Blogging is a great way to add regular, relevant content to your website, allowing you to build your search engine presence and establish a consistent brand voice among your readership.
Engaging content is the life blood of a successful blog, whether you choose to report on relevant news in your industry, start an opinion column, publicise your company’s own recent successes, or tackle a separate subject such as a charity or environmental cause you believe in.
A good content plan is a sensible place to start, as by planning out several weeks or even months in advance, you can make sure you publish relevant content across multiple posts that support each other, building up to a library of engaging content that will keep readers on your site for longer.
Why all businesses should start a website blog
There are some simple and compelling reasons why you should start a business website blog:
- It builds the number of pages on your own website, under your own control.
- These pages can be indexed by the search engines, increasing your visibility.
- You can build your brand voice and positive public perception.
- Each post is an opportunity to link across to your sales or enquiry page, or host ads.
- Regular relevant content keeps your website looking fresh to human visitors and search engines.
If your competitors are already blogging, you’ve got some catching up to do; if they’re not, you can create your content plan even more freely and get a head start on this powerful method of online marketing.
How does starting a blog help site traffic and search ranking?
Back in the spring we looked at some figures from HubSpot’s Rick Burnes, who compared around 750 businesses that blog with roughly the same number who don’t.
He found that business websites that include a blog:
- Receive 55% more visitors.
- Get 97% more links from other websites.
- Have 434% more pages in the search results.
This makes sense – the more pages you publish, the more opportunities there are for people to find you in search results or to link to your pages.
But of course it is also about publishing good quality content, which will rank higher in Google’s results and increase your chance of people linking to your posts too.
What makes a good business blog?
As we’ve mentioned, a content plan is a good way to make sure you publish engaging content on a regular basis – it doesn’t have to be too detailed, but it serves as a road map for your blogging activities over the long term.
You can still adapt it as necessary in order to respond to changing market conditions, major industry news and events, or any examples of huge success in your business activities.
Making sure you put relevant content on your blog is a good start. There are also techniques you can use to make your blog posts appear in search results for certain phrases, known as search engine optimisation or SEO, although this is something that is often best left to the experts.
How to blog better
It’s a cliche that to become a better writer, you should read as much as you can, but it helps to be aware of what your competitors and other local businesses and organisations are saying – you might find a hashtag that you can use to support your blogging when you link to your new posts from Twitter or Facebook.
Not everyone is a natural writer, and it’s sometimes hard to talk about yourself, so don’t be afraid to get some external help.
The Content Marketing Team offer outsourced blogging services and we have the experience and expertise to write engaging content with all of the SEO seamlessly included to help maximise your search visibility and website traffic – and ultimately, to maximise your revenues from your business blogging activities.
Need help with creating and maintaining your blog?
For further help with creating engaging content, please contact Paula Alexander at The Content Marketing Team.
