Today, writing a blog on your business website is a foundational activity for SEO.

Blogging lets you add fresh, relevant content to your domain on a regular basis.  You target keyword themes with natural use.  It provides insight and information for prospective clients.  It’s some of the most “shareable” content for social media marketing.

But blog content today must go beyond filler. It’s not just to feed search engine algorithms.  It needs to be useful, unique content that genuinely interests and engages your audience.

This not just because it makes you look more professional.  The engagement metrics tracked on your content (time on page, navigation patterns, social sharing, user comments) are used by search engines to determine if the content is useful to people.  When those metrics tell a story of rich engagement, the content is given more value for SEO.

These engagement metrics, including the social media activity, have supplanted inbound links as the most important factor in how Google evaluates your content’s value.  It must be remembered that the algorithm uses these types of metrics to measure human behavior, then uses that data in it’s calculations.  It’s still just a computer – it has no innate ability to judge how useful a piece of content is.

In other words, you could have a really excellent piece of content on your blog, but if nobody ever reads it, shares it, comments on it, or links to it, it won’t attain maximum impact with respect to SEO.

Creating this “buzz” around your blog articles is the goal of content marketing.  You need to create excellent content, then you need to promote it.  As people interact with it, it gains a momentum that raises the SEO value.

All of this seems to gel into a clear marketing plan.  But there are other considerations.  The biggest has to do with measurement vs results.

You can create a great deal of useful, engaging content that gives you loads of SEO value.  But does that content help you drive more conversions?  Are the search rankings you’re building reaching your primary audience?

Moreover, is all the blog content you’re publishing on your domain helping funnel leads towards your conversions goals?  Or is it in fact distracting them from your business offering and sales message?

We know in sales that too much information can lead to indecisiveness.  On a website, too much content creates the same problem.  You can provide so much information that it lures leads away from the very goals you hoped to achieve with the content in the first place.

The bottom line is that as a business, you didn’t set-out to become a publisher.  Your end-goal is not to provide free information, it’s to get more clients.

Your website design is not meant to be a digital magazine.  You’re not just trying to engage people with information and entertainment.  You need your design to be conversion-based.

So we end-up in the this quandary.  Informational blog publishing is a needed SEO tactic, but it can also create a glut of information that can actually distract leads from the main priority of your conversion-based content.

What can be done?

The reality is that you can’t have it both ways.  The informational blog content you create is more akin to branding.  By its nature, it’s not direct-response.  It has the potential to steer traffic away from the conversion-focused areas of your website.  To gain the SEO value, you lose some on the promotional weight of your content.

Of course there are many ways you can implement conversion goals into this content, most of which (at this stage) are meant to either capture an email or get someone to follow your social media channels.  You then have a lead segment you can target in a drip campaign with information that funnels into your conversion goals.

You can also remarket to anyone who’s been on your domain, giving you the chance to try some more direct-response ads on this audience.

But in the end, your blog content is working towards two goals.  The first is the SEO benefits.

The second is earning trust.

Far and away, the biggest advantage to providing insightful, useful content for your target audience is building trust.  You have to make good on your promise and provide value for free.  While this seems counterproductive for the direct-response mindset, it can be very effective for inbound marketing because establishing trust is often the first, vital step that leads people into your conversion funnel.

You also have to look at the quality of the leads you’re getting.  It’s possible to get high conversion numbers with brief, direct-response landing pages that focus on nothing other than the call to action.  But remember that these leads are going to be less informed and less qualified.

Using content marketing may take longer, but when you engage the right leads with a story that makes them the hero, you end-up with higher qualified leads you can close.  It’s not just about the number, it’s about the end result.

You can – and should – run PPC campaigns with landing pages that are strong direct-response content.  Don’t miss leads who are farther along in the buying cycle.

But if you want to be successful with SEO, you must have a content creation plan for your blog.  And a major part of the plan must be how you’ll engage your audience with your story.  The content alone, without engagement, simply won’t drive the best SEO results.

Old-school, direct-response advertisers may scoff.  And in truth, your website content won’t be as precise.  But precision is not the same as significance.

If gaining a larger share of your target audience through organic traffic and earning their trust in your initial presentation are goals for you, then your blog content is the most significant part of your website.