Cut through the clutter and convert more HR professionals into subscribers of your payroll software through a better company blog
You might be asking yourself, “Hmm. How can a blog post improve my Google ranking?” CEOs and small business owners are usually surprised (and a bit skeptical) about focusing more energy into their business blogs. But it’s true: blog posts are an incredible tool for driving website traffic and gaining customer loyalty. Engaging your online audience with useful content gains trust, builds rapport, and finally, converts virtual leads into buyers.
Here at Buzzfarmers, we specialize in ghostwriting and managing blogs for companies. We connect with your target audience through SEO-optimized blog posts to drive waves of new traffic to your website. The shelf life of these blog posts last as long as the keywords we target are still being searched for online. In other words, one blog post can consistently drive new leads to your site for several years. Now multiply that by 100+ blog posts every 12 months.
Get the picture? It’s far more effective than a stagnant SEO’d home page.
Why are we focusing on blog post ideas for payroll software companies? Well, everybody wants to get paid. The market share for payroll software is becoming more and more saturated every year. If you want to stand out from the crowd and be noticed, optimizing your blog posts with useful content and keywords, and publishing on a consistent basis, will put you ahead of the race. You can think of this as an introduction to content marketing.
10 blog post ideas for payroll software companies
Now let’s clarify one basic principle behind content marketing through your business blog. The content for your blog is not meant to directly sell your product or service–that would be “interruption-based marketing”. Instead, we create content that your potential customers search for on the web and will find useful, informative, and intriguing to discuss. There are “soft sells” and calls to action throughout, but the focus is on providing content that will gain trust with your audience and loyalty to your brand.
Ask yourself: what content is useful to businesses or HR professionals looking to purchase or upgrade their existing payroll software?
In the examples below, I’ve listed 10 blog post ideas for payroll software companies out there today. I’ve included ideas for niche keywords highlighted in red within the headlines and a call to action for each post. Enjoy!
1. Help Businesses Create Strong Employee Relationships
Title: 10 Team Building Strategies to Strengthen Employee Ties
Suggested Call to Action: “Bringing your team together is key to creating a flourishing culture within your company. We can help keep your employees happy with simple and effective payroll strategies. Give us a call to find out more!”
Gusto has done an amazing job at creating useful and productive content on their blog. They publish with steady frequency and focus their content on helping businesses grow. You’ll find articles on team building, hiring freelancers, productivity tips, and more. Every blog post is also structured in a easily digestible way, with short paragraphs and ample use of white space. We think they’re doing a great job attracting exactly the type of customers to their site that are most likely to buy their products.
One particular post, “7 Team-Building Ideas that Help Your Employees Come Together” caught my eye. The author did a great job providing links to relative content on their site and provided a nice call to comment at the end. At Buzzfarmers, we see this as a near perfect post.
2. Become their Trusted Tax Advisor
Title: How to Explain a W-2 Tax Form to New Employees
Suggested Call to Action: “Are you looking for an easy way to complete payroll taxes for your business? Our payroll software will make this year’s tax season a breeze.”
Taking one look at SurePayroll‘s “Payroll Blog“made my eyes bulge. This company treats its blog as an online publication, with separate tabs across the page for Payroll & Taxes, Small Business Tips, Accountants, and more. Clearly, SurePayroll is utilizing its content to drive traffic to their website. Gauging their visibility on Google, they seem to be doing a great job at it. Every page is lined with a call to action and there is a focus on dominating certain keyword phrases. Bravo, SurePayroll, Bravo!The only suggestion I have is to delve a bit deeper into keyword research. Many of their articles target keywords that have an extremely high competition rate on Google (there are many companies and organizations targeting the same keyword). In the section for Payroll & Taxes, I noticed a few opportunities to use keywords about tax forms. Spending more time on finding niche keywords could help their web traffic grow.
3. Focus on Helping Businesses Budget Their Time and Money
Title: The Best Annual Budget Template for Small Businesses
Suggested Call to Action: “Relieve yourself of number-crunching and invest in quality payroll software to do it for you.”
Square Inc. has recently added a new payroll product to their portfolio, specifically for hourly employees. With all the different software systems coming out these days, Square played it smart by creating software for a specific niche. Their blog, Town Square, does a beautiful job at categorizing several different types of articles that could be useful to business owners. Their posts are detailed, in-depth, and insightful. However, it’s easy to see that not much of a focus is put on targeting niche keywords.
4. Give Expert Tips on Managing Unique Employees
Title: 7 Effective Ways For Managing Remote Workers
Suggested Call to Action: “Hourly employees working remotely can be difficult to manage, especially when it comes to payroll. We specialize in making those situations easier on both parties. Give us a call to find out more!”
The first thing I noticed about Wagepoint‘s blog was the hand-crafted graphics for each post. They show a real focus on making personalized content that communicates their brand voice. Not to mention the graphics are incredible! This payroll company shows an excellent eye for detail and makes a serious effort to locate niche keywords within their market. Nice job, guys.
After doing a little digging, I found a keyword that will prove useful to drive traffic to their site. One of their posts, “Keeping it Together With Your Remote Employees,” was great. However, the keyword they chose is difficult to rank on Google. “Managing remote workers” could provide a higher yield at 1,320 searches per year and only 13,300 competing pages.
5. Use Your Blog to Spread Brand Awareness
Title: How to Hire a Good Employee for Your Small Business
Suggested Call to Action: “Adding another team member to your small business can put a lot of stress on your numbers and figures. Make it easier on yourself with the simplified payroll software we offer.”
Oh and by the way, one way for YOU to hire good employees is to spend some time on talking about culture. With all the buzz going around about CheckMark, it’s surprising to see they haven’t yet utilized their blog for optimizing content. They recently re-posted an article HR Tech Outlook wrote, where CheckMark was placed on the top 10 list for payroll solution providers in 2015. It’s time to put that blog to use! With publicity like that going around, there was never a better time to target audiences in the market. However, they totally tackled the W-2 Form topic we just talked about.
6. Teach Businesses How to Properly Manage Expenses
Title: How to Maintain an Affordable Expense Reimbursement Policy
Suggested Call to Action: “Factoring in expense reimbursements with your payroll isn’t as easy as it sounds. Actually, it doesn’t sound easy at all, does it? We can help you figure it out. Give us a call today!”
QuickBooks has been a heavy hitter in the accounting software field for some time. They focus specifically on small businesses and their “small business center” blog platform reflects those efforts to dominate the field. Similar to Square and SurePayroll’s strategy on treating their blog as an online publication, Quickbooks’ has a extensive amount of content. One thing that sticks out is their use of video marketing, where employees give insights on how to properly manage tasks. Video is the king of online marketing. If you pair a quality video with SEO-enriched content, you’ll have a winner every time.
Taking a closer look, I felt Quickbooks’ articles on managing expenses within small businesses could use more diversification. The keyword above is an absolute killer: 4,680 searches per year; 33,600 competing pages.
7. Help Your Readers Understand Company Culture
Title: 3 Dynamic Types of Company Culture That Increase Productivity
Suggested Call to Action: “Keep your productivity culture at a high level by rewarding your employees with an easy and transparent payroll software.”
I have to say, I really admire Namely’s content focus on “company culture”. They’re dominating a particular keyword phrase seldom seen in other payroll blogs. Smart move. To top it off, Namely also crafts their own graphics for each post, giving them a personal touch that stock photos can’t produce. Their blog page is also accessible and easy to find on their website.
I decided to stick with Namely’s culture motif and dug up a keyword phrase to add to their portfolio of niche content. Blog post ideas for payroll software companies: focus on finding a niche–not just for your brand, but for your content, too.
8. Spread Awareness of Your Annual Events and Conferences
Title: A CEO’s Guide to Planning Fun Events for Employees
Suggested Call to Action: “Planning special events for your employees shows dedication to creating a healthy company culture. Keep up the morale by investing in a payroll service everyone can enjoy.”
Ultimate Software doesn’t pull any punches with its branding. As a full-service HR, payroll, and team management software company, they seek to create an culture of “ultimate” dynamics. Back in March 15′, they held their first annual Connections Conference and utilized their blog to spread the word. Good use of a content platform? Absolutely. But it seems Ultimate Software has not yet made the leap into utilizing their blog as a marketing tool.
Sticking with the focus on events, conferences and seminars, I picked out a keyword that has a good chance at pulling in executive-level traffic to their site. Similar to Namely’s dominance of “company culture” keywords, Ultimate Software can begin their blog content on fertile ground. From what I’ve seen, not many HR/payroll companies are targeting “employee events” keywords in their content. Get on it!
9. Create Groovy Infographics for Your Posts
Title: Why Cloud Payroll Software is Better for Business
Suggested Call to Action: “Are you transitioning to a more digital-friendly business plan? See how our payroll software can make life even easier for you.”
I was wondering when these payroll companies were going use infographics. Wave came through with flying colors; many of their posts are detailed with hand-crafted infographics, immediately pulling me in to click and view their content. The issue for most companies is that infographic-based posts often don’t include any content outside of the graphics. That means Google cannot search through those posts and rank them on their search engine. Isn’t that a shame? So much work put into these fancy graphics with no real returns. However, Wave has done pretty good in this respect!
10. Tackle Rules and Regulations
Title: 101 Things to Know About HR Law
Suggested Call to Action: “Every creative step within your business is a leap forward for employee satisfaction. Choose a payroll system that keeps your community in touch.”
MyPayrollHR is one of the first blogs I came across in my research that doesn’t tackle just the front-end issues, but also tackles HR education and more serious topics for those working in HR and processing payroll. This post on their blog is an update on the FLSA, and news posts like these will entice readers to hit the “subscribe to this blog” button in order to stay up to date.
Unlock the marketing power of your business blog
There are numerous blog post ideas for payroll software companies that can increase web traffic and engage readers with unique content. A few of the big ideas shared in this post:
- Publish your blog content with consistent frequency and a unique voice. Treat your blog like an online publication.
- Utilize keywords within your content that will drive targeted traffic back to your website.
- Make use of infographics and video content to further engage readers.
- Focus on dominating a particular business topic that your competition has not targeted yet.
- If you haven’t already, hire a professional content marketing company to create optimized blog content for you.
Do you know another payroll software company that publishes great content? Are you going to use any of these highlighted keywords to drive traffic to your site? Let us know what you think in the comments! We’d love to geek out about content marketing with you.
