Content marketing has proven to be a growth quantifier for digitized businesses, and blogging is the second most popular form of media utilized by marketers.
Blogging has tremendous benefits, and one of the most useful things small businesses can do to sweeten their likelihood of ranking high in Google is to start a blog. While business blogging covers abundant objectives, from establishing your authority to generating qualitative leads, we’ll discuss using it as an SEO enhancement tool.
Blogging to meet a specific goal: Your business website and services (or products) is what you want to promote and rank organically in Google. Blogging can help you promote your business.
Service Pages Content V/s Blog Content?
A relevant question might be, why not create fresh content on the website and publish new pages instead of having a separate blog? Your website will probably have pages dedicated to your vision & mission, the foundational story of your business, and service details.
If you provide software development services, for example, how do you engage your viewers with discussions on various aspects of software development?
We are talking pre-sell at this point.
- How do you garner trust and goodwill and set up some kind of relationship with your potential customers?
- How do you give them something of value even before they have decided to buy your services?
- You can do all that through articles that, almost invariably, will not be quite in sync with the rest of your site.
Assuming that you are going to constantly update your blog (you should, although a lot of businesses don’t), keeping everything on your site is going to make it extremely cumbrous and difficult to navigate. Also, updating a site is not as simple as updating a blog. A blog is designed to be updated – a weblog, remember?
It is your online diary that you can keep updating forever and still keep everything organized with categories, tags, and pages. With all the advantages the blog offers over a site, there does not seem to be any logical reason why you should want to fit your square articles in your round site.
Also, a blog is so much easier to optimize with its inbuilt tools and third-party plug-ins. And you get all of that without paying anything extra – mostly. It is a user-friendly interface that can have multiple accounts for your employees and departments, and anyone can log in and add a post.
Any blog becomes part of an unimaginably huge network of bloggers, and that, by itself, has its own SEO merits. Even if you do not make an effort to read other people’s blogs, rest assured, if you have good content, bloggers will find you and add trackbacks.
Today, no business can afford to keep “social media” outside of their inbound marketing strategy, and a blog, owing again to its plug-ins, makes it stupidly simple to share your content on your Facebook Page (which you doubtless have?) and make available equally simple options for your readers to share it on their network as well.
Here are some points to keep in mind when you are using a blog to enhance your SEO.
Track Your Keywords & Search Positions –
One of the best ways to determine whether or not you need help marketing your blog – i.e., making sure people can find it – is to see if you can find it yourself.
Search the major engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, and see what comes up. Make sure to use many different search terms, keywords, spellings, misspellings, and phrases that you think should land your blog at the top of that search. If your blog doesn’t pop up at the top, you may need help.
Optimize Content –
If you’ve searched several terms, but your blog doesn’t appear – or if it appears way down on the page – you may need to spend some money on search engine optimization or SEO. SEO is a strategy that uses keywords, metadata, content, and page structure to convince Google and other search engines that your website is credible and authoritative and that it should be ranked high up in the listings.
Search engines are at constant war with spammers and unscrupulous keyword stuffers who try to crowbar subpar pages into good rankings they don’t deserve.
If your blog is good, it deserves to be ranked high up. Content optimization may be able to get you there.
Invite Guest Authors –
Many times, quality blogs can attract guest writers with little or no budget. Offering them a chance to plug their product or service and link to their website is enough to convince even an industry expert that a post on your blog helps them as much as it helps you. Guest bloggers provide unique perspectives and can give valuable insight to your readers and lend the credibility of their name to your operation.
Who would you ask to guest blog? Anyone whom you respect, admire, or are curious about. Whose work inspires you or would make you move to emulate their style? Someone you’ve read about, follow on Twitter, whatever. Reach out with an individualized invitation, and don’t let a rejection get you down.
Hire Freelancers –
There are freelance writers (ghostwriters) that specialize in doing one thing and one thing only – providing content for owners of blogs and websites who are in a pinch, are understaffed, or simply need help filling in the content gaps. Whether you’re a software developer, life coach, or interior design firm, content is king.
Most of these freelancers not only provide content but do it in a way that is focused on SEO, or search engine optimization, which uses keywords, metadata, and links to convince the search engines that your page is authoritative and credible enough to be ranked high on their index.
Remember Your Objective –
You are trying to enhance your business website’s SEO.
- Use judicious placement of links to your business site on your blog. Make use of the space above the fold and place an invitation to try out your service.
- Place links in your articles that reach relevant sections of your site – but remember to also link to authority resources so as not to appear too promotional.
- Choose a template that will allow you to place a welcome message right above the main navigation with a link to your money pages.
Above all, make a commitment to update your blog regularly. A blog is not just a great way to enhance your SEO, but it is also something that gives a human face to your business, and if people trust you, getting customers will never be a problem.
