Blogging Best Practices for Brands

Blogging has been declared dead time and time again. But there’s a good reason some of the biggest brands on earth have a steadily maintained, high-quality blog – it works. If your team isn’t seeing results from blog content, it’s time for a gut check. Whether you’re looking for SEO tips for blog posts or the right blog metrics to track, we have you covered.

Here are Oneupweb’s blog best practices, plus why blogging is important for brands.

Best Practices for Blogs: The Basics

Your business’s subject matter experts have information that at least a small slice of the internet is looking for. It’s time to attract and inform your readers and gain their trust with these tactics.

1. Know Your Audience

Your sales team might call them “buyer personas” or “customer personas,” but they also happen to be your reader base. Know who you’re writing for and invest time developing blog topics that answer their questions; provide “how to” steps; and explain ideas, products, or services relevant to your brand. (You guys, we’re literally doing those things right now.)

If you don’t have established personas, conduct market research to create a comprehensive profile of your ideal customers. This makes addressing their needs easier.

2. Give Every Blog a Specific Topic

Once you understand your audience, you can build a list of interesting blog topics that align neatly with your brand’s market – but don’t limit yourself to strictly your own products or services.

While we could ramble on for paragraphs about SEO tips for blogs, the following approach sums it up: Give every blog a clear, unique concept that doesn’t overlap with your existing blog posts.* Then do keyword research to see how users address that topic. Finally, write with those keywords while covering the topic comprehensively.

For example, think of someone searching for “how to make spaghetti.” What other terms might they search for before they whip out a pot and bring the water to boil? They’ll probably look for:

• spaghetti ingredients
• spaghetti ingredient list
• spaghetti recipes
• Or they might qualify their search with additional terms like:
• gluten free spaghetti noodles
• quick and easy spaghetti recipes
• spaghetti recipe with canned sauce

These keywords match your audience persona (in this case, busy and carb-hungry individuals) and add SEO value to your writing. Include them in your title tag, meta description, and on-page copy.

*If you are tempted to write about a topic you’ve already written about, do an optimization instead! Optimizing older blog content increases the SEO value of older posts, maximizing what you already have.

3. Know Which Blog Metrics to Track

Blogging is all about reach. SEO-optimized blog posts rank for valuable keywords, generate organic website sessions, and introduce your brand to prospective customers. Most brands measure that impact on brand visibility using the following important blog KPIs:

• Organic landing page sessions: View this in GA4.
• New users: View this in GA4.
• SERP impressions: View this in Google Search Console.

High-performing content may generate more landing page sessions than your homepage or account for a sizeable chunk of total site sessions. Those are excellent examples of how powerful blogs can be!

We recommend setting quarterly and annual goals for your blog subdirectory and working to achieve them. To balance quantity and quality, try to include a visibility/volume goal (like those above) and an engagement metric (like those below). For example, “increase organic blog sessions by 25%” and “increase average engagement rate to 60%.”

Blog Engagement Metrics

While it’s not their primary goal, blogs can generate strong engagement. Usually, blogs have lower engagement rates than product or service pages, as blogs typically attract top-of-funnel users who are just discovering or researching options. Even so, reviewing metrics like engagement rate and average session duration on blogs can help you understand blogs’ long-term impact on conversions and sales.  

We recommend optimizing your best posts to turn sessions into conversions long-term. This can happen in several ways, including:

• Strategically placing internal links to relevant product or service pages
• Including gated content like PDF downloads or infographics, which allows you to remarket to interested users
• Triggering a pop-up that invites engaged users to join your newsletter

Your Blogging Questions, Answered

Check out the answers to common blog writing questions to give your next post a bit more shape.

Why are blogs effective?

Let’s say you find the right keywords and write an incredible blog. What’s the point? Why are blogs important in digital marketing? Whether you’re blogging to grow brand awareness or to supplement social media content, blogging is incredibly important for building brand awareness and authority. First, the content attracts new users to your brand with SEO tactics. Then it provides your audience with reliable, knowledgeable content that builds their trust and keeps them coming back. At some point, they’ll need your product or service and have your brand in mind when they do.

How often should a business blog?

Blog frequency depends on the maturity of your domain and blog, the subject, and your capacity. We typically recommend blogging 2-4 times per month. If that’s too much, focus on quality over quantity – or tag us in.

How long should a blog post be?

The optimal length of a blog post is whatever it takes to provide a comprehensive, useful answer to a question or explain the topic – not a word longer. Oneupweb has done considerable research, and while many industry outlets recommend making blog posts around 1,400 to 2,000 words long, neither we nor recent large-scale studies have found a consistent correlation between length and SEO value. It all depends on how complex the topic is. Instead of worrying about the ideal blog length, focus on comprehensiveness, building domain authority (the street cred search engines assign your domain), and the relevancy of your content to the search query.

What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content describes blog posts or other pages with topics that are relevant far beyond the time of publication. This includes most “how-to” content and blogs that explain a service or product. Evergreen content is valuable for SEO because it addresses queries that never go out of style. Non-evergreen content, like pictures from your company picnic or an announcement about a recent promotion, has little SEO value; this is one reason some domains have separate /news/ subdirectories separate from /blog/.

Blogs Drive Growth. Let Oneupweb Get Behind the Wheel.

Content is king, but blogging without a roadmap wastes time and resources. Count on Oneupweb’s SEO specialists to provide rigorous research, sound strategies, and high-quality content creation to get you more miles out of every post. We understand how content must evolve along with search engines, and we can even pair blogs with insightful infographics, social posts, and stunning videos. Let’s get started; get in touch or call (231) 922-9977 to schedule a conversation.