Why Blogging on Your Website Matters

Maintaining a blog on your website takes time and effort, and water is wet!

Yes, we've stated the obvious, twice! But, a lot of people senior managers think and (worst of all) say "oh yeah, marketing team - just start a blog". It ain't that easy sunshine! But... it doesn't need to be a struggle with some planning and help from someone with experience.

We've prepared some tips to help you avoid the stumbling blocks.

Why write a blog?

1. Search Engines and Blogs are friends

A blog is a great way to increase traffic and improve your search engine rankings. By regularly posting relevant content to your blog you can potentially improve your search engine rankings and therefore increase your chance of increasing traffic to your website. To optimise your blog posts for search engines you should make sure you use relevant keywords in the title and keep your blog posts relevant to your target audience. On WordPress there are also a range of SEO fields you can fill in when you post your blog, e.g. meta description and keywords.

2. Show People You Know Your Stuff

A blog will improve your credibility by showing people you know your stuff. It gives you the opportunity to write about topics relevant to your business. These topics could include news, tips, facts or informative articles. The more quality content you write the more you demonstrate knowledge and authority in your field. This can increase your conversion rate because when customers see you have a vast knowledge about your products or services they are more likely to want to do business with you.

3. Interact With Your Customers and Build Trust

A blog gives your business a human aspect that allows you to build relationships and build trust with your customers. Rather than just going to a website that has a list of products and services, a blog will give visitors something more personal to read. It gives your business a voice and the option of including comment boxes below your blog gives visitors the chance to interact with you.

4. A Blog is a Cost-Effective Marketing Tool

A blog allows you to keep your customers updated with the latest news about your business for free. If you develop a new product or service you can quickly and easily write a blog post to inform your customers as well as adding it to your product/service list on the website. You can also post your blog articles to other social media such as Facebook or Twitter to improve the reach.

How to write a blog?

1. Generate loads of ideas

We wrote a whole blog post about this, so it doesn't make sense to repeat that here. Read that post here:

• How to generate 50 blog title ideas on a 1 hour flight!

2. How to allocate time, people and resources

Think about the steps you need. We follow these separate steps to get the right people, doing the part they're best at:-

• Generate ideas (above)
• Find out which ideas can do well because the keywords make sense to your audience, people who you want to visit your website are (likely) searching for them... and the competition isn't insane! This takes some SEO Keyword Research (another post).
• Write a first draft. Sometimes this is just sub-headings with a sentence on each to outline what the section is about.
• Get a second pair of eyes to confirm you've got something valuable.
• Write the sections - might be multiple experts, like our hit post Quick SEO Wins.
• Edit down check for spelling, grammar issues.... but make it powerful - check there is a strong story.
• Optimise - Graphic Designers are great at this. They know how to make
• Proof - check it... we prefer when two different people check it, we call that "second eyes check" to be sure of catching any issues.
• Plan for launch.
  • Will it go on social media when published? It should.
  • Which ones?
  • What graphics are needed for each platform?
  • Craft the posts to earn clicks from each social platform?
  • Will any ads go to the post? If so, what?
• Pull the trigger - schedule the post to go live. We rarely just press publish - unless it is urgent.

Your blog need not be a chore.

Enjoy! If you want to get some professional help, talk to one of our SEO Copywriting experts.