Congrats on getting your website launched! Now it’s time to sit back and watch as an influx of new customers floods your site each day.
Wait, that’s not happening?
Sometimes, even great websites need a little SEO (search engine optimization) push to get discovered amidst the immense competition online.
That’s where blogs come in.
Why Bother Blogging?
Why should your business have a blog?
When you regularly post blogs on your website, you will:
1. Answer frequently asked customer questions.
Blogs provide an opportunity to go more in-depth about a topic than a FAQs page allows, offering rich, specific content to your customers. This could include troubleshooting, detecting a problem, or getting the first few steps of a task accomplished.
With a blog written on the topic, you can refer your clients to a link rather than spending several minutes on the phone or via email each time the situation arises. This also positions your company as a thought leader and will likely bring in more business as others are searching for the same answers.
2. Increase traffic to your site, thanks to improved SEO.
SEO, or “search engine optimization,” is a strategy to improve the visibility of your website using techniques that consider how search engines work and how your customers seek information.
Blogs also give you fresh, insightful content to share on your business social media pages, keeping your followers engaged and your services top-of-mind. Hello, referrals!
3. Attract new customers, build trust, and position your company as an industry expert.
Potential clients are constantly Googling the answers to their problems – problems that you can solve, they just don’t know it yet! If your page pops up in a search, they get quick answers and want to come back for more to learn from you, their trusted source of information on the topic in question.
Getting Started: 5 Tips for Business Blogging:
- Keep each blog to a single topic.
- However, as you increase your blog stockpile, you can weave internal links within your content so your customers can click around to their heart’s desire, learning every bit of information you’ve ever written. This also helps strengthen your SEO.
- As you’re writing, remember to keep your blog customer-focused. The blog’s tone should be geared towards their mindset: what problems do they have, and how can you help them succeed? Believe it or not, the hero of the story is the customer, not your business.
- For best SEO results, blogs should be roughly 500 to 1000+ words in length.
- Blogs should be educational in focus.
- Ideally, we want to write blogs that answer common customer questions. Don’t be brief, write a full explanation with step-by-step instructions.
- Include links:
- Provide links to your contact and services pages; this gives your customers more information and guides them to a clear call to action.
- Provide good backlinks to additional sources of information to give your material more clout. Not only does it build authority, it helps your SEO, too.
- Include the following in your blog structure:
- Catchy title – we want them to click to read more! “How to…” blog titles are very popular.
- Engaging introduction: state the problems, pose the questions, build controversy or tension.
- 3 to 10 answers to the questions or problems listed in the introduction. Be sure to use a variety of effective keywords.
- Conclusion: we want to repeat the question/problem and summarize the solutions presented.
- Call to Action: let’s have them do something now: download something, call us, fill out a form, take some logical next step.
- Topic suggestions for your blog:
- Answer customer questions in detail.
- Compare your services/products with common competitors.
- Compare DIY options vs. your options.
- Educate your customer on your processes, value, etc.
- Help your customer do the stuff you don’t want to do, for example: tedious or non-profitable tasks, troubleshooting, etc.
- Educate your customer on how hard or complex your services are so they don’t want to do it on their own.
- Discuss your partners and/or company’s history.
- Do a case study with testimonials and lots of before and after pictures.
- Leverage your vendor’s marketing and write blogs about how you use their products and services.
Now What?
Have we convinced you to start blogging? Perhaps now you’re weighing your options for execution:
A. Write it on your own.
B. Outsource it to either an agency or a freelance writer.
There are pros and cons to all of the above, it just depends on your staff’s capacity, both in skill and time, your budget, and your desire to get started.
