Are you blogging yet?
Does your business have a blog? If not, are you beginning to feel it should? Do your competitors have blogs? Blogging has become a mainstream marketing activity for many businesses. Whilst more and more businesses are hearing about the value and increasing importance of blogging, many businesses are still wrestling with exactly what the advantages are and how they can get the best out of their blog to make sure it becomes an effective marketing tool and not just an interesting exercise.
In this post, I’ll try and cover some of the basics of business blogging and why blogging and SEO are mutually beneficial.
Why blog?
The reasons people and businesses blog encompass anything from simply enjoying the freedom of self expression, to promoting a business, generating leads directly from the blog, generating an income from selling advertising space on the blog and many more. Blogs allow businesses to have a human face. Once set up, blogs are typically very easy for a non-technical person to update, so no need to consult your web designer.
What are the main benefits of business blogging?
A blog can be used to promote a business in a whole variety of ways. And if your competitors are moving into this space, you can be sure you’re missing out on something. So just what are those benefits and how can you make sure you maximise the effectiveness of your blog for your business?
1. Engagement
A blog is a powerful tool for engaging with your target audience. Having a blog means you have another channel of communication with your staff, your customers, others in your industry or any group you may wish to target. Blogs are most effective when they are interactive and allow true engagement by allowing your readers to leave comments on your blog. Through that channel, you can influence opinion about your business, help to establish your business as a leader in its field and attract new clients. Your blog can also be part of your reputation management strategy. Through your blog, you can control a bit more space in the search engines and therefore control a larger part of what people find out about your business. If you publish regularly, you can grow a community of loyal followers which might transform your website into a dynamic organism rather than a static, possibly stale, brochure site. That helps to keep people coming back for more.
2. Dissemination of information
Blogs are most effective when they allow mutual engagement although this does of course require more managing. However, there are still many benefits to be gained from a one way channel of communication and this may be the only practical option for some businesses. We encourage every business to incorporate a blog into their website.
3. Blogging for SEO
A blog has many benefits from an SEO perspective. Each blog post might be capable of appearing on page 1 of Google. For example, this blog post usually appears at number 1 in google.co.uk for a search on “business blogging services” and therefore draws visits from people hunting for those services. Every blog post therefore provides another potential entrance path into your site. Your blog post can also be used to promote the most important pages on your site, such as your main service pages. By including one or two strategically placed hyperlinks from within the content of your post to other pages in your site, you can kill two birds with one stone. You can help guide your visitors to the information pages that are likely to be most useful to them. By doing that you increase the chances of the target page (the page you link to) appearing higher up in the search engine results, thereby further promoting your main services.
Business blogging services
There are a number of different kinds of blogging service for business ranging from blog hosting, blog design and set up (integrated into your existing website or standalone) to blog writing / blog content creation. AdJuice is working on bringing you an exciting new range of blogging services including off-the-shelf blogging packages and services tailored uniquely for you. You will be able to offload the hassle of another essential aspect of your online marketing activity to an accomplished SEO services provider that can leverage the best SEO techniques for your business blog. We will ensure your blog draws traffic, engages readers, improves your fathead keyword rankings and becomes a sustainable competitive advantage for your business. Just like ours has for us.
How to maximise the effectiveness of your business blog
For your blog to be most effective, you need to maximise its reach and that means promoting both the overall blog and individual posts. There are a vast number of tactics for this but those below are probably the most common.
1. Promote your posts on your social media sites by mentioning them and linking back to them.
2. Encourage your readers to subscribe for updates by RSS feed or email so that they are automatically informed each time you publish new content.
3. Make it easy for people to link to your post by including social media buttons on your page. Back links to your post will improve the rankings not only of the page your post is on but also increase the overall authority of your site.
4. Draw more readers to your site by visiting the blogs of other people within your niche and leaving a useful comment whilst linking back to your blog. The blog owner and his readers may visit your blog and become regular readers.
5. Making sure your blog posts are SEO friendly. This means making clear choices about the keywords for which you wish your blog post to appear on page 1 of Google and then making sure those keywords appear in the important places within your post. Include the keyword in the post title and several times throughout the copy without overdoing it. Don’t target the most competitive (highest traffic potential) keywords for your individual post pages because your post page is very unlikely to rank top for a competitive keyword. Instead, target long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are usually phrases of 3 or more words which will not draw high traffic volumes since they are used less frequently by surfers.
6. Promote your overall blog by registering it in the most important directories of blogs.
7. Fully engage with your readers.
The golden rule
The most important rule of all is to try and publish content that is useful and interesting to your readers. It should also be yours and not scraped (copied) from other websites.
Want to find out more about business blogging services? Please get in touch using any of the options on our contact page. Alternatively, please visit our home page for an overview of our SEO services.
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