In order to keep up with modern demands for easy access to information, most businesses communicate with their customers across multiple channels. From social media accounts to email blasts, there are many different options available to keep your audience engaged and loyal to your brand. Many businesses also opt to utilize blogs on their websites, and for good reason. Blogs have multiple benefits for businesses in nearly any industry, which is why we highly recommend that our clients utilize this digital marketing tactic.
What is a Business Blog?
So, what is a blog? Merriam-Webster defines it as: a regular feature appearing as part of an online publication that typically relates to a particular topic and consists of articles and personal commentary by one or more authors. When it comes to business blogs, the definition remains the same. However, unlike lifestyle or commentary blogs, a business blog should focus on topics that relate to the industry that they are in.
The length can vary from short 500-word blogs to long-form 1,500+ word blogs. What matters is that the tone is appropriate for the audience, it is free of spelling and grammatical errors, and that it is interesting enough to keep the reader’s attention. You should try to link out to relevant sources, products, or websites, or to a page on your site that is relevant to the topic being discussed.
Why Should I Have a Business Blog?
Your website isn’t just a way to provide an online shopping experience – it is also a very valuable marketing asset. Paying attention to SEO strategies and keeping your site updated is the best way to get your site to the first page of search results, which means tons of exposure and more leads/conversions.
Blogs present a great opportunity to both boost your SEO, and for you to talk about your products or services, provide informative content to their audience, to talk about industry trends, and more. Every time you post a blog to your site, your quality ranking will go up because you’re layering it with relevant keywords. This increases the chances that, when someone in your area searches for a term that pertains to your business, they’ll find your site and potentially turn into a lead or even a conversion.
Direct traffic isn’t the only way a business blog can help your bottom line. Over time, your blog can gain attention from your audience, which helps boost your reputation as an authority in your industry. This will hopefully lead to other sites linking to your blog as a reference, which also helps to increase your site quality ranking. You can also add the option for people to share their blog on social media, which can also help generate additional link clicks.
The Keys to Writing a Great Business Blog
There is more to think about when writing a blog than simply writing. There are a few boxes you should be checking in order for it to be both an engaging source of information and work for you as a marketing tool.
Do Keyword Research
It isn’t good enough to just guess what keywords your potential customers are searching for. Instead, you need to do some digging into your Google ads campaigns, or use keyword research tools, to determine what keywords and phrases are getting the most traffic.
Categorize Your Topics
The blog feature on your website should give you the option to create multiple different categories for your blogs. Separating them rather than grouping them all together helps search engines to display individual blogs more accurately in search results.
Include Visuals
Some companies may decide to include visuals within the text, and others may only set a featured image. Either option is fine, so long as, at the very least, you have a featured image. The visual should be clear, and relevant to the topic. If you can include graphs/charts along with any statistics discussed in the blog, even better.
Keep it Up-To-Date
The one thing you can count on with technology is that it is always changing. Even if one of your blogs has performed well over the course of a few years, you should update it to make sure it is still relevant for the times.
Optimize for Mobile
With over 50 percent of online traffic now coming from mobile devices, it is very important that your site is able to display your pages properly for every user. If your blog is only going to display properly on a computer, it is likely that you will lose a lot of potential leads because it is difficult for them to read your content.
Boost Your Marketing Performance with a Business Blog
While blogs are a great way to inform your audience about who you are and what you do, it should be primarily utilized as a marketing tactic. This means focusing on relevant topics and keywords in order to boost your site quality score and search engine rankings.
When it’s time for your business to build an effective and engaging business blog, Gulf Coast Web is here to help. With over 25 years of experience in managing marketing campaigns for business across all industries, we have the knowledge necessary to build a blog that appeals to your audience, generating you quality leads and conversions. Our staff consists of highly-trained web design and digital marketing professionals who are both passionate about their jobs and excel at what they do. And unlike many other design agencies, we have a content writer with over 10 years of experience on-staff to handle everything from blogs to website copy to social media posts. Contact us today to book a consultation with our team. We look forward to outlining exactly how we can help you grow your business with our digital media agency services.