In a business landscape that seems to have been completely taken over by social media, writing a blog for your small enterprise may seem useless. However, statistics show that blogging is still a powerful force in the world of digital marketing.
According to recent data, there are still over 600 million active blogs on the internet. People still go to blogs in search of education, entertainment and clarity.
Small businesses that want to expand their online presence will do well to start a blog of their own. If you are running such a business, it can form the cornerstone of a digital marketing strategy.
Learn how to come up with an effective and engaging blog for your small business.
Use Keywords
As an SEO service provider will tell you, keywords are the lifeline of any good digital marketing campaign. When looking for the right keywords for your small business blog, you should try to find ones that have a lot of traffic without a lot of competition. This means that there are plenty of people who want to find content on the keywords but there are few people giving them answers.
You should also avoid just repeating the keyword over and over again in your blog post since this will lead to search engines to blacklist your blog. Use keywords in strategic locations such as the metadata, the title and subheadings of your blog posts.
Find Evergreen Content
Although there is value in writing blog posts about trending topics, the real meat of your business’s blog should be evergreen content. Evergreen content refers to topics that take years if ever, to become outdated. These timeless articles can provide information that will still be useful and relevant to readers for a long time.
Examples of evergreen content include historical facts, tutorials, glossaries and reviews. These types of information rarely need to be updated and people are always looking for them. This doesn’t mean that all your blog posts should be evergreen content.
Capitalizing on recent trends in your field is highly encouraged. But a substantial portion of your content should be timeless to keep drawing readers to your site.
Write a Snippet
Google snippets are the small amount of text summarizing the meaning or essential information of a given search term. It is in essence a small encyclopedia entry regarding the term you searched for. The Google search engine tries to find snippets when applicable to save users time and provide an immediate answer to their queries.
Websites that provide this essential and condensed information appear at the top of the page, greatly increasing the traffic to the site. Writing a paragraph that the algorithm will favour as a snippet takes time and practice.
First, the snippet has to appear within the paragraph or even the first 100 words of the blog post. It has to be concise, condensed and easy to understand. If you have written an efficient summary, you will have a great shot at being the featured snippet of a given term.
Look at FAQs
Sometimes you may have a hard time looking for content that would snare the curiosity of readers. If you ever encounter such a block, you can always look into the frequently asked questions of various sites for inspiration. Users and customers in your field may have a lot of questions that need detailed answers.
FAQ pages, while useful, sometimes only provide an abbreviated answer to these questions. Your blog could have an entire post dedicated to solving user problems. For example, if you run a car cleaning service, you could provide a detailed response to why detailing is important. Just be careful to pick questions that are relevant to your business and require long answers so you can make a compelling article.
Stay in Your Lane
Finally, avoid the urge to make blog posts about topics that are not remotely related to your business. This is because readers will be jarred by such content appearing in your blog and you may not have the relevant experience or information to give an authoritative response.
For example, if you run an art gallery, it is perfectly alright to make a post on Bob Ross’s paintings. But readers will not take it seriously if your blog suddenly puts up an article on social media marketing. Remember to carefully curate your blog posts and ensure you stay within your business’s field.
Writing blogs may seem quaint, but the numbers indicate it is still a powerful tool for digital marketing. If you want to boost your small business’s online presence, start writing a blog today.
