Do you have a business blog? If not, it’s time to set one up.
If you have a blog but don’t do much with it, you must remedy that as well. The return on investment of blogging is huge, but unfortunately, many business owners don’t understand how valuable this tool can be — or why it’s critical for growing their business.
Blogging is the anchor of content marketing, and content marketing is one of the most important aspects of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. In fact, for most businesses, blogging is essential to improving SEO.
Let’s start with the basics. A business blog (a word derived from the term “web log”) is a platform that allows you to create and share written content in the form of blog posts. You can add other forms of content to your posts to enhance them, including images, infographics, charts, videos, etc.
Although you have quite a bit of freedom with regard to subject matter, your posts should relate to your business.
For example, you can write about new developments in your industry, product launches, interesting ways to use your products or you can emphasize the importance of your services for certain customer profiles.
The sky’s the limit for subject matter, with only a few caveats: Your content must be original, it must be relevant and you must be able to naturally incorporate your SEO keywords or phrases.
Let’s take a quick look the secondary benefits of blogging for businesses. Blogging helps you:
Those are all great reasons to blog, but the primary reason you need a business blog is to help boost your SEO rankings, increasing visibility and driving more traffic to your website.
How does it do this? Let us count the ways.
Fresh Content — Google demands you add fresh content to your site regularly. If you don’t, you’ll get penalized in the search rankings. This is the easiest, most cost-effective way to accomplish that goal. Blogging makes Google happy.
Evergreen Content — Once a post goes up, there it shall dwell, forevermore, helping boost your SEO. The investment you make in each post will continue to pay off indefinitely. You can also use posts for internal linking purposes.
Targeting Keywords & Phrases — Google does not allow keyword stuffing. This means you can only use your keywords and phrases so often in your site content. But each new blog post allows you to repeat and reinforce these critical terms. Blog posts are also the perfect place to use more long-tailed key phrases and local or hyperlocal terms.
More Indexed Site Content — Google loves sites that have tons of content, but most businesses are limited in how many main pages they can (or should) have on their site. Your blog contributes directly to the content that Google will index for its SEO algorithms.
Increase Backlinks — Your blog posts provide a great opportunity for other sites to link to yours. Google places great value on these backlinks, making link-building an important aspect of SEO.
Business owners must realize that a blog is not a direct marketing tool. It’s primarily a tool to make Google happy. Anything else it accomplishes is a bonus.
Yes, your content must be fresh and well-written (correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.). Other than that, business blog posts are a vehicle for the components required for good positioning in the search results.
That said, you can leverage your posts for a variety of other marketing purposes. For example, you can link to social media posts to engage your audience and drive even more traffic to your site. You can use posts to help customers with questions, if you have already addressed their issues in a post.
You can do all kinds of creative marketing using your business blog posts as a basis — as long as you never lose site of the true reason for blogging.
Effectively describing how to blog requires its own post — or several. However, savvy business owners let a content marketing expert handle this task for them.
Companies that specialize in digital marketing know how to leverage blogging to boost SEO. No matter what your industry is, expert internet marketers — such as the Be Locally SEO team — know how to create content that will get you results.
In addition to content marketing, Be Locally SEO provides search engine marketing (SEM) and optimization, website design and social media marketing. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you grow your business using your business blog.