Are blogs necessary as a communication tool to promote a business?
This is a question we get asked a lot… We regularly get asked to just “build the website and get it on page 1 of the search engine”. Well, good internet marketing is much broader than this and requires a strategically structured plan.
An article or blog being part of this. Why, I hear you ask?
There are numerous reasons, really. An easy way to explain it is to compare it to something familiar. You may be aware of your business having a newsletter, if you’re, not that au fait with blogging your company newsletter is probably the easiest thing to compare a blog to. Basically, it is a piece of information that is circulated monthly or bi-weekly to an audience. They may contain pictures of staff, business team news, maybe even some tips and tricks, or more in-depth articles for more information.
The problem with a newsletter is that the information has a limited life cycle and, this is due to costs, and the publication has a limited circulation, usually within the work environment only meaning only a few people can access it. However, with a blog, everyone, in or out of the company, can access it. There is far less hard cost to produce it and to add extra news or information doesn’t add cost. A blogs life cycle lasts for ever unless physically removed. Also, the content can be easily found thanks to the global power of the search engine.
Thinking of this analogy further, how many company newsletters have you read that are interesting enough to want to read again?
Not many. With a blog rather than a newsletter, you have the power to stay around longer. Therefore, it will reach more people and target a wider audience yet with this power comes more responsibility. Creating a blog for a business is part of an overall content marketing strategy. A strategy that aims to build credibility, increase exposure and traffic to your site resulting in an increase “in conversion rates”. But for you hard work and efforts to pay off your blog content needs to reach your intended audience.
Some proven ways to reap the benefits of blogging.
Use Your Keywords Wisely
After choosing the precise keywords, you need to put them into action by tactically inserting them throughout your blog and web page content (But avoid keyword stuffing).
Place your primary keyword once in the main title of each post.
- Then once within the first 100 words
- Then once in the conclusion or final paragraph
- Place in the title tags and the Meta descriptions
- Naturally use related keywords and phrases throughout the article.
Speed Up
Site speed is a conclusive growing factor in the ranking algorithm. Cloud computing is growing as Google continues to give more prominence to site load times. It is surmised that as much as 40% of users will leave a website if takes longer than 4 seconds to load.
Understand the Best Article Length
When writing a blog, there can be some discrepancy as to the length of each piece of content. Some bloggers keep it relatively brief with 400 words or fewer, and some go all out with 2,000 words or more. It is debatable what the ideal post length is; it is suggested that the word count depends upon the industry.
An approximate guide is:
Gadgets: 181 words approx.
Gossip: 183 words approx.
Web news: 329 words approx.
Politics: 465 words approx.
Health: 666 words approx.
Marketing: 1,085 words approx.
Finance: 1,225 words approx.
Personal development: 1,470 words approx.
So the content length will vary depending upon the industry you’re writing about. It’s usually best to keep posts at a minimum of 250 words, otherwise, it’s easy to get ignored by search engines for longer content.
Humans are visual; we like to be captured and providing readers with some eye catching visuals are a good idea, inserting an image or two within a blog post has some SEO benefits.
Make sure your blogs are regular if you don’t it can hurt your rankings. The more you update your blogs the more often the Search Engines will send their crawlers to your site to index it. This means your newly written articles could appear in the index within days or even hours rather than weeks. So can you see the beauty of a blog?
To allow us to work with you in optimising blogs call us on 0161 669 5544.
