One of the best ways to get more people clicking into your website is maintaining a good blog. By now this is pretty common information repeated endlessly across the internet, and yet a surprising number of companies continue to either lack a blog altogether, or ignore theirs to the point where it’s almost useless. While different companies and products may need their own tailor-made blogging strategy, there are virtually no companies that wouldn’t benefit from regular posting.
The main point of a blog is to share content that will either be interesting, or useful to people, particularly your product’s target demographic. Having a good blog for your product or company accomplishes three main things:
- It vastly improves your presence in search results by giving search engines more pages to index, and more relevant keywords to associate with your site. Additionally, posts that offer value will likely be linked to by other websites which also boosts your site in the rankings.
- It provides something of value to potential customers; like it or not, you often need to give something away to get something.
- By sharing, you become an authority and this helps build trust in your product or your brand. Potential customers are always more likely to buy from a company they’ve had a positive experience with, and the best way to accomplish this online is through sharing quality content.
The SEO value of a blog
Search engine optimization (SEO) can be roughly divided into two types: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO refers to the content of your site - the HTML text that a search engine regularly crawls over to determine what your content is about. Off-page SEO is primarily based off of how many other sites link to yours, how important they are, and how and where they structure the links. Social media shares are increasingly playing a role as well. The thinking goes, that better and more important content will be organically linked to more than the bad content and outright spam that makes up so much of the internet.Blogging is such an effective SEO tool because it helps with the on-page and off-page aspects. Your blog posts may cover a wide array of topics, but in general they will be related in some way to your website or your product. They will also be interesting to the people who you hope to attract to the site. Each blog post is an extra page for the search engines to index, and another place where they can find keyword-rich content to show to the people searching for those topics. Google (the most important and best of the search engines) also assumes that a website that doesn’t change much is neglected, so regular posting shows them an active site that they’ll in turn show higher in their results pages.
The other great thing about good content is that it’s interesting, and interesting things get shared, both on social media and through backlinks from other sites. As noted earlier, this is how Google decides if your content is “important” or “good”. Of course people have to find your posts first so it’s essential that you share them as well, through networking with like-minded people, and through your own social media channels.
Our product missinglettr automatically creates Tweets from your blog posts for you to review and share. It can also share your content to sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon. This takes much of the legwork out of promoting your posts. It’s hard enough blogging consistently, and staying on top of your social media strategy is even harder. Try missinglettr today.
Providing value
You’ve worked hard to create your brand or your product, and you know the value that it can bring to people. The problem is that they don’t, and they may never find out unless you find a way to get their attention. A blog post that can answer their questions or help them improve the way they do something, or even just be entertaining or interesting can be the perfect way to do it. Using your understanding of your target audience, combined with keyword research, you can come up with topics that will be of interest to them even if they don’t directly relate to your website. Think of an auto mechanic who gives free air fills for anyone’s tyres. The shop has a minimal cost associated with the fills, and not everyone who takes advantage will become a paying customer, but enough will certainly come back for future work to more than justify the cost of giving free air. Blogging is a bit like that.Become an authority
It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a software product, an online course, a cool gadget, or a cookbook, it’s essential that prospective customers trust you. Without that, they’ll never buy no matter how flat and sleek your site design or how clever your sales copy. Reviews and customer testimonials are the best ways to achieve this, but a good blogging strategy can shore up your efforts. Providing people with a solution to their problem or an answer to their question is one of the best ways to build trust and goodwill with potential customers.We mentioned above how important links and shares are, and becoming an authority on a subject can multiply the positive effect by an order of magnitude. Having other respected people in your industry or a similar field share your posts can do wonders for your traffic. Their authority backs up yours, and these shares by other leaders in your field are one of the single best generators of high-quality traffic to your site. But of course these people worked hard for their authority and won’t be sharing anything but the best. Work hard at creating great posts and these shares will come eventually.
Whenever you mention another company’s service or product in your blog post, make sure to include a link to the company’s page. Not only does Google enjoy seeing outbound links on your website, but the company you mention will also become aware of your post and link back to you. Plus, your readers will appreciate it when you give them the resources to make it easier to discover the things they’re searching for.
