Having a blog on your business website is incredibly important. We take a quick look here at the reasons why and some blog writing tips to get the most from your blogging efforts.
Reasons why you should have a blog
A website with products and services won’t change much if you have a fairly static set of offerings. By adding a blog to your business website you will be regularly introducing new content. This has a number of advantages such as:
- Reasons to visit and revisit: Blogs give users a reason to visit your website on a regular basis. Whether you have news, product announcements or the latest updates from your company, having a blog is another channel and cause for visitors to return if you keep up the quality and the cadence.
- Freshness: Having blog posts feature on your website’s homepage is a great way to keep your number one shop window fresh and up to date. If your content is fairly static, e.g. only updates every few months, then a blog is a channel for more regular web content.
- Social Media Ammunition: By creating a blog you have content that you can link to, and announce from your social media channels – if you write a blog post then broadcast it to your followers on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, then you’ll be creating greater opportunities for people to come visit your website, and read your latest news or blog. The side effect is that they may evolve into an incidental buyer or you can nurture them towards buying products and services from you. This last point is especially pertinent if you have “big ticket” items or products and services that require consideration and have longer lead times.
- Showing your human side: Having a regular blog, you have an opportunity to give a more human side to your business, if that’s in keeping with your brand policy, tone of voice, editorial policy etc. You can show personality, charisma and free-flowing, in-depth knowledge that may assist in endearing your brand to your visitors. You’re building a relationship between your brand and your (potential) customers here, so it’s the perfect opportunity to really connect with your audience.
- Rich keywords: You get to add a new richness to the wording on your website. So where you may have been quite formal in writing about your products and services, you can now naturally talk about your offerings and introduce those all important keywords that may capture those “long tail” searches. For instance, if you don’t yet have a case study section on your business website, take the opportunity to talk about your latest work in a particular place, clearly highlighting to you audience that you provide services and products to their area. If your news and blog posts start attracting more geo-located traffic on the back of this, then you should consider adding that case studies section to your website.
- Showing off the benefits: The sales adage of “selling the sizzle not the steak” comes into play in your blog posts – you get to really showcase the benefits and the life-changing advantages, although you really should be doing this in the rest of the copy in your business’ website anyway, right?
What you should be doing when writing your blog
We’ve just written about why you should be blogging on your business website, but now for the what and the how…
- Unique blog titles: Make your blog titles are absolutely unique. We had one client who called each blog post “latest news” and so their site filled up with loads of posts all called “latest news”. Can you imagine if the BBC News website wrote headlines like that?
- Specific blog titles: Be specific in your blog title, actually mention the product, service or thing you’re here to write about. Writing “See our new service” might attract some attention on social media but not on SEO. Who is going to Google “new service” and actually end up on your site? The chances are exceedingly slim. Better still, titling your piece “See our new technical SEO service” is exactly what you’re writing about, specifically what you’re trying to draw attention to and ultimately what you’re trying to create a buzz for, and sell more of. So once again, be specific. This title, in WordPress, is used in the URL of the page, quite often it automatically appears in the <title> tag and will be in the meta description tag too. These are all ranking signals and you need to be “ticking all the boxes” where you can.
- Repeat your Keywords: Once you’ve mentioned the product or service in your heading or title, say it again. Mention the specific product or service again in the blog piece because, if you don’t, that’s another ranking signal that the search engines look for and it won’t be there. This is quite often the keyword you’ll want to be ranking for and if it isn’t mentioned why would a search engine rank you for something you’re not saying or talking about? Your competitors may be talking about it, and they’ll be beating you, so step up and talk about your new offering.
- Avoid Keyword Stuffing: Following on from point 3, remember not to overdo it with the keywords. If you mention a keyword too many times, that’s called keyword stuffing. Write naturally, write for humans, have a conversational style, or whatever best suits your brand and tone of voice. If you’ve tried to squeeze your keyword in too many times it may look unnatural and be a bit odd to read – you’re writing for humans first, search engines second.
- Add images: Even just one image will do. Make sure the image appropriate and relevant, eye catching, on brand, in keeping with the style of other images on your website. Make sure the image is not too big though, uploading 5MB photographs to your website will actually slow it down so create images that are the correct dimensions and optimise them so that they remain a good quality but a smaller file size. Try using Compressor.io for individual images or the Imagify plugin if you’re on a WordPress website.
- Expertise, Authority and Trust: Write with all the natural expertise and authority that you have about your profession. You’re a subject matter expert, you really know your stuff, so let that flow. You’re conveying to your audience that you’re “the one” so let that come naturally, don’t force it. Your expertise and the way you come across to your audience should also ultimately generate trust. Every so often people who work for the search engines may actually manually evaluate your website content, so make it the very best and really show off your Expertise, Authority and Trust or E-A-T as Google will be looking for.
- Does your blog pass the “so what?” test?: Whilst we’re talking about expertise, authority and trust, make your blog posts really useful for your visitors. For example. if you are offering a new service that aligns with the latest government policy, then include references to a relevant snippet of that policy, include it as a quote or blockquote. If your visitors might want to see more, then include a link to that reference. It’s OK to link out, you’re providing your reader with richness and, hopefully, they’ll appreciate that. Another great point here is to link to other pages within your website and build up more internal links. You’ll be adding weight to the most important pages in your site by linking to them. Again, it’s also very useful for your visitors.
- How long? (Has this been going on?): A common question we hear at Clever Marketing is “How many words should I write in my blog?” As with all things in SEO – it depends. You really need to write enough to really get your point across and in good quality too. Short blogs can be seen as a bit “spammy” so you want to make sure you’re better than that. The absolute bare minimum has always been touted as 300 words. There are studies that show the best ranking blog posts, which are both authoritative and convey expertise, tend to run in at over 1,000 words.
However, this word count depends on what you’re writing about, how much time you’ve got, what you’re trying to achieve and obviously the depth of knowledge you possess within the field. You really need to make your efforts pay dividends, so create the very best blog post that you can and, if it does run for over 1,000 words then that’s great, you’ve got a better chance of ranking and getting traffic than your competitors who write the least they can.
Hopefully these blog writing tips should be enough to get you started with creating blogs for your website. Once you’ve started though, make sure you blog regularly – your audience will expect it and the search engines will crawl your site regularly.
If you need assistance with doing the SEO on your blog posts, more blog writing tips, editorial oversight and proof-reading pre-flight or you need someone to write those blog posts for you, give Clever Marketing a call on 01276 402 381 or complete the easy contact form.