How many times have you put off writing a blog? Unless you’re born a writer it can be a tedious and time-consuming task to maintain a regular stream of relevant blog postings. But you’ll gain nothing from procrastinating because, if you take the plunge and stay the course, you’ll also reap the rewards.
At its most basic, a decent, regularly-updated blog will earn your company brownie points with prospects and customers alike. By sharing your domain expertise and knowledge via a blog you can become a thought leader in your business sector. You’ll be able to demonstrate to your prospects and customers that you understand their challenges and pains and can help overcome them successfully.
However, a blog really starts to deliver full value when it’s part of your overall search engine optimization strategy.
The search engines take a few things into consideration when deciding your ranking for a particular keyword search. Do you deliver relevant content on the search subject? Do other sites think so too, and link their sites to yours? Do you regularly update your content?
Blogs are great tools to show the search engines just how well you measure up:
- Make sure your blog is focused on subjects, issues and information relevant to your industry. Address the challenges people face and suggest ways to overcome them. Provide tips, tricks and advice on how to do things better, faster, cheaper, smarter. The watchword here is relevance. The more relevant your content is to a subject, the better the search engines will rank you for keyword searches on the subjects you cover.
- By their very nature, blogs encourage interaction. If your blog content is good, visitors will leave comments and even set up inbound links to your blog. You can help make this happen by regularly commenting on other blogs that are relevant to your industry, so you in turn get noticed.
- By deciding to blog, you commit yourself to adding fresh content regularly. This is good. Readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. Regularly posting fresh content also causes search engines to crawl your site more frequently, which allows the new content you post to become searchable sooner. Search engines also tend to consider your site as being more authoritative if you post new content regularly.
- Remember your keywords. You’ve gone to a lot of effort to identify the keywords that are most relevant to your product or service offering, and you’ve diligently incorporated them into your website content. Your blog is no different, so make sure you include these keywords in your blog postings too.
Starting a blog won’t magically rocket you to the top of the first page in Google all by itself. But there’s no question that a relevant and regularly updated blog will help contribute to your overall search engine rankings, which makes all the effort worthwhile.