How to start a blog and how it can help to improve your businesses search engine optimisation
Written by: Ryan Walsh
Date: 06/12/2023
A blog is your businesses opportunity to show off your company’s expertise
What is the purpose of writing a long thousand-word articles, that simply give away free advice?
The answer is simple, if you write a series of excellent blog posts, which are well written, and these are super useful to your customers, then this can help to improve your business search engine optimisation.
The work might be such good quality that Google.co.uk places the blog posts on the first page of Google’s results.
More organic visitors
This could bring in thousands more organic visitors, some of whom might purchase items from your company.
Therefore, having a blog section on your website is well worth the effort, however the written work must demonstrate Google’s EEAT-that’s
– Experience
– Expertise
– Authoritativeness
– Trustworthiness
The written work must be helpful
We always believe a blog section on a company’s website, is somewhere where you can show off your expertise and where your staff can demonstrate how they fully understand the products or the services you are selling.
For example, whether you run a search engine optimisation company or a solicitor’s practice, you will have staff members with tremendous expertise within your business sector. So by writing helpful blog posts can help your shoppers find answers to questions they might have, well, this can bring in more organic visitors, who may buy more products from you.
How do you go about starting a blog?
You can have a blog that’s totally independent from your main website, so its on its own domain name. Yet, we wouldn’t recommend this from an SEO perspective. What you want is simply a blog section that is integrated within your main website so that you can have your main service pages or pages that sell products on the same website.
Then, we recommend adding a blog section to your website where you can regularly add new blog posts.
This is so as you add new blog posts, the older blog post is pushed down and replaced by a newer blog post.
And you might be thinking, well what should we be writing about?
While we would recommend writing some really high quality original work, why not jot down on a whiteboard a series of questions your customers frequently ask you, then start to pick which ones you want to answer?
Also don’t answer the question in a half-baked way, instead, what you should do is really answer the question in an in-depth way, showing off your company’s expertise.
By doing this, you are doing two things: you are helping your customers to find answers and solutions to questions that they may have.
You are also making your website much more relevant, so, for example, let’s say you sell an item like lawnmowers.
You could add blog posts on how to maintain and repair lawnmowers, for example, how to remove the spark plug and how to store the lawnmower when it’s not being used. In that case, these articles will likely benefit somebody considering purchasing a lawnmower.
Therefore, you are making your website much more relevant for lawnmower keywords, improving the business’s organic search engine optimisation. For example, someone looking to purchase a “Honda lawnmower” is more likely to find your business, if you have written, a well written article, about the benefits of owning a Honda lawnmower, then this article is likely to appear in Google’s results, for keywords, relating to Honda lawnmower keywords.
Make sure you keep your content marketing relevant to the products / services your business sells
What sometimes happens from our experience is that within some companies they may task a junior member of staff to write the article, yet the blog post that gets written may have little to do with that business sector or the companies products or services it offers.
So what we mean by this is that say the business in question is a solicitor’s practice; the person that’s writing the articles might start regularly talking about a rugby team that the company sponsors.
Although they might sponsor that particular rugby team, and their company logo is seen across the shirts of the rugby players, it’s still irrelevant to what services the company sells.
Instead, the solicitor’s practice should offer advice to people seeking legal advice. Therefore, you should be answering the commonly asked questions that people as when writing your companies blog posts.
To keep talking about rugby means it’s confusing for the search engines, such as Google, because they don’t know which the services the business sells. Is the business selling legal services, or is the company a rugby team?
Please work with the experts; the marketing company needs to work hand in glove with the company
Let’s put yourself in a copywriter’s shoes; let’s say they have to write 5000 words per day for various different companies. Is that copywriter going to do much research, if they have to produce so much written work per day. Does the writer even have the level of expertise needed?
What sometimes happens is what we would describe as wishy-washy articles are written, in that they could be considered a bit mediocre. In fact what could be written is a short article, but one which doesn’t offer much expertise.
However, our best advice would be to slow it down a bit, write less, and produce instead much better quality work.
You do this by partnering with the client, chatting with somebody with expertise on that particular product or service, and bringing that knowledge into the article so that it is well-written and valuable to the customer.
