Blog Development for SaaS Company

If a company does not invest in the positioning of the blog, the latter might turn into a scary dementor that will consume both time and money. The same happened to our client, the platform for call tracking, analytics and advertising management.

The company operated in the B2B sector where purchase decisions should be well considered, so they took a lot of time to make. The platform had certain competitors: free services with limited functionality.
The company needed to show the audience the advantages and the value of their service, help them understand complex terms and explain how the platform solved businesses’ problems. The client decided to create a corporate blog with high-quality expert content: case studies, product descriptions and information articles.

In May, the client started publishing first articles on the corporate blog. At the same time, they faced first difficulties: the articles didn’t find their readers, and the audience grew very slowly, although the editorial team worked hard on the content quality. By 2018, the average number of monthly visits was only 5,000.

Few articles were published randomly, and that made it difficult to track their performance, as the client had neither clear goals nor an understanding of what its readers were looking for. The process required adjustment, and the client’s team asked us to conduct an audit to determine what was to be improved to help the blog grow.

We started by setting goals and expectations for our mutual work. Together with the client, we decided that the blog should:

• Describe products and explain their benefits
• Reflect client’s expertise
• Form a positive brand image
• Generate demand for the platform’s services and help the target audience to make a purchase decision.

To simplify the performance analysis, we set up a benchmark: we needed to increase the blog’s audience to 30,000 visitors per year, offering the readers high-quality and interesting content. It was not a random figure: we selected it based on the niche analysis, calculations and our experience.
Spoiler alert: we achieved the performance benchmarks ahead of time. But more on that later.
Having agreed on the terms and the scope, we started setting up the workflow to break down objectives into specific tasks.

To understand how to attract the audience, we needed to define who would read the articles in the blog: create the company’s customer profile, find motors and barriers that influenced the demand and the conversion rate.

The analysis showed that the client's target audience comprised analysts, marketers and entrepreneurs. Essentially, they were people with different values, interests and mindsets.

It was also important to consider the product recognition stage: most of the audience had never even heard of the call tracking service, let alone used it. The analysis data became the starting point that helped us determine the direction we wanted to take with the blog.

Our next step was to analyze the demand and find out what content the audience wanted. We analyzed the blog posts and selected the ones that were most frequently visited, read and commented on.

We studied how our competitors addressed the same audience and developed our own solutions, taking into account the specifics of our client’s business. Our analytical base helped us determine the range of topics that might have interested call tracking customers.

After collecting the inputs, we proceeded to arrange the workflow and create content.

We didn’t make a standard content calendar, i.e. a table that showed when certain content should have been published. For our purposes, we needed a more functional tool, which would help us track the whole process of working with content.

We made up a list of topics for three months and started collecting key data. The list of topics helped us build a well-balanced workflow, excluding overloads and emergencies. All the work on the project was tracked in a shared file: the team made updates in real time. It made the work management easier, and we were able to understand at what stage we were and what else was to be done.

The list of topics also resolved communication issues, as we shared access to the document with the client’s team. They saw what was going on with the project, didn’t need to worry about the deadlines and could grant their approval faster.

We figured out what topics would attract readers. However, to make the blog grow, we needed to please not only people but also search engines.

After finding out what users were interested in, we picked out the corresponding search requests. Then, we determined the frequency of those requests and their competitiveness rate. The more popular a key phrase was, the more competitors used it for promotion.

Our client had already published articles in the blog, so we tried not to duplicate already existing content.
We analyzed all the data we gathered and added it to the list of topics. Later, we set publishing priorities, specified dates and created technical assignments for the articles.

We needed the blog to be both informative and appealing to search engines. So, we created technical assignments to help copywriters produce high-quality texts that would attract as much organic traffic as possible. When creating technical assignments, we analyzed the top search results on specific topics and developed an article structure focused on the value for the target audience. It helped copywriters fully develop the narrative and write articles that would fully answer users’ questions.

A standard technical assignment included:

• Topic
• Requirements for text’s stylistics, formatting, uniqueness, volume, and other parameters
• Image requirements
• Meta tags: title, H1, description
• Keywords
• References to competitors’ articles.

Once an article was written, our content managers checked its compliance with the technical requirements and made recommendations for its revision if needed. Apart from that, we performed interlinking: we added links to other articles for the user to read relevant content and spend more time on the website. It influenced the ranking and created a habit among users to search for answers to their questions in our blog.

Our priority was not the process of content creation, but its result. After an article was published, we checked the Google Data Studio report every week: we tracked search positions and traffic dynamics. If the metrics increased or stagnated, we could immediately determine the causes and add new requirements to the technical assignment or correct mistakes if there were any.

To ensure that the blog was relevant, we updated the list of topics every three months.

But working on the content was not all. It was important to keep control of the whole technical side of blog optimization. We kept track of the loading speed, revised meta tags, and implemented micro-markup for the search engines to discover the content on the website faster.

To ensure constant growth of the blog’s audience, we needed to quickly identify and correct technical errors. For example, we noticed that a part of the content that was driving traffic stopped being displayed because of the change in the URL address. To solve the problem, we set up a system that checked article accessibility every day.

The systematic approach and well-defined workflow led to a result that exceeded our expectations. We joined the project when the website had only 5,000 visitors per year and set the target to increase this figure up to 30,000 visitors.

We completed the task within nine months, and in a year’s time, the blog had already 50,000 visitors. Further on, the figures kept increasing exponentially: after only a year and a half, the website had over 177,000 visitors, a growth rate of 3,440%.

By the end of 2020, blog’s traffic exceeded the most optimistic forecasts: it came to over 300 000 visits per month.

We preserved the article quality: texts from the blog were published in the client’s social media, digests and newsletters.

Since 2020, the client has entrusted the entire process of evergreen content creation to us. We are carefully checking the article quality and controlling the amount of content released. We have already published 138 articles, and the work is still going on. Our new target is 450,000 visits.

We don't limit ourselves to traffic goals only and also work on the blog’s conversion rate. We have created a format of niche articles and added them to the content plan. These are materials that explain to the target audience how to resolve certain problems using our client’s products.

We are also implementing conversion blocks with links to client’s products into most popular articles. It is not just a CTA button in the text: the narrative subtly leads the reader to a conversion block that describes the actual value of a product in the article.

Now we are also working on the client’s YouTube channel: we are optimizing descriptions and meta tags for how-to videos, investigating new ideas and tracking ratings. All this helps us attract the client’s target audience to the channel.

The corporate blog and high-quality content, which raise brand awareness and boost sales, are the results of coordinated work of our teams, which include marketing experts, SEO professionals, editors, copywriters, desktop publishers, designers, and more. Only with a systematic approach, we are able to develop a blog, get the most out of it and at the same time create a strong brand.