The blog, so versatile yet so underutilized for many businesses. With near unlimited writing space, blogging provides the chance to speak on anything from day-to-day operations or provide commentary on the latest industry trend.
Why Blogging Benefits Your Business
An active blogging presence drives traffic to your website. Each blog post is an indexed page, one more opportunity for your business to show up in search engine results and drive traffic to your website. This activity also shows Google and other search engines that your website is active, helping to increase your site ranking.
The content created through your blog can be shared via social media outlets, giving more eyes to your website, business, or product. Additionally, as with the Google effect, regular blogging helps keep your social media presence going.
The best business blogs answer common questions from their leads and customers. This gives you the ability to establish yourself as an authority in the industry. Yet, the content you produce must be helpful to your target customer. If the customer finds an answer to their question by searching through your blog, you’ve helped them before the initial contact. This increases the potential customer’s ability to educate themselves, allowing them to ask more complex questions should they engage in a potential sale with the company. Salespeople with your company can reference the blog posts for specific questions and/or in-depth explanations.
Blogging drives long-term results and fuels the ever important SEO. A post will rank in search engines long after the initial upswing in views and leads drops off. But your information and company will appear in the results long after you’ve moved on to another post.
A blog gives a voice to your company. This voice can speak about current or upcoming products and services and add commentary to timely news topics or market trends. It can share company initiatives beyond the corporate website and let your brand personality shine through the keyboard. On the other hand, active blogging encourages interaction, comments and feedback from customers and industry peers alike. But this requires someone keeping up with the comment sections at all times, providing timely and relevant responses.
Should I Blog For My Small Business?
Frankly, yes. Blogging keeps you focused on your content marketing strategy, but offers PR in return.
The SEO Benefits of Blogging
The content, message, keywords, and links – you have control over it all when blogging. The website itself should only have so much content on it. Blogging allows you a channel to write further about what you feel is helpful for your audience. Many users search for do-it-yourself tutorials and other content likely not found on your website. But a blog with content related to these searches will appear more often in their search results.
The more backlinks your content has, the more Google and other search engines can see the website and content are useful. This boosts your search engine ranking. Speaking of linking, blogs allow for enhanced internal linking. This action helps search engines understand what’s on your website.
Above all, fresh content is a driving force in SEO. Google prefers websites that stay fresh via new content, rewarding them with a higher ranking.
Are You A Blogger?
If you already blog on a regular basis, we can help you optimize your content with our SEO services. In a nutshell, SEO helps search engines such as Google and Bing figure out what each page on the internet is about how it may be useful for users. From there, the search engines rank your website in their results based on on-page SEO factors such as meta tags, keyword placement, keyword usage, readability, image usage, and URL optimization.
Social Media Promotion
Our team of experts are well versed in social media and promotion. Along with Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn Groups and Google+ Communities are full of like-minded people within your industry. By promoting your blog through those outlets, we will help generate more traffic and engagement for your blog. Other social media means we use are relevant hashtags and Twitter chats. Twitter chats allow you to generate conversation with others and share tips and tricks of value within the industry.
- Check out our blog: “Why LinkedIn Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy“
Paid campaigns allow you to decide which post to promote via social media. By doing this, you can target a post to specific individuals based on demographics, events, behaviors and interests.
Analytics and user data show us when your target audience is online and active. From there, we customize the posts to reach the audience at peak times. But why not use the same post or content across all social media platforms, wouldn’t that save time?
That’s the cookie cutter approach and sadly, the cookie cutters need to stay in the kitchen drawer. We use Google Analytics to track who, when, where, how long and several other quantitative measurements happen on each of your pages and posts. What numerically explodes on your Twitter account won’t necessary have the same engagement rate on Facebook, hence customization. We always have these seven words in mind when producing your social media and blogging content: grabbing attention is good, keeping it is better.
