5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Blog in 2023

If you've been creating content for your company's blog for a while, we're willing to bet you've got some old content lurking in the dark corners of your blog. And whenever you go through your Google Analytics dashboard, you may discover a few low-performing blog posts with little to no traffic.

Your goal as a marketer should be to reduce the number of these underperforming blog posts, improve their ranking, and extend the life of popular, high-performing posts. 

Revamping your company blog addresses all of that. Let’s dig into some tips on how to improve your blog and take it to the next level.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What Is a Company Blog?
• Why Is a Company Blog Important?
• How Can You Revamp Your Blog in 2023?
• Why Do People Think Revamping Your Blog Is Expensive and Needs a Developer?
• Revamp Your Company Blog Successfully

What Is a Company Blog?

A company blog is different from the bloggers you may think of when you hear someone say blog. Company blogs are marketing channels, like email or social media, where you can publish news, fun facts, contests, tutorials, and other information about your services and products. 

Blogs are a regularly updated section of your company website that includes a variety of content designed to be timely, helpful, and engaging. Your company blog helps you build relationships with your audience so they trust your brand. Once you achieve that, you can easily persuade them to buy your services or products.

Frequent new blog posts help keep your website updated with current content to please your audience and search engine robots.

Company blog types include:

• The CEO blog — Your top executive regularly shares in-depth insights with your audience. The CEO is usually synonymous with the company, so the content must always be accurate and authoritative.

• Department blogs — Team-specific blogs that let departments share high-quality content with specific audiences. For example, HubSpot has two blogs for the Marketing Department and Sales Team, each thriving with multiple contributors.

• Product and service blog — A series of discussions and posts that help customers learn more about your services and products, accelerating their buying journey. Instructional videos and product tutorials are especially popular for this type of blog.

Why Is a Company Blog Important?

Your company blog helps build credibility and trust in your brand, eventually persuading customers to buy your products or services.

However, there’s a sales funnel process visitors must go through when they land on your website for the first time before they become customers. 

A blog helps you feed that process by:

• Sharing company news to humanize your brand and show your audience that you're not always about selling.
• Building long-term relationships with customers by increasing customer engagement.
• Providing content to repurpose for your social media platforms.
• Converting blog traffic into leads and, eventually, customers.

How Can You Revamp Your Blog in 2023?

Let’s now look at some blogging tips to help you revamp your company blog into a successful blog that drives massive traffic and converts leads into paying customers.

1. Conduct Research on Your Online Community

The first step of revamping your blog is gathering as much feedback as possible through comments on your blog posts and social media. That way, you can know what works well and what needs improvement.

Replying to comments can help nurture customers and leverage the one-on-one interaction your blog and social media provide.

Positive comments allow you to connect with your audience and build your reputation. On the other hand, negative comments help you right wrongs and fix mistakes, helping consumers feel much better about your business and become repeat customers.

To gather feedback from your comments section effectively, add a question as a call to action (CTA) to start a discussion. 

Here’s an example from Backlinko’s blog post on email marketing:

Brian Dean asks targeted questions in the article’s concluding section, attracting 312 comments and 4,214 social shares. He also tries to respond to all comments, further engaging his readers.

You can also conduct listening sessions through webinars and live sessions to collect thoughts and views from your audience, which you can use for content creation.

Once you collect the feedback, you can create great content by:

• Explaining product features that people don’t understand well.
• Offer solutions to the most common issues.
• Answer the most common questions your target audience is asking.

Once these sessions are complete, using a project management software can help you organize the team and move forward with next steps. 

2. Understand Which Other Company Blogs Your Team Admires

Yes, it’s crucial to focus on your business and not allow what others are doing to distract you. But while that’s true, a little friendly spying doesn't hurt either, especially when it comes to other blogs that are doing well.

Ask your team what company blogs they love. Even if the companies aren’t in your industry, you can look at what they’re doing for ideas.

Use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to check out stats on those blogs like search traffic, number of backlinks, page views, or where the traffic comes from (email, social media, search engines). 

Then go beyond the metrics and look at the type of content they post on their blogs. 

What’s your first impression of the blog? Is there something unique that makes it pop? What topics do they cover? Do they have an FAQ section? Which posts are performing well? Are there any apparent gaps? Is there anything you'd do differently?

Look for content ideas you can put on your company’s blog that is much better than what they have.

Don’t forget to check out their brand. Do they have a logo? What's their brand identity? Do they have a signature look that they stick to? What specific personality are they going for? Playful? Sophisticated? Expensive? What catches your eye?

3. Refresh Your Blog To Be Timely and Relevant

Want visitors to keep coming back to your blog?

Keep it fresh, timely, and relevant.

A slow blog with stale content and outdated design can cause visitors to leave in search of more relevant information or a faster-loading website — increasing your bounce rate. According to Digital.com, 32% of customers won't revisit a website if its pages take too long to load.

So, consider updating your blog's overall look and feel from time to time to ensure it continues to function as it should. Look at your website architecture and the design elements you can improve: fonts, colors, illustrations, banner images, site navigation, comments section, and footers.

Then, coordinate with your brand team about any changes to your corporate identity that should be reflected on the blog. That way, you can stay informed of search engine optimization (SEO)  best practices and the benchmarks Google sets, so you're not left in the dust by faster and more relevant blogs.

4. Up-Level Outdated Content

Once you post new content on your blog, it gradually loses its freshness, which is one of the aspects search engines use to determine the quality of your blog.

An editorial calendar helps you consistently update and optimize your blog. Doing so breathes life into your old pages, boosting your Google search rankings and saving you the hassle of creating new blog posts from scratch.

For example, HubSpot regularly updates its old posts, which in turn generates more leads and traffic. As a result, the company has increased the number of monthly organic views by an average of 106% and doubled its monthly leads.

When updating and republishing your old blog posts, make sure to: 

• Keep the same URL to prevent search engines from flagging duplicate content.
• Retain keywords in the post title to avoid making significant changes to the original title.
• Update the content for accuracy, remove irrelevant parts, and add new headers or subheadings.
• Optimize the post’s meta description to make it catchier and improve the clickthrough rate from search.
• Add fresh and attention-grabbing infographics or examples to further engage your readership.

5. Collaborate With Interesting Subject Matter Experts

An excellent way to add a unique perspective to your company’s blog posts is to conduct Q&A-style interviews with internal and external subject matter experts (SMEs). 

New and surprising expert insight can significantly drive engagement and views on your blog. Plus, you get added exposure when the experts share the interview on their social networks and websites.

When looking for an expert to interview, find someone who can speak from a viewpoint that resonates with your audience. 

Ensure you fully understand what they bring to the table. Is it the developer who designed the software as a service (SaaS) software for your small business? A CEO who brings a business perspective to the topic? Or have they been an industry expert for decades? 

A good place to find SMEs include:

• Your networks and friends 
• Industry organizations
• Groups on social platforms like LinkedIn 

Once you get the ideal expert, you can have in-person interviews, phone conversations, video chats, live podcasts, or webinars to gather their unique insights.

While interviewing them, follow these best practices to get the most out of the conversation: 

• Make a list of questions to guide the meeting in the direction you want it to take. If the subject matter expert says something interesting, ask them to elaborate. If necessary, ask follow-up questions that were missing from your original list.
• Be respectful but ready to interrupt if the expert gets off-topic for too long.
• Record the interview but always take notes in case something happens to the recording.

Why Do People Think Revamping Your Blog Is Expensive and Needs a Developer?

According to a 2022 Top Design Firms survey, 27% of small businesses don't have a website because they believe it's costly, and they don't know how to design, manage, or update the website. 

However, that's far from reality. Many free tools like website builders and blog creators can help you design and improve your blog quickly and at no cost, even if you are a beginner. 

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Blog creators and website builders help you create professional-looking blogs in minutes, and you can adjust your blog later based on your needs. On top of that, you won’t need to hire a web developer whenever you want to tweak your blog or add useful images and content.

Revamp Your Company Blog Successfully

Your company's blog is more than just words on a page. It's a cost-effective channel to increase traffic and build customer relationships. It also represents a significant part of your content marketing investment.

With that in mind, here's a checklist you can use to help you learn how to publish a successful blog post every time you create content for your company’s blog.

Author Bio: Tony Do

Tony is a graduate from University of California San Diego and is a Marketing Manager, Digital Marketer, and SEO Strategist for HubSpot. Outside of marketing, Tony enjoys exploring the forests of Portland, Oregon and producing content for his marketing firm.

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