Note: This was featured as part of our Web Wednesday segment on Charleston’s 105.5 The Bridge. You can catch us every Wednesday morning at 8:20 am ET for your dose of social media & digital marketing news. You can listen to the segment below:
When we discuss social media marketing and what we do as an agency, blogging often gets brought into the conversation. Blogging is often thought of as just that – a blog post. We are often asked if they really need a blog. It’s not typically high on a business owner’s priority list, but it should be and here’s why.
Blogging is a piece of organic content that is written for the purpose of providing value to your audience and driving traffic back to your website from social media or third-party sites.
A website should be updated regularly due to web crawlers frequently browsing the web and your website for key topics. Once a web crawler finds relevant information, it will then deliver to end-users who are using search engines, such as Google to research a topic. Blogging is the easiest way to prep for these web crawlers by updating your site regularly.
Example: Let’s say you own a carpet cleaning business and you have your website set up with a list of services. Well, not much is going to change on your website unless you add in additional services or update your pricing, but overall, your website will continue to remain the same. This shows a web crawler that you’re not necessarily an active site that is updating information, so your site gets pushed down in the search engines to make room for a website that features more information.
You can change your website’s fate by adding in a blog and writing about key terms related to your business that your customers may be looking for. An easy way to find key terms is to head to that very search engine that you want to showcase your website. Start typing in a search query: “Carpet Cleaning”.
Most search engine sites, such as Google will auto-populate what it thinks you are trying to search for. These “options” that it shows are what actual people have looked for. Let’s say you find that people are now wanting organic carpet cleaning. Write a blog post on using natural ingredients and keep that in mind throughout the entire blog post – remember to include key terms while writing for a person, not a search engine. You still want the blog to be valuable to your visitors.
But it doesn’t stop there, you’ve just written a piece of content for your website and you want people to see it – so post it to all of your social media channels and add it to your newsletter. This is a great way to send followers back to your website and to position yourself as a resource in your industry.
When writing a blog, make it as evergreen as possible so that you can re-use it in the future. Let’s say a few months from now it’s National Organic Cleaning Day, well what a great time to go back and re-post that great piece of content. It doesn’t have to be a one and done, you can certainly re-use blog posts when applicable.
As you continue to add to your blog, you will more than likely write about organic or natural cleaning again. A good way to tackle this is to link back to old blog posts to keep users engaged in the older posts, as well as the new.
Example: Your next blog post on organic cleaning is about the maintenance after your carpets have been professionally cleaned, so simply link back to the original blog post that talks about the ingredients used in the initial cleaning. This not only helps with SEO, but it also shows readers that you have an extensive wealth of information on your site that is of value to them – this is why people will keep coming back to your website and your business will stay top of mind for their next carpet cleaning or if their friends ask for recommendations.
Bonus: this also can decrease bounce rate because users can stay on your site to gather more information rather than having to do more research elsewhere.
The benefits of blogging are substantial and the only downside to blogging is the actual time it takes to write an SEO-friendly post. If your to-do list is already sky-high, that’s where we come in. Let us take blogging and organic content off your plate. Start by filling out our free consultation form or call us at (888) 632-4499.
