Why Most Companies Fail at SEO Marketing
Companies will happily spend thousands to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on different types of paid ads.
$20K a month on Facebook? Definitely.
A $100K subway campaign? For sure.
But they have a blog that hasn't been updated in 3 months. (If they have a blog at all...)
A successful company blog mean thousands to hundreds of thousands of organic visitors on your site every month. This is traffic that intentionally picked your content while searching for a solution to their problem or question. They are looking for you and you just acquired them for free.
That will bring down your average customer acquisition cost and save your marketing team some serious time and energy on having to constantly swap out creative and test new paid ads.
Here are common reasons that businesses may not be approaching content marketing with the effort they should.
1. Company Leadership Not Willing to Take the Risk
The difference between a successful independent blog and a failing company blog is clear.
An independent blogger is free to experiment, test, and explore new strategies and approaches to blogging. They can take bigger risks without having to worry about reporting to a manager.
The marketing team at any given company likely has a management hierarchy and relies on a system that focuses on short-term performance reporting. If the marketing team doesn't see results on an ad over 3 months they would probably freak out and turn it off, but with a blog that is normal. The challenge is explaining this to the wider team who without a doubt are not experienced bloggers and do not understand this time delay.
The single biggest difference between successful blogs and failing blogs is that every successful blog took that chance and continued to create content and trust the system. While every failed blog suffers from a lack of consistent, quality content. The team gave up before enough time passed to see results.
2. Misaligned Incentives
Incentivizing employees is potentially the most important aspect of building a high-performance team.
In line with allowing them to take risks and pursue new ideas, they have to be incentivized to want to take risks that lead to big rewards.
The individual building a blog for themselves directly benefits from the success of the blog, often leading to life-changing results.
A marketer who is building a blog for their company is likely on some form of salary and cannot possibly be as driven because they do not benefit from the success of the blog to the same degree as an indie blogger.
If the company blog happens to take off, maybe they get some kind of bonus but at best it probably just makes the marketing team look good.
3. Most Marketers Have Not Built Successful Blogs From Scratch
Only 63% of companies utilize SEO as a strategy.
This means more than half of marketing teams don't take advantage of blogging.
Plus many successful bloggers make more than a full-time income doing what they do and as a result often leave salaried jobs to pursue building their blog full-time. As a result this takes many of the strong, experienced bloggers off the market and leaves companies with smart, qualified candidates who just haven't grown a blog to 6-figure a month traffic levels yet.
4. Companies Blog for the Wrong Reasons
I notice a lot of companies with "blogs" but they don't actually use their blog as a form of content marketing. This completely defeats the purpose.
They have it just to look professional.
Or they think posting about awards they get once a quarter will benefit them in any way.
If your company doesn't have a content marketing strategy and blog for the right reasons, you will never get the results you want.
5. Lacking Enough Content
The main reason any blog fails is a lack of content.
You can have perfect SEO, a billion backlinks, and a domain authority of 100, but if you have 1 blog post you are not going to get the traffic you're looking for. And wow it would take a lot of time and energy to get your website all of those things.
If you want your company blog to be successful, it needs to genuinely provide helpful answers and information for as many people as possible.
The fastest-growing blogs post as frequently as possible. They create posts that answer what people are searching for and provide the highest quality information in a format that is clear to readers and easy to consume.
If you want a successful blog, that should be your focus.
Get 100+ high quality articles around your blog's niche topic. Base each post on keyword research so you know people are searching for your topic. Then you can focus on technical SEO and everything else that matters when you actually have content for Google to index.
When it comes down to it...
If you want to build a successful blog, you have to blog.