These days there’s no excuse for neglecting your website and for not taking the time to define your digital strategy.
Even if your business doesn’t sell anything online, your website can still generate leads or work to improve your brand by engaging with potential customers. For many businesses, the best way to keep on top of their website is to blog regularly. Blogging allows you to present and develop the voice of your company and to comment on your industry on a regular basis. Generating new content for your website will increase its authority with Google, which will help your website (and your brand) reach more people.
Blog Often (or as often as you can)
First off, if you forget everything else in the guide, don’t forget this. Publishing regular content on your blog is the best way to convince Google, and your customers, that you’re a valuable part of your industry. Too many blogs start and stop, with long periods of inactivity. If you write regularly on your blog for a while, managing to engage with an audience, then all your effort is wasted if you stop, as your audience will stop visiting your blog. Keeping up regular blogs is essential for any business these days, so it’s a good idea to pace yourself by spreading your ideas out. Don’t post every insight and piece of news up on your blog within the first two weeks to discover that you’ve nothing left to say. Instead, get organised and plan out your blog posts over time.
Get Several Employees Involved
Often, when a business’s blog becomes inactive it’s because whoever was in charge got waylaid with other work or because they left the company. You can avoid this by delegating the writing of blog posts across several employees. This way, should someone leave or become too busy, the others can pick up the slack. Also, if your business’s brand allows for several different voices, then you can make sure that each blogger is named personally. This can add a personal aspect to your blog, which is ideal if you’re working within an industry where trust is important. It might even be a good idea to add a thumbnail photograph and author bio of each contributor so that readers can put a face to the various people in your company.
Do Not Ignore SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is absolutely essential for any business looking to make the most out of their blog. You could be writing the best blog posts in the world, but if they aren’t optimised for Google, then you won’t be benefitting as much as you could be. SEO helps Google’s automated robots read your website, categorising and designating relevance to your different pages. This is essential for Google’s rankings (showing up when someone searches for your products or services). SEO can get pretty complicated, but the basics are relatively easy to grasp. If you want to get up to speed, then Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO is the best resource on the web.
Additionally, there is a great plugin called Yoast SEO that changes the post editor interface on your CMS, reminding you of certain key features that you should enter to ensure your blog posts are optimised. It’s a good system as it flags green, amber, or red depending on how well optimised your post is and it tells you what you need to do to make your blog posts better.
Beware of Typos and Other Mistakes
In the scheme of things, typos aren’t a huge deal; we all do them and the world keeps spinning. However, as your company blog is the way you talk to your potential customers, the stakes are particularly high. Typos, as well as grammatical and punctuation errors, can really put off customers as they perceive any mistake as a lack of professionalism. And any perceived lack of professionalism can impact how much they trust you. And as there are usually 100 other competitors to choose from online, it’s easy enough for someone to go to your competitor instead. As such, it may be in your interest to employ a copywriter to write and/or edit everyone else’s blog posts. Bringing in a copywriter who can spot all the little (and large) mistakes can safeguard your blog (and online brand) against any damage poor or sloppy writing might cause.
Research Topics for your Blog Posts
If you like, you can just go with your instincts and blog about anything you think is relevant to your company and your niche. This strategy is fine if you read a lot of your competitors’ blogs and have a good idea about what people want to know about your industry. However, there is another way to plan out what topics you blog about: find out what questions people are asking about your industry/products/services. If you research what questions people are googling about your industry, then you can write blog posts that answer these questions. This way, you can be sure you’re writing content that has an audience – that people are actively seeking out your content.
There are all kinds of ways to find out what people are searching for, but the best way is to use Answer The Public. Answer The Public is an online resource that pulls in all of the most frequently searched-for phrases around a category of your choice. And, most importantly, it arranges these into lists of questions. This means that you can type your products or industry into Answer The Public and get back a hitlist of questions people are asking that you can use to plan out your blog posts. If you’re ever not sure what to blog about, consult your list of questions! This is an easy way to have a data-driven content plan, where you’re producing content that is in demand.
If you’d like some extra development work done on your WordPress website, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We are WordPress experts with years of experience. We hope you’ve found this blog post useful and that it’ll help you improve your company blog.