Of course! Blogging is great for SEO. It gives your company an outlet to tell your stories and reach more people. Talk about what your business and its’ people are doing. Share your knowledge. Blogging makes business sense. Increase your website traffic and grow your business with a blog.
Blogging is great for SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the process that helps your website be found in the search engines when a relevant search is performed for the products and services you’re offering. Blogging drives traffic to your website with the creation of more content for the search engines. Every blog post is like adding another page to your website that search engines can index, but unlike regular web pages, Google seems to really like blog posts, as they tend to show up in search results much faster than web pages.
Blogs make great social media posts when you’re sharing your knowledge, upcoming events, and company news, over posts that are just about promoting your company’s services and products. Blog posts are ideal for Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn. Followers click on your posts which link back to your website. This increases traffic to your website. Google considers these social signals when considering rankings.
Blogging is good for establishing credibility
Blogging can help to position your brand as an authority, a thought leader, with both Google and your customers. The more content that your company produces that is well-written and informative, the more you’re going to be able to build trust. When you write about what you know, you’re giving a little bit of information away for free, but it allows potential and existing customers to see that you know what you’re talking about and they can trust you.
For best results, consider what your customers are looking for when they read a blog. In most cases, it is not to be sold to. They’re looking for something of value, such as information.
Keep their attention
It’s long been known that blogs without images are clicked off of faster than those with images, but you can also include video and audio with your blog to keep your reader’s attention.
Another thing you can do is to break up your blog into smaller sections that are more easily read and scanned. Bold the section titles.
A lot of people have a hard time writing for the web, because all they’ve ever been taught is how to write academically. People reading online content don’t like reading long and bulky paragraphs. Shorten your paragraphs so that your readers can digest and find the information easier.
As mentioned above, don’t keep writing just to fill a word quota. There’s only so much that you can say about some topics before you run out of things to write that provide value to your reader. When there’s nothing more you can say of value, it’s best to stop your blog post right there, even if you’ve only reached 300 of your 1,000-1,500 word goal for blog posts.
How often should I post blogs
Some businesses can work up to posting several blogs a day without looking like content spam, as long as frequency is increased slowly. Businesses that can work up to this level can expect to see great increases in website traffic. But don’t worry if your business doesn’t have the budget or the time to blog that frequently. You can choose a schedule that works for your business, such as once daily or weekly. Any blogging that you do is good, but less frequent blogging will bring in less traffic.
What kind of content should I include on my blog?
Start by considering the types of products and services your company provides. Think about which products and services you’d like to see more website traffic for. Consider what your existing and potential customers would like to know about, what kind of problems you can help solve, and if it’s something that you’d like to see increased traffic for, it’s even better to blog about.
For best results, the longer the better. It used to be that a 150 word blog was good enough and then it moved to 300 words, followed by 500, and so on. For the last several years, the recommendation has been to create posts of 1,000+ words and it just keeps going up. If you can get up to 1500 words with quality content that’s even better. Just don’t forget the quality content part. Meaning you can’t just throw something together with a whole lot of keywords in there and expect to see it on the 1st page of Google. You need to strike a balance of writing for people and for search engines. If it starts to look spammy or unreadable, you’re probably better off with fewer words.
Should I update old blogs that aren’t performing well
If it’s been at least a couple of months and a blog post isn’t performing well, you can always update it to see if it helps. Check out the competition for the keyword you were trying to rank for to see what they are doing. It may also pay off to increase the length of your blog post if it was written at a time when long content wasn’t as necessary and there is still more you could say without decreasing the value of the blog post.
Who should be writing the blog
Many different people can write blogs. It can be the job of one person in the company, such as the CEO or someone in marketing or pr. You can also outsource the task, but if you really want to get a lot of blogs posted and take advantage of the vast knowledge of several people, it can be very beneficial to have many people, including from various departments in the company, blogging. Some employees are resistant to adding on an extra task that they may see as not their job, but when shown the value to the company, many employees come on board.
One thing that should be considered is the time that it takes to write the blog. The average blogger now takes over 3 hours to write a post due to Google wanting quality and in depth content. Many businesses do not want to take on this task because it seems overwhelming or they simply do not have the time. The good news is you can always hire a blog writing service to do this for you. A blog writing service can take over all or a part of your businesses blogging, freeing you up to what you’re best at.
Thanks for reading. I hope this helps you in your decision to continue or start blogging in 2018. You can contact Delphinium Marketing today at 304-207-0795 to get help with a new or existing blog!
Delphinium is a Dunbar-Charleston, WV based company providing SEO and blog writing services to WV and across the U.S.