Blogging is a bad word for a brilliant and effective marketing tool for most companies.
Blogging is worth your time—or worth outsourcing if you’re too busy—because blogs tell search engines who you are, what you do, and where you do it.
And search engines can only send traffic to live pages or blogs on your website.
If you don’t have a page or blog on your site that plainly says you offer Service X in City Y, you’re missing out on search traffic and leads.
Search engines are, basically, librarians. Your website is, basically, a book.
If it doesn’t have a page or chapter on what you’re selling, the librarian isn’t going to refer visitors to you, because other books are better suited to that user.
A simplistic explanation, but pretty accurate.
So here’s why, how and when you should write and post blogs for your business.
Blogging ROI
If you own an SMB, you should be blogging.
Done right, blogging will get you:
- More website traffic
- More qualified leads
- More brand-recognition.
What to Blog About
The best blogs you can write are:
— Answers to the most commonly asked questions you get in your business.
— Accurate and helpful answers to the common problems you solve.
Treat that FAQ list like a pyramid: Write answers to the most frequently asked questions, then move on downward to the less frequently-asked questions.
For example:
- What is it?
- How much does it cost?
- What happens during the service / procedure / work?
- What happens after it?
- How good or bad is X in city Y.
Common Blogging Mistakes
You’ve started blogging and it’s doing nothing for you yet. What went wrong?
The most common blogging mistakes are:
- Too soon. Expecting an immediate ROI from blogging. Give it a minute, blogs take some time to rank.
- Too generic. Bad headlines (titles). Your headline should give users and search engines a summary of what your blog’s about. We’ve seen great blogs with terrible titles… and very little traffic.
- Too short. Your blog doesn’t have to be thousands of words, but it should be somewhat substantial. It should answer the promise made by your headline in enough detail it “covers all grounds” or most grounds. If you’re writing about the cost of something, would it also make sense to cover insurance, financing, payment plans, red flags (too cheap, too expensive), and other parts of pricing, money, square footage, residential vs. commercial, etc. (Google once defined “thin content” as articles under about 300 words.)
- Too infrequent. While there’s no set schedule of exactly how often you should blog, you should do it often — maybe once weekly, once monthly, or more frequently—depending on your market and marketing budget. Whatever you do, please don’t sacrifice quality for quantity.
- Stock images. Your business has access to something pretty unique: Real pictures of what you do and deliver. Those images are a lot better to use than generic stock images—both for your users, and for search engines. Search engines will see and recognize either a generic stock image in use on thousands of websites, or a unique image in use on your website alone. The latter is a whole lot better. Your unique images also contain metadata that says where the picture was taken—further helping tell search engines what areas you service and operate out of.
Blogging for Maximum ROI
Beyond great research, expert insights, first-person perspectives, and great writing, you can do these things to get an even better return on your blogging investment:
- Embed video. Post video to YouTube, and include an embed of it in your blog. Very easy, very effective.
- Include unique images. Photographs that you or your team members take are the best images to include in blogs, because they contain metadata and are 100 percent original to your website.
- Keep URLs short. Not a must, but a sign of professionalism and better for users.
- Include only directly-related “tags.” Assign tags to your article only when the article is truly relevant to the tag topic. Create tags only when you have 2-3 or more articles for the tag.
- Link out to authoritative sources/sites that support your statements, claims, suggestions.
- Link out to national associations, licensing groups, government entities etc., that you are a member of or are endorsed or licensed by.
- Include an obvious (but not obnoxious) call to action in multiple places on each article; the sidebar or between X number of paragraphs of text is best. You can do this by inserting a custom image/graphic that links out to your contact or scheduling page, or by including a linked image in your blog’s side bar. That call-to-action helps you convert visitors into clients.
Say Whatever You Want Search to Say!
If you think you’re the best at your business and want search engines to repeat that, the best way to start that ball rolling is by saying it on your own website.
List 5-10 fellow providers you think are also the best, and turn it into a “listicle,” or list article.
This applies to anything you want search engines to share with users: It has to be said somewhere on the Internet for it to be shared by search engines.
And if done smartly, your own website is the best place to “toot your own horn.”
Jump all over ever industry achievement, award, or recognition you get, write blogs and film quick videos about it on social media. Interlink the two, and make your captions meaty—you or someone like you have to say whatever it is you want Search to say.
Avoid Unedited AI Output
AI content is 100% detectable as AI.
And with Google and the Big Dogs entering the AI space, it makes no sense to be pumping out unedited AI content on your own site.
But, with the advances in AI, it also makes no sense not to capitalize on it.
The smart and safe way to do that is make AI do the grunt work, and have a human edit it for accuracy, brevity, and coherence.
Then delete and replace every word you wouldn’t use in actual conversation….
Utilize = use
Commence = start
Terminate = end
Facilitate = help
Subsequently = then
Moreover = also
Nonetheless = but
Ascertain = make sure
Prior to = before.