Setting goals for your business blog is a surefire way to guide your content and achieve improved ROI.
“What is the ROI of blogging?” is a common question I hear, and an impossible one to answer if you aren’t setting goals for your blog in the first place.
Like any other marketing channel, your blog should facilitate a business need. Your content topics, internal linking schemes, and call-to-actions should all support your focus goals.
In this post, I’ll help you think beyond mere content creation and take a bird’s-eye view of your blog, including types of goals and how to track whether your blog is working.
Why Your Business Blog Needs Defined Goals
There have been numerous times when I’m midway through a blog post and can’t figure out how to carry on.
Sometimes, the flow is bad. Sometimes, the headers don’t organically continue from one another.
However, most of the time when this has happened, it has always been a result of a lack of focus. The post topic or outline was created in the spur of the moment on a topic I thought would work, despite not being part of a greater goal.
Setting goals for something like a blog can seem insignificant, but if you’ve ever set clear SMART goals for your business, you know how powerful they can be when looking at the bigger picture.
Goals for your business blog help you create focused content, capture better topics, track performance, and lead to more strategic growth throughout its lifespan.
The Four Most Common Goals for Business Blogs
Fortunately, deciding on a primary goal for your business blog isn’t a magic formula.
You’ve likely had to go through a similar thought process for your other channels. While there are certainly more niche goals, I’ve chosen four of the most popular and generally widely applicable goals that are set for blogs.
If you’re unsure where to start, consider one of these options.
Driving Organic Traffic
Possibly the most popular goal is to drive organic traffic.
After all, who doesn’t love site views without Google consuming your wallet like a Henry Hoover?
Consistent, high-quality blogging helps build sustainable search engine traffic over time. Keyword targeting plays a crucial role in this, and thus, blogging for organic traffic as a primary goal includes a large amount of SEO.
Content is usually more long-form and written to answer specific user queries, long-tail keywords, or high-volume search terms. While a strong goal, it also requires consistent resources to ensure your blog remains updated and provides new content for Google to index.
Generating Leads or Enquiries
A goal of generating leads or enquiries places greater emphasis on the structure of your blog, calls to action, lead magnets, and how you handle your internal linking.
As you want users to make conversion-based decisions, end-of-blog call-to-actions should be relevant and link to core service pages or actions, allowing users to continue their journey. This goal will also influence post titles, as they will need to be somewhat service-focused to support more aggressive call-to-actions to make sense.
Similarly, you’ll place a focus on internally linking to your contact page and service pages, rather than other topical blog posts.
And finally, incorporating lead magnets into your posts consistently will help convert users from one-off readers to top-of-the-funnel prospects. You can achieve this through internal linking to relevant pages, or opt to adapt your single post template (or blog template) to include mid-page sign-up forms, email list captures, or general contact forms to better incentivise users to take action if they find the content valuable.
Building Brand Authority & Trust
Building brand authority and trust is typically a secondary goal, as it supports the other goals on this list.
It’s inclusion here, however, is vital as omission of this for a business blog can quickly lead to your blog feeling disconnected from the rest of your site. When you create consistent, high-quality content, you’re building up a catalogue of trusted content.
New users to your site can see this frequency, and just the fact that you’re updating your site regularly will build trust. Then, this trust-building is amplified if the quality of the content is good, as it provides them with value, whether by answering their questions or offering a good read.
From a user perspective, building trust through your blog can help them overcome their buyer hesitation and support a stronger content funnel. On the other hand, search engines value consistent content, and regularly updating content on the same topics helps build brand authority, thereby improving your ranking potential for future content.
Increasing Brand Awareness
Brand awareness differs from brand authority in that the content you create is either consciously created to be more shareable or for repurposing.
Generally speaking, content created with any goal in mind will help build brand awareness, as it provides another touchpoint for users entering the funnel via your website, as well as through search if the page is ranked. Creating content with the greater purpose of sharability, however, will drastically change the way you write the content in some cases.
More shareable imagery and infographics, condensed writing and snappy, quotable lines, and so on, are all methods of creating a piece of content that can be easily shared. Once created, internal teams can easily repurpose blog content for other platforms due to its structured nature.
How to Choose the Right Goals for Your Blog
Consider asking yourself questions like:
- Are we trying to generate more inbound traffic?
- Do we want more people to trust our brand or see us as experts?
- Is the goal to generate more leads or to educate existing clients?
- Do we need more content to support other channels?
If we’re being honest, it’s probably yes to all of them.
The purpose of asking these questions, however, is to figure out which is more important.
When discussing this with clients, I often recommend that they think about a primary goal and a secondary goal. The primary drives the overall focus on the blog, while the secondary helps guide changes in structure and formatting.
An important note: these absolutely should evolve as your business evolves.
For example, if you’re a brand-new business, I would suggest focusing on generating traffic and building brand authority. After all, you’re not yet known and focusing on lead generation via the blog is a fool’s errand if you’re not gaining any traffic to begin with.
Once your blog has started to generate traffic and you think the time is right, you can always pivot your goals to a more lead-gen approach. You can even revisit older blogs and optimise them for this new goal.
During this initial process, consider how frequently you can post to your blog. If you’re only able to post once a month, you may find it challenging to use the blog as a supporting tool for your other channels that need more content.
What I’m trying to say is: focus on one goal that’s most important for your current business position, then support with a secondary goal.
How to Track if Your Blog Is Achieving Its Goals
Tracking the success of your blog is actually quite simple.
There are many plugins you can leverage if your site is built on WordPress. Google’s Site Kit is a good one that allows you to view your analytical data directly from your site dashboard.
In general, however, you want to utilise Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and any keyword or SEO tools you use. These will enable you to view core metrics of your website through their performance tabs or analytical dashboards.
But what should we actually be looking for?
Using the four suggested goals above, what metrics would be important?
For traffic: impressions, clicks, organic sessions
For Leads: contact form completions, downloads, and sign-ups
For Trust: engagement time, return visits, and quality backlinks
For awareness: social shares, social tags, referral traffic, and brand search volume
When tracking leads, you may need to incorporate additional methods of tracking. For example, you can use tracking links on your download buttons to see how many times they have been clicked, or how often a specific redirect call-to-action was engaged with.
Regardless of your goal, tracking the data consistently is the best way to gain informed information that allows you to optimise.
Direct Your Blog With Informed Goals
Like life, goals aren’t a one-time “set and be done with” task.
As your business evolves and priorities change, so too should the goals for your business blog.
If you want to elevate your blog and craft high-quality goal-led content, get in touch. We can evaluate your current position, analyse what goals we should focus on and get your blog pumping out quality, supporting content.
FAQ: Blogging Goals For Businesses
What types of goals should I avoid when starting a business blog?
Try to avoid vague or unrealistic goals.
It’s all too common to see “go viral” or “hit rank #1 this month” as starting goals. While you can do everything perfectly on your blog, ultimately, the power is in the hands of search engines to decide where and how your content is visible.
Setting more sustainable objectives, potentially even ones slightly lower than your capabilities, can be a great place to start.
How specific should my blogging goals be?
When getting into the specifics, aim for something like:
– Increase organic traffic by 15% over 3 months
Rather than:
– Grow traffic
Following the rules of SMART goals, setting them in this way gives you something tangible to track. Again, referring back to the first question in this FAQ, ensure that the goals you set are realistic.
Once you’ve reached your designated timeframe, you can analyse what is and isn’t working, optimise accordingly, and set a new goal.
Should my blogging goals align with my wider marketing strategy?
Your business blog can be an amazing supporting medium for your other marketing channels, even your service pages on your website.
Considering a multi-channel marketing approach is a smart, efficient, and powerful strategy. It enables your blog to support more than just itself and provides you with another channel to aid in achieving your service goals.
