Small business blogs – why you need them
Thinking of creating small business blogs on your website? Here’s why you really need to.
It’s been a CRAZY year this year for Proof Perfect. 8/10 enquiries this year have been for blog writing.
That’s a complete about face from a few years ago when most business owners would practically break their neck in an automatic and often violent jerk reaction to the mere suggestion of putting a blog on their site.
“We can’t put a blog on our site! It’s unprofessional. That’s for foodies and travel writers!”
An educational lesson on how Google had changed the requirements needed to get found online would ensue, and the assertion that “you don’t have to CALL it a blog, but you do need to create fresh, original, regular content”. But for the most part, the businesses remained unconvinced that small business blogs work as a marketing strategy.
Time has proven me right and now most business owners understand that they need small business blogs on their BUSINESS site for the following reasons:
SMALL BUSINESS BLOGS GET YOU FOUND ONLINE
Your 5-page website doesn’t leave you much room to optimise for search engines
You need to focus on a single keyword phrase per page so you need MANY pages on your website in order to achieve your SEO strategy goals. Putting a blog function on your site allows you to do this in the most logical way. Trying to optimise your normal web pages won’t gain you much traction as:
- you need to focus these pages solely on your visitor not on the search engines
- you need at least 300 words on the page to optimise it for a set keyword and that will bore your reader if you are trying to squeeze unrelated phrases into the content – focus on your reader!
- longtail keywords (longer phrases like “How do I fix a lawnmower”) will help you win in the search wars but isn’t going to find a place comfortably on your main pages
Google needs to know what words you want to rank for – your need cornerstone articles
Cornerstone articles are longer than the average blog post and are the key pages you want to drive readers to for particular keywords. Then you link shorter articles to these longer articles – essentially telling the search engines – this is the most important page for this topic.
A strategy of linking between articles gives you more search juice
You need to be able to create a series of articles linked by hyperlinks to one another to add search engine juice to your site. You won’t be able to do this with a small site so a blog is the ideal way to manage this organically.
SMALL BUSINESS BLOGS HELP YOU STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD
Become the respected subject-matter expert
When you publish articles regularly, you become seen as the subject-matter expert for your niche and this helps you to get noticed and increase your brand value.
You’ll become a top-of-mind brand
If you are publishing regularly, not only will you be perceived as an expert, but because you have been prolific at getting your message out, chances are potential clients will recall you first when they need the service or product you provide. If you aren’t publishing, it’s amazing how fast you get forgotten!
You’ll start receiving offers to speak publicly to grow your brand presence
As your name becomes known and your content gets shared around the Internet, you may find that others seek you out to speak on your expertise, further establishing your brand and getting you in front of new audiences. That’s free publicity for you and, for some gigs, you can command a fee to speak. That’s all good for business!
So get busy creating your small business blogs with the help of a blog calendar and plan regular educational content to put out on your website that will help get you seen online and have you stand out as a brand that stands for something.
If that is a daunting prospect to handle alone, I’m here for a chat!
