The past few months have been a challenging time for many of us. Businesses and individuals have had to completely change how they go about their day-to-day lives, adapting how they shop, how they live and how they conduct business. Many businesses have had to temporarily close in order to follow government guidance and keep their staff safe and may now be thinking of ways to give their business a new lease of life in the post-lockdown age.
If you are looking at how to improve your business’s online presence and attract more people to your website or business premises in order to purchase goods or a service, you may not have considered the benefits of a business blog.
Why a Business Blog is Good for Business
Whilst many online tools such as online ads are brilliant for generating traffic to your website, they do cost money in order to work. If you are new to online marketing, you may be hesitant to invest a lot of money in this tool, or you may simply not have the budget at the minute. Creating a business blog for your website is a free or low-cost way to attract people to your website organically (i.e without directly paying for advertising). Creating and adding to a business blog is one of the best ways to boost your company’s visibility online and get noticed by your target audience.
Boost your Business’ Visibility
Creating an SEO-optimised blog can also help your website rank in search engines, the place many of your potential customers will be searching for a solution to their problem. Recent studies have shown that blogs are responsible for around 434% more indexed pages than websites without a blog, a clear marker that creating a business blog on your website can make all the difference. As the online world constantly changes, so should your business. Adding new, relevant content to your business blog gives google, bing and other search engines the chance to index your pages whilst enabling you to incorporate more findable and relevant keywords into your website content through engaging blog posts.
Show Your Audience You Are an Expert
Aside from driving more traffic to your website, creating a business blog is a brilliant way to show your customers why you do what you do and why you are the best option out there. A business blog can demonstrate to your customers that you are a leader in your industry with expert knowledge they won’t find anywhere else. Writing a blog on problems your customers may be facing, for example, is a great way to connect with your customers and show that you understand their needs. You can then use your blog and connecting website pages to show how you can solve their problem and provide a service to them whether that is a product, advice or a business service. Blogging as a business is a great way to build up trust with your customers and clients through a less (but not always entirely) sales-driven approach.
Boost Online Sales
If website visitors and a boosted brand presence haven’t swayed you to start a business blog yet, did you know that you could get over 50% more leads on your website compared to a website with no blog? Creating a business blog allows you to talk directly to your audience about your product or service as well as related topics to help your customers make an informed decision. By keeping customers on your website for longer, you stand more chance of generating valid leads and converting those into paying customers. For those simply searching online for a product or service, an engaging blog post could mean the difference between remembering a brand and returning once they are ready to purchase and your company simply falling into the cracks of the world wide web.
Access a Captive Audience
As the world starts to reopen, prospective customers are spending more time than ever researching and buying products online. Creating a blog for your business talking all about your product and related topics can take advantage of an audience looking to find out more about what is on offer whilst sat at home. Google’s algorithms match people searching for exactly what you are offering meaning that the people reading your blogs are people who have been actively searching for related topics. An in-depth blog about the best types of pipes for each purpose, for example, could see your customers clicking through to purchase or remembering the name of your business when looking to purchase in the future. Harnessing the power of the internet to reach your customers in new and informative ways is one of the best ways to engage with potential and existing customers. A well-run and optimised blog can keep them visiting your store again and again and ensure they remember your name when the time comes to purchase.
What Makes a Good Business Blog?
When it comes to creating a blog for your business, you may be wondering what makes a good business blog. The answer to that can largely depend on the industry you are creating a blog for. However, there are some key things you should bear in mind when creating a business blog.
Value
One of the key elements of your business’ blog should be value. In order for your blog to succeed in its purpose, to entice viewers, drive conversions or add to your mailing list, you will need to provide value to your audience. This could be through solving a common problem a number of your customers face, outlining a how-to guide relating to your product or service or even just providing an interesting topic and exploring unique ideas relating to your business within your business’ blog posts. This is important as, without value, your site visitors have no need to read your blog and discover what your business has to offer.
Frequency
If you are planning on creating a successful blog for your business, something that you should consider is creating a blog post schedule. Take a look at the resources and man-power available to you and work out how frequently you will be able to reasonably plan, write and publish a blog post as a business. Once you have worked this part out you should stick to it. Whilst some businesses may see success from posting daily blog updates, for a lot of companies, this just isn’t feasible. Working out how much time you can dedicate to creating a blog post for your company will allow you to set up a regular posting schedule and let your readers know when to expect new content. This will ensure a steady flow of content to your site and, if done well, a steady flow of visitors.
Make it Personal
When looking at what makes a good business blog, something that can help your company blog stand out from the crowd is to make it personal. That is not to say you should write about what you had for lunch and what the weather looks like out of the office window today but it should closely align with your company’s online profile and talk about some of the things that are important to both your company and your customers. By building up a familiarity in your business’ blog, you will keep it relevant and on-brand and become something your customers recognise as part of your business.
Optimise Your Business Blog for SEO
We wouldn’t be doing our job as a digital marketing agency if we didn’t add this point into our guide on how to make a good business blog. SEO should be present in all elements of your business website but one area where you can really incorporate your SEO strategy is within your business blog. By implementing a keyword strategy in your blog you will be harnessing the organic traffic accessed through those search terms resulting in more click-throughs to your site and more potential customers seeing what it is your business does.
If you are looking for guidance on how to start a business blog, or perhaps your business already runs a blog that isn’t performing as well as you had hoped, our specialist SEO and content writing team are here to help. Get in touch now to see how we can help.