So, you’ve invested a significant amount of time and money into building a strong online presence. You’ve signed-up with numerous social networks and you’ve got a great website to back your brand. But, the amount of traffic your site is generating is nothing to shout about. What’s going wrong?
I’m going to take a punt on this one and say your site is lacking something very important: a blog. Once upon a time, blogs were deemed nothing more than online diaries, written by people eager to share their thoughts and stories with fellow web users. Oh, how things have changed…
Nowadays, blogs (when written well) have become valuable sources of information. When integrated within a company’s website, they aim to inform, educate and entertain readers. As far as online marketing goes, blogs are essential components of the mix.
Exposure is everything when you’re a small or medium-sized business. Blogging improves your SEO rankings, which in turn boosts visibility and helps drive more traffic to your website. Marketing mission: complete.
A recent Business 2 Community article unravels the factors which boost online search rankings, and discusses how blogging helps achieve these factors.
Keywords
Long gone are the days where keyword stuffing was good marketing practice. In fact, a recent Google algorithm update means sites are penalised for doing just that. Now, it’s all about ‘strategic keyword placement’, that is, integrating high traffic-generating keywords and long-tailed keywords into content and ensuring they are given context, i.e. that they add value and actually make sense.
Unique content
‘Unique’, ‘original’, ‘fresh’,…call it what you will, Google can’t get enough of it. Unique content, coupled with ‘strategic keyword placement’, creates new opportunities for your site to be found. Plus, if you engage readers through high-quality, unique blog posts, they’re likely to come back for more!
Social sharing
You’re not going to reap the full benefits of blogging if your posts are just sat there on your website – you need to share, share, share! Social networks are perfect platforms to share your blog posts with the online community. And if they’re well-written, this will encourage your online audience to share them, too.
The great thing about social sharing is that Google evaluates your website’s ‘authority’ by how much social activity it generates. The more shares, the greater the authority, and you guessed it: the higher your website will rank in those all-important search results.
Indexed pages
Page volume is unlikely to affect your Google rankings. However, if those pages are indexed on Google, your website stands a better chance of being found through certain long-tailed keywords. Also, blog pages are always accessible, and this means that they are capable of gaining traffic long after they are written.
Don’t have the time or creative flair to blog? Let us help. Our dedicated team of writers are experts in creating engaging, high-quality content that can help boost your SEO rankings and improve your website’s visibility. Get in touch today to find out more.