Does Your Small Business Need a Blog?

Understanding SEO isn’t easy, and Google doesn’t help things much by changing the algorithms and policies on a regular basis.

In fact, change is almost the only constant when it comes to SEO. Google changes its algorithms and ranking factors regularly throughout the year. The rules of the game change in a moment’s notice.

That being said, there is one SEO strategy that remains relevant with each Google update and passing year and that’s content. Content, especially fresh content, is king when it comes to ranking well on Google and there is almost no easier or better way to add fresh content to your site than through blogging.

Blogging provides many surface-level benefits, including offering helpful information to your customers about your services and positioning yourself as an expert on subjects related to your business, but it also includes many SEO benefits you might not be aware of:

SEO Benefits of Blogging

Indexed Pages

The biggest SEO benefit of hosting a blog is that each new post counts as a new page on your website and another opportunity for your website to be indexed in Google and other search engines. It’s estimated that websites that host a blog will see at least a 50% increase in traffic over those that do not, with a lot of that attributed to an increased amount of indexed pages online.

Fresh Content

Standard web pages change very little. Once you have provided your companies contact information, an image or two and a list of services, there isn’t a lot more to change or a lot about that information you will want to change regularly, which is unfortunate, since Google and search engines love fresh, new content… which is where blogging comes in.

Blogging allows you to post new information each week directly on your site or linked to your site. Search engines will pull the freshest content related to a search which will allow the opportunity for your site to rank well assuming you have a hosted blog.

Keywords

A blog provides a place on your website to optimize for new, trending keywords related to your business as well as long-tail keywords. An example of a longtail keyword would be something like “what is the best way to clean tile floors” as opposed to simply “tile floors” or “cleaning tile floors”. Blogs can be optimized to include all the variety of ways customers are searching keywords and terms relevant to your business, much more so than basic website content.

Sharing

Popular blogs move up in Google rankings when they are shared on clicked on regularly. The only way a blog will become popular is to post regularly and provide quality content each time.

Linking

For this strategy to work, your blog must have a separate domain from your website, thus creating an additional destination on the Internet that links back to your website and promotes it via backlinking. In theory, the more relevant websites linking to your business’ website, the more authority assigned to it through Google.

If your blog is hosted on your website, you will still see internal linking benefits as Google will recognize the layout and navigation of your site through anchor text and additional content referencing relevant pages.

Images/Video

A standard web page might only feature one or two optimized images or no videos at all, whereas a blog post allows the opportunity to post one or two optimized images or videos to your website every week.

Optimized blog images and videos should include appropriately titled images including keywords relevant to the blog post as well as alt-tag text that describes and image to seeing-impaired customers and to search engines that don’t intuitively understand what an image represents.

Social Media

Social media remains extremely relevant in SEO and Google rankings. Social media outlets allow the opportunity to share and post your blog throughout the week and increase the chance of it gaining in both popularity and search results.

Hosting a blog on your small business website offers many benefits to both your customers, and as mentioned, search engines as well. When getting started on a SEO strategy, make sure to include blogging as a top priority.

Overview

If you don’t feel you have the time to host a blog on your website and post on a regular basis, perhaps turn to the professionals at KMB Local Marketing. We offer regular blogging as part of many of our service packages.

For more information, call (262) 853-5325 or email: kmbdigital@yahoo.com