Your business blog is an essential tool for your inbound marketing efforts in terms of SEO, creating a community, becoming known as a thought leader and generating visits, leads, conversion to customers and brand ambassadors.
As THE most valuable piece of company real estate, your blog content should speak to your audience and prospects first and then the search engines. Your blog content should resonate with your prospective buyers, meeting their needs and answering their questions. Make it rich, valuable and educational.
WHY?
People are searching for answers to their problems and pain points every single day and you have the solutions.
Hubspot: Companies that blog have 55% more visitors and generate 70% more leads than companies who don’t.
If you are writing content and optimizing your site and pages to answer the questions of your buyers, then you will be discovered, valued and your content will be shared. Don’t just push product and services. Answer questions with exceptional content that is worth talking about. When they talk and share, this creates more inbound links. The more inbound links you have, the higher the rate of getting found in organic searches. 97% of companies that blog have more inbound links.
Laboring over content and strategy can present a challenge for many. Think about what you want to say to your readers. What solutions you offer. Research trending topics, keyword searches, case studies, statistics and other industry related materials. Set aside time each week for research and writing. Your blog content strategy is simplified and better organized if you create an editorial calendar containing columns for:
- Theme
- Posting date
- Social media channels
- Title
- Keywords
- Tags
- Meta description
- Links
- Statistics
- Guest authors
When considering your keywords and descriptions remember: Blogging impacts your SEO!
HOW does a blog influence your SEO??
- Each and every new blog post you write is actually an indexable “site” of its own.
- Each page gives you an opportunity to be found by search engines.
- The more pages you have, the more indexing you receive: the greater opportunity to move your site higher up the ranks.
- You can optimize each post with strong keywords that your target market is searching.
Keywords are just as important as your content. When creating your post, consider what probing question (s) you want to answer and use these in your title, meta descriptions, image file name/alt tags and body of text. Long tail keywords are much more powerful and targeted than just a single word. They help to drill down to a slimmer defined market of those in need. It trims the fat and returns much better results.
“The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, but, when taken together, they comprise the majority of the world’s demand for information through search engines.” Moz.com
Your blog is a cost effective inbound marketing tool to generate new interest, business and web traffic.
- Keep it rich, enticing and educational for the greatest return.
- You are writing for your audience.
- Content that is relevant and can be trusted as an authoritative resource will drive search engines to crawl your site.
- Make your content personalized for your visitors, answering their questions.
- Use long tail keywords
- Create internal links to other posts on your site
- Blog consistently
- Monitor your brand’s online chatter
- Submit your posts to online blogging directories and business sharing communities
Are you ready? Now set aside the time right now to work on your editorial calendar and content. If you need help overseeing your blogging efforts, just send us an email to schedule a consult.
Hi Suzie,
Blogs are a fantastic way to spread the word about your brand. Combined with social media and other online marketing strategies, it can be a very effective way to give your business more visibility.
Hi Heather,
Thank you for your comment. Business blogging is definitely a necessary component of your marketing funnel creating a more expansive digital long lasting digital footprint. It is well worth the time and effort. The social search experience has continued to grow and exemplify the benefits of integrating social media channels and sharing as can be further validated by G+ and Google Authorship.
Thanks again!
Suzie
I’m not a big fan of blogging unless it is part of an overall strategy that incorporates SEM/SMM/PR. Blog is an attractive means to pilot traffic goals, but you need the extra influences of followers and networked colleagues to make it worthwhile. Optimized press release linked with specific blog entries are also very effective means of generating interaction and decent traffic. But the most important rule of all – is consistency. Keep the content flowing!
Thanks for your comment Ray. I think it is an important part of the marketing funnel as well. There are many facets to online success and digital growth. Relevant and remarkable content is just as important as the consistency. If you are providing value, enriching others, solving pain points etc, then you aren’t able to maintain an audience. Great day to you.