Writing Blogs is Not Just About Clicks

After writing blogs for clients the other day, someone told me that businesses are only interested in how many times their blog posts are read.

That is absolute rubbish.

Yes, blogs are written to be read. And clients do need to see a return on their investment (ROI) if they’ve paid for blog content to be researched and written for their website. As the customer, a commercial venture, when you’ve paid a blogger to write blogs, news, and other articles for your channel, then having no clicks, no traffic is a no-brainer, right? Writing blogs has cost you money and you’ve seen no direct benefit. Time to “stick a fork in it”, right?

Wrong.

Writing blogs is not just about clicks, and page popularity; there are so many other indirect benefits of blogging for business. Let’s take a look at why clicks alone aren’t a helpful metric.

Why Page Views Don’t Tell the Full Story

Page views alone provide no insight into either content quality nor reader engagement. How do you know how good a blog article is until you’ve started to read it? And even then, how long do you read for? What’s the engagement time? Do you read to the end, skim it, did you feel fulfilled, compelled to share, or click the CTA (Call to Action) and sign up or make a call?

On this last point of the CTA, if you had high traffic but no conversions, is the content not aligned with your audience? That’s a crucial consideration for sales & marketing pitch, but what if your aim is to inform? What if you’re creating that “top of funnel” experience where an audience needs to be slowly and naturally informed and the brand awareness is a serious consideration? How do you measure that from just a click?

As for vanity metrics, it’s true that they don’t directly correlate with business objectives or revenue generation. But once, I took pride in attaining a top ten position for many years for the term “digital marketing blog” for a digital agency where I worked. It was a vanity metric, appearing alongside the likes of Neil Patel, HubSpot, and Smart Insights, all big name players in the field. But it got clicks. And it indirectly demonstrated our ability to rank with bigger budget SEO.

So What Matters More Than Just Blog Clicks?

I’ve just touched upon those items but let’s lay them out for clarity:

Engagement depth and time on page.
Conversion rates and lead generation.
Brand authority and trust building.
Long-term SEO positioning and organic growth.

A week or a month after writing and publishing your latest blog posts, you may not immediately see these benefits. But the seeds have been sown. Even if you’re not getting a click, a conversion, or a phone call straight away, you may well be in the consideration phase for your audience. They’re aware of your brand. And if you impressed them with what you said, and how they felt about what you wrote, then despite no seemingly direct and obvious benefit, that blog post was worthwhile. If not this time, then maybe next time you’ll see a brand search and a conversion.

And how do you do all this? You do it through:

Building topical authority.
Internal link building.
Building brand authority and trust.
Lead generation, customer nurturing.
Supporting customer service and sales.
Measurable business impact beyond just traffic.
The compound effect of consistent quality content.

Let’s dive in…

1. Building Topical Authority: The Long-Term SEO Strategy

Now this is probably my favourite part of blog writing – the strategic value of a content marketing strategy. While blog posts seem transient, and they’re only valuable whilst they’re in the “latest news” carousel on your website’s homepage, there’s more to blogging than that. Every single time you mention, explain, and demonstrate your expertise in SEO and all its minutiae, for example, you’re building up a broader picture, and that is topical authority.

Understanding Topical Authority

Topical authority is all about your website’s credibility and expertise within specific subject areas. The more high-quality blog posts you write on any given topic, the more topical authority you will build up and the higher you will rank for Google searches related to your niche.

This is also connected with the concept of E-E-A-T where Google’s team of Quality Raters look at the search results and physically assess your pages for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Your authority in a topic is being built by blogging, so build out your content on your chosen specialist subject.

The Topical Authority Building Process

So how do you go about building topical authority in your blog writing? Here’s a very quick overview:

Comprehensive Coverage: Create in-depth, helpful, and quality content across all aspects of your niche. I can’t say enough how comprehensive you should be, this has always been key.
Consistent Publishing: Regular, quality content demonstrates your ongoing expertise. So write and publish blogs with a regular cadence.
Expert-Level Insights: Going beyond common, surface-level information provides your unique perspectives. This is the expertise in E-E-A-T.
Content Clusters: Organising related topics into content clusters (Using the category or tags in WordPress, for example) means that you’re creating authoritative content hubs and demonstrating that authority in E-E-A-T.

I know I’m not being as 100% comprehensive here as I’m advising, but there’s a lot to get through on the topic of blog writing. I’ll expand any of these topics in a future post or I can explain on a call.

The Long-Term Benefits of Topical Authority

As mentioned, writing blogs isn’t a tactic, it’s a long-term marketing strategy. You have to commit now and be patient. Sharing on social media helps give you a short-term boost of eyeballs to your new blog content, but you should look to the future. And if you’ve been blogging for a little while now, go look at your GSC and GA4 to see how you’re performing for focus keywords you’ve blogged about. See which blog pages are being surfaced. Are those seasonal pieces being visited again and again every year?

In a nutshell, the long-term benefits of topical authority are:

Improved rankings for competitive keywords.
Enhanced organic visibility across topic clusters.
Increased trust from both search engines and users.
Sustainable traffic growth without constant promotional efforts.

I’ve written hundreds, if not thousands of blogs in my career and they’ve contributed to making a success wherever they’ve been published, particularly for topical authority. Think about the digital marketing blog I ran that was in Google’s top ten for many years, competing very well against the likes of Neil Patel for example. That keyword and traffic dropped when I left that company and fell even more when someone relaunched the website and didn’t do a good job of it. I have other examples.

Topical authority is also excellent for semantic SEO, lending credence to this oft-overlooked and subtle concept in content and SEO. When the search engines analyse your content and the relationship of all the words and concepts on a single page and between related pages, they start to “understand” if not at least recognise the semantics of your blogs and articles.

Every time I write your business a blog post on a particular subject, I build your topical authority, and that is worth its weight in gold.

2. Internal Link Building for SEO

I know brand authority is a big thing, and as a marketer this should really be the first thing on the list. But instead, as an SEO consultant, I’m putting internal link building second on the list.

So of course, the number of clicks your new blog post gets is still not the be-all and end-all. Every time you write a blog post and link to other useful articles, products, and services, you’re building up the vital internal link structure.

In Google Search Console there’s even a tool to allow you to inspect your internal links and, usually, your home page and all the menu items have the lion’s share of links. But then what’s next?

Blog writing is your opportunity to “sculpt” your internal link profile and create more links to the subjects and pages that matter.

The Strategic Benefits of Internal Linking

There are SO many reasons why you should write blogs with the added intention of building internal links. These are your top-level benefits:

Page Authority Distribution: Spreading link equity throughout your website.
User Journey Optimisation: Guiding visitors through relevant content paths.
Topic Relationship Mapping: Helping search engines understand content connections.
Conversion Funnel Enhancement: Moving readers from awareness to action.

So, once again, it’s not just about page views. It’s about building an internal link architecture within your commercial website. You’ll be signposting not just your users but helping search engines to understand what’s important too. Links are signals, indicators that another piece of hypertext is relevant and important, or provides vital context. So crafts those internal links as a secondary benefit of blogging.

Best Practices for Internal Linking

And how do you go about sculpting internal links for the optimal benefit?

Create logical content hierarchies with “pillar pages” and supporting articles.
Use descriptive anchor text that indicates destination content value. Please, avoid “read more” and “click here”.
Build content clusters that naturally link between related topics.
Implement strategic calls-to-action (CTAs) that guide users toward conversion points.

There’s a lot to think about, and this is only the second key benefit of blogging on your website, but do it. You will see the benefit, especially if you’re now keeping an eye on your GSC internal link profile.

3. Trust Building and Brand Authority

I’m sure many strategic marketers will not be happy that I’ve listed this third in my reasons why you should look beyond traffic alone in the art of blog writing for business websites. But here it is, at number three – brand and trust.

Content as Trust Currency

Quality blog content serves as “social proof” of your expertise and reliability. Each well-researched, insightful article that you write builds cumulative trust with your audience. Over time you will have built up a body of work that demonstrates the A in E-E-A-T and readers can look back over your library of useful articles.

I was once asked to delete all previous blog content for a digital marketing agency, where there were about three or four years worth of sporadic, questionable quality blog posts on a subdomain. What I did was bring them into the main website, nest them in the new digital marketing blog section, and build up the content over a further eight years. Over the next few months, the old content was refreshed and optimised and it kept generating traffic and the occasional conversion for the business. So it was well worth keeping past blogs in their archive to be found and digested.

That 11 or 12 years worth of content is that agency’s currency, pedigree, and trust. You can see they’ve known what they’re talking about and willing to share for over a decade. Props to them.

Establishing Thought Leadership

Here’s another biggie that marketing strategists love – thought leadership.

I must admit that when I first tried to create thought leadership pieces, it was a bit of a struggle, particularly for other businesses than my own. But after a while it became easy and I feel like I’m generating thought leadership pieces every week.

So what do they and can they entail?

Industry insights: Sharing unique perspectives on market trends and developments.
Problem-solving content: Addressing real challenges your audience faces.
Educational resources: Teaching rather than just selling.
Transparent communication: Building authentic relationships through honest, open content.

As both a thinker and a writer, thought leadership in digital marketing is easy. And as a marketer who has to “get into the heads” of both service providers and customers, it’s a skill that can be developed and is actually hugely beneficial.

If you’d like assistance with generating and writing thought leadership pieces for your business, let me know and we can work together.

4. Lead Generation and Customer Nurturing

Oh yes, every sales and marketing person’s ultimate goal – generating leads. But you’ve also got to nurture customers too. They don’t want to be sold to straight away, especially not if they’re high net worth individuals or there’s a product or service with a high price tag. This is your opportunity to blog to nurture as well.

Content-Driven Lead Magnets

Now this is where I start to get “salesy”. When I first started blogging it was for fun and entertainment. It rapidly developed into being informational, and then later I warmed to the notion of blogs for generating leads. So rather than being just web-logs of your life and work, blogging can inform and sell too.

When you start to think about it, blog content naturally creates opportunities for lead capture through things like:

Educational downloads: Expanding on blog topics with detailed guides.
Email subscriptions: Offering ongoing value through regular content updates.
Consultation offers: Positioning your expertise to encourage direct contact, just like I do here. Call me.
Resource Libraries: Building comprehensive knowledge bases that encourage return visits.

These are just a few of the things you can do to to help visitors convert through blog content.

And remember – some marketers call “lead magnet” pages landing pages. I need to reiterate that ALL of your website’s pages are landing pages. Maybe you should consider converting not just your blog posts but as many other popular pages as possible into becoming high converting lead magnets?

Nurturing Through the Buyer’s Journey

And above all, remember the stages of the funnel, and beyond:

Awareness stage: Educational content that identifies problems and solutions.
Consideration stage: Comparative content that positions your approach.
Decision stage: Case studies and detailed service explanations.
Post-purchase: Ongoing support and advanced insights for existing clients.

There’s another one too, that many writers know by a better acronym: AIDA.

Awareness.
Interest.
Desire.
Action.

Blogging should take these points into consideration because you want your readers to be aware of your services, you should generate interest, foster a desire to purchase, and for your visitor to take action.

5. Supporting Sales and Customer Service

With the previous reasons for blogging in mind, think about the pre- and post-purchase phases for your customers.

Your sales team will want to help out potential buyers in as many easy ways as possible from the FAQs to the special offers.

The customer service team, whether it’s the busy MD or a whole dedicated department, are interested in retaining your client base, and leads to repeat sales, referrals etc. So what do you do about all that in your blog writing?

Proactive Problem Solving

A well-crafted blog content can answer common customer questions before they’re even asked, reducing support burden while improving customer satisfaction. So think about the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) the sales, marketing, and customer services team receive, and proactively publish these in your blog.

Sales Enablement

Of course, quality blog content provides your sales team with a number of benefits:

Educational resources to share with prospects.
“Credibility markers” that support sales conversations.
“Objection-handling” materials in written blog content form.
Industry expertise demonstrations that build confidence.

By positioning your business as the expert in its field with the experience to match, you are once again contributing to not just your sales department’s effectiveness but the E-E-A-T that Google looks for in evaluating your blog content, website, and wider business.

7. The Compound Effect of Consistent Quality Content

Long-Term Asset Building

Unlike paid advertising, like PPC, or temporary campaigns, quality blog content creates real lasting value that appreciates over time. I’ve seen ten year old articles still generate rank and traffic even though we’re often led to believe that the “shelf life” or freshness of articles can be around 3 years. Personally and professionally, I think that a helpful, comprehensive blog post can be timeless, especially on evergreen subjects that are not time-sensitive.

Indeed, there is a compound effect of “saving” blogs in your news section and watching the interest build with topical authority and semantic SEO generating a healthy and vibrant library of expertise. Benefits include:

Accumulated search authority: Each quality article builds upon previous content.
Evergreen resource development: Timeless content that continues delivering value.
Cross-promotional opportunities: Content that can be repurposed across multiple channels.
Competitive differentiation: Unique insights that distinguish your brand.

Of course, as you acquire inbound links from producing popular and helpful content, your “domain authority” should increase too.

Sustainable Growth Foundation

Quality content creates a self-reinforcing cycle where improved authority leads to better visibility, which attracts more qualified traffic, generating more leads and customers who become advocates for your expertise. As mentioned previously, you can build your domain authority, but the figures vary as this is a bit of an arbitrary number as every tool is trying to replicate Google’s PageRank, (Domain Trust, Domain Rank, etc.) but that’s a piece of intellectual property that nobody has the secret recipe to apart from Google themselves.

Rather than obsess over domain rank/trust/authority, simply focus on creating helpful, valuable content that’s entirely relevant for your audience and make sure you keep up the output to a regular rhythm.

Conclusion: Writing Blogs, Defining Success

Success in blog writing isn’t measured by fleeting page view spikes but by the steady building of digital authority, customer trust, and business value. Establishing your topical authority can really improve your business website’s rankings, organic traffic, credibility, conversions, and more besides.

The organisations that thrive in the digital landscape are those that understand blog writing’s true purpose: creating valuable, authoritative content that serves their audience while systematically building the foundation for long-term business success. When you shift focus from vanity metrics to value creation, blog writing becomes not just a mere marketing tactic, but a strategic business asset that compounds in value over time.

Next Steps

If you need a blog writer with over twenty five years’ experience and all that time spent in SEO as well, then call Paul Mackenzie Ross, your local SEO consultant, on 01252 692 765 or better still leave a message via my contact page.