Many reasons exist for operating a business blog. As part of a well-rounded content marketing strategy, a business blog can improve your online visibility, establish trust with target audience members, and help generate traffic to your website.
Thinking About A BlogConsumers are looking online for more information about the products or services that you offer. By creating quality content and maintaining a business blog there is a better chance of being found by target audience members in the increasingly competitive online space.
What’s great about a business blog is that unlike other content sharing outlets, the property is owned by the business. They have complete control over the content that gets shared and how often it gets shared. A blog on a business website also helps to improve SEO efforts because the search engines reward sites with fresh content and each blog post can rank in the search engines over time. Business blogging is a great content marketing tactic, as long as you are doing it correctly. Avoid these common blogging mistakes that can hurt your brand image and hinder marketing efforts:
1. Letting the Blog Sit Idle
If you are going to operate a blog and include a link to the blog on your website, you need to keep it active. Even if you aren’t promoting the blog, people are still going to find it. If a potential client or customer clicks on your blog only to see that the last post was from over 3 months ago and discusses a topic that is no longer relevant, it gives off the impression that you are lazy. It’s important to commit to keeping your blog active. Hire content writers or outsource the work if necessary. If you can’t dedicate time or resources to your blog, it’s not worth having.
2. Posting Low Quality Content
Some businesses, in an effort to keep the blog active, post content that doesn’t resonate with target audience members, or just isn’t good. Blog posts should be informative and helpful, not promotional. Don’t use your blog as just another place to advertise or to link out to the work of others. Content should be written with the target audience in mind and address some question or concern that they have. If the content on your blog is thin, it’s just as bad as having a blog that sits idle without any content.
3. Not Thinking of SEO
In order to maximize the potential of your blog posts it’s important to spend time optimizing each post. Include targeted keywords in the title and throughout the body content of the post naturally. Conduct some keyword research to find out what kind of information people are looking for. It’s recommended to install an SEO plug in on your blogging platform which makes it easy to add a title, description, and keyword to each post. Think of each blog post as a new page of website content and SEO best practice is that every page of your website should be optimized.
A business blog is like a sneak peek into your business and how it operates. It’s important to keep it active and create quality posts to be viewed favorably by visitors.
Autjor: Nick Stamoulis
Courtesy of www.searchmarketingstandard.com