounds like a quick way to create something “better”. But instead, you should focus on adding more value and covering things nobody else talks about. The easiest way to do this is by using your own data to make a point.
3. Focus on just a few niches. They need to be relevant and valuable, but you can’t spread yourself too thin chasing “the next big thing” in your industry. Writing a lot about a few topics is better than writing a couple articles about everything. It helps search engines understand your business and makes them trust your expertise.
4. While choosing the few topics you’ll write about, make sure the categories and articles are heavily intertwined. One of the most powerful SEO techniques is linking from one article to another – not by using “others also read” links, but by highlighting words and sentences in your text. These are called contextual links, and they’re extremely valuable.

If you’d like to learn more, get our free guide to writing blog articles. It’s based on our entire process of writing, which we’ve perfected over many years.

Common mistakes with company blogs

If you’ve reached this point and you still think you need a company blog, here are the three things to avoid.

1. Researching just keywords, not people’s needs/intent

Raking in traffic – or worse, just impressions – for keywords that don’t bring value to your business is a waste of resources.

That’s exactly what happens with many company blogs. And it’s rarely the writers that are to blame! The reason for lousy research is the lack of clarity, or having a company blog for all the wrong reasons that we already mentioned.

What to do to turn it around?

Focus on niche topics that help your audience and check the intent behind what people search.

As an example, we rank in the top 3 for “conversion value” not because we have a superior definition.

Instead, we give users a conversion value calculator. Their intent is to figure out the conversion value, and not to define the obvious term.

2. Writing articles in isolation

We’ve explained the importance of internal links in the past. Writing articles in isolation goes specifically against that.

If we wrote a great article about football on the NerdCow blog, it could do fine. But it would never be great because it’s out of our area of expertise. There are no logical connections between the rest of our content and that one piece.

This is exactly what you need to avoid with your blog. Write articles almost as if it was a great TV show – with continuity and a few solid plots (niches) that are covered by different episodes (articles).

3. Using “automatic” titles and descriptions for SEO

Doing the foundations isn’t glamorous, but that’s what gets you 90% of the way to your goal.

The simplest way to start ranking for the intended keywords is to fix the SEO title. The description is useful, too – but here’s an example of what can happen one week after changing just the title.

Who said SEO has to be a long-term game? Sometimes you’ll see massive changes right away!

While tweaking meta titles won’t get you to rank one, it’s a quick win for many company blogs.

What kind of content goes on a company blog?

Blogs are generally a place for top of the funnel (TOFU) content. This is exactly how we use our blog.

Your articles are a way for people to discover your company. This is why our process of writing blog articles talks a lot about creating funnels.

We use blog articles to solve problems for our audience, and then we show them the next steps. This can include resources, a newsletter subscription page, a link to our YouTube channel, or sometimes even a link to our services.

But in the end, it’s all about brand awareness. Alex Moore, the Global Head of Content at Dropbox but it best during his appearance on the Pros & Content podcast. At the 12th minute mark, he explained that Dropbox removed all “money” metrics from their content reports.

At the level of a company blog, it’s all about helping people and improving the perception of the company.

Blog readers aren’t ready to buy… yet

It’s unlikely that you will sell directly from a blog article in a B2B environment.

It can be an important step in the funnel, and perhaps even the last one before conversion, but the sales cycles can last for months.

But what if you can find a genius topic that converts blog readers straight away?

Unfortunately, you will make people skip several steps on the journey.

This will bring lower quality leads. It’s a common issue for SaaS companies. People can convert without the proper education and after the purchase, they’re disappointed to find out that the product is not what they thought, or that they need to learn how to use it.

Instead, we recommend pointing people towards your content hub, resources, and newsletters.

A content hub to tie it all together

Creating a content hub is a bigger challenge than a blog. You may or may not be ready for that, but we’d like you to know what to expect.

Important note: you don’t need a content hub for your blog to work as part of the user journey. As mentioned, you can use “scattered” resources, newsletters, and other middle-of-the-funnel content.

But a content hub just makes sense. It’s an extension of the topics covered in articles – something that you can’t cover in 5,000 words, or something that might even require a different format than written content.

We’ve successfully created them for our clients and for NerdCow. The resources that go on these content hubs range from short brochures, all the way to 100+ page long guides and hours of video content.

To learn more, read about the content hub we built for Doddle.