Setting Clear Goals for Your Business Blog (Before You Write a Word)

Setting clear business blog goals is one of the most effective ways to guide your content and achieve measurable ROI.

One of the most common questions I hear is: “What is the ROI of blogging?” It’s almost impossible 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 calls to action 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 the types of business blog goals you might set and how to track whether your blog is working.

What Are Business Blog Goals?

Business blog goals are the specific outcomes you want your blog content to achieve. These goals often focus on areas such as organic traffic growth, lead generation, brand authority, or brand awareness. Defining them early helps shape the topics you write about, your blog’s structure, and how success is measured.

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 flow organically 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 on the spur of the moment, based on a topic I thought would work, even though it wasn’t part of a larger goal.

Setting goals for something like a blog can seem unnecessary at first, 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, identify better topics, track performance, and drive more strategic growth throughout its lifespan.

The Four Most Common Goals for Business Blogs

Most business blogs tend to prioritise one of four main objectives. Understanding these will help you decide what role your blog should play within your marketing strategy.

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 applicable goals 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 Ads 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 involves a significant 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 keep your blog updated and to provide new content for Google to index.

Generating Leads or Enquiries

A goal of generating leads or enquiries places greater emphasis on your blog’s structure, calls to action, lead magnets, and internal linking strategy.

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 calls to action.

Similarly, you’ll focus on internally linking to your contact page and service pages rather than to other topical blog posts.

And finally, consistently incorporating lead magnets into your posts will help convert one-off readers into 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.

Its inclusion here, however, is vital, as omitting it from a business blog can quickly make your blog feel disconnected from the rest of your site. When you consistently create high-quality content, you build a catalogue of trusted resources.

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 when the content is of high quality, as it provides 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 creation because it signals topical authority and site activity, 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 and, if the page is ranked, through search. Creating content with the greater purpose of sharability, however, will drastically change how you write 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:

1. Are we trying to generate more inbound traffic?
2. Do we want more people to trust our brand or see us as experts?
3. Is the goal to generate more leads or to educate existing clients?
4. 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 consider a primary and a secondary goal. The primary drives the blog’s overall focus, while the secondary guides 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 starts generating traffic and you think the time is right, you can always pivot your goals toward 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

Each goal should be measured using different metrics. Tracking the right indicators helps you understand whether your blog is supporting your broader marketing strategy.

Tracking your blog’s success 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 option that lets you view your analytics 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 use additional methods. 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, consistently tracking data is the best way to gain the information you need 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 which goals we should focus on, and get your blog pumping out high-quality, supporting content.

FAQ: Blogging Goals For Businesses