Is blogging still worth it for B2B SaaS?

This article is a response to research that HubSpot recently published on Are blogs dead?

At CommonMind, we work with B2B software brands on their content strategy, so I wanted to answer this question based on real-world data from our clients.

Whereas HubSpot's research was based primarily on interviewing experts, I analyzed this question by looking at data from CommonMind's clients. I chose three B2B SaaS clients that have different sizes of blogs and compared the performance.

We'll refer to the three blogs from these clients as Big Blog, Medium Blog, and Small Blog:

• Big Blog started with 457 posts and added 100
• Medium Blog had 328 and added 54
• Small Blog began with 101 and added 33
  

The assumption going into this article is that AI and zero-click searches are decreasing how much traffic B2B software companies are seeing from their blog efforts. In this article, I'll share my analysis and give my opinion on whether blogging is still worth it despite the changing landscape.

In the article, I refer to AIOs, which are the AI Overviews that appear at the top of more and more Google Search results and provide answers without the user needing to click to a website.

One note on methodology: for each of the websites studied, I only looked at blog traffic. I felt this was a more fair comparison than looking at overall traffic since the question being addressed is specific to blogging.

AI's Impact on Organic Clicks for B2B SaaS Blogs

Both the small and medium blog saw significant drops in organic traffic (clicks) despite blogging 2.8 and 4.5 times per month respectively. In the case of the small blog, there was a 54% drop in organic traffic and in the case of the medium blog, there was a 30% drop.

Only the big blog, with more frequent blogging (8.3 posts per month) saw an increase in blog traffic (11%). In their case, traffic dipped during the first six months before recovering in the latter half of the year.

Diving into Click Data

What drove these click trends? I dug into the data within Google Search Console and found the following:

For the big blog, articles that focused on statistics, trends, and artificial intelligence drove the growth in clicks.

Conversely, there was a drop in clicks for blog posts related to trends for the medium blog. I believe this is because unlike the trends highlighted by the big blog, the trends referenced by the medium blog were one year out of date.

Similar to the big blog, the medium blog also saw a rise in traffic for blog posts related to the topic of AI.

Although two AI-related blog posts received the most clicks for the small blog, similar to other topics on the small blog, AI-related posts saw a significant drop in traffic as a whole.

AI's Impact on Organic Impressions for B2B SaaS Blogs

The small, medium, and big B2B software blogs all saw significant increases in impressions:

• a 351% increase in impressions for the big blog that posted 8.3 times per month
• a 94% increase in impressions for the medium blog that posted 4.5 times per month

a 157% increase in impressions for the small blog that posted 2.8 times per month

Diving into Impression Data

In the case of all three blogs, topics related to AI drove significant impression growth.

For the big blog, significant growth also came from articles on statistics and trends, which lines up with that blog's increase in organic clicks. A "tips" article saw significant growth in impressions (from 28,000 to 143,000 impressions per month). However, clicks to "tips" articles declined from 168 clicks per month to 83 clicks per month.

The trend with "tips" articles was seen in the medium blog as well: a 28% increase in impressions and a 66% decrease in clicks.

With the small blog, "tips" articles saw significant impression growth and flat click growth. However, with the smaller sample set of articles, it is harder to draw conclusions in this case.

Takeaways

• Headwinds from AI overviews are decreasing the amount of organic traffic that Google is sending to B2B software blogs
• More frequent posting may help counteract this trend:
  • The one blog that saw more clicks from Google posted 8.3 times per month as compared to 2.8 and 4.5 posts per month for the other two.
• Articles on trends and statistics can still generate traffic, but they must be current.
• Articles focused on "tips" are likely to see increased impressions and a drop in clicks as Google incorporates those tips into its own AI-generated answers.
• All three blogs saw increased traffic (clicks) from articles that discuss AI.
  • This is likely a reflection of how "hot" this topic is and how frequently people search for information on AI.

Recommendations

Blogging still has benefits for B2B SaaS brands. On average, these blogs saw a 200% increase in impressions. This means that these blogs are seeing increased exposure for their brands in Google search results including AIOs. 

Although hard to prove, I believe that having your brand mentioned twice as much in these results is helpful for brand building. What's the alternative? Your competitors being referenced in AIOs while you're left out of the conversation.

It may burn a little that Google isn't sending as much traffic to our websites anymore due to AIOs, but we need to adapt to a world where brand mentions rather than clicks are the new collateral. By the way, this was the old world before Google.

Stats and trend articles can still drive clicks. This makes sense because LLMs need new information and users are more likely to dive into the sources for statistical information. The caveat is that this content isn't evergreen: to continue generating impressions and clicks, you'll need to keep those articles with statistics and trends up to date or publish new ones.

Finally, I don't think we blog just for Google traffic. Consider these non-Google related benefits of blogging:

• Blogs help us organize our thoughts and points of view
• Content from blogs can be repurposed for shorter thought leadership posts on social media, e.g. LinkedIn
• Blog articles help demonstrate our expertise to prospective clients who visit our website from other channels
• Blogs are useful to our sales people because it gives them a way to share thought leadership with prospects
• Our existing clients like our blogs: sometimes they have a question that our blogs can answer for them

If you have a question about content strategy for B2B SaaS or a perspective to share, find me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from yo.u