This post is very meta. A blog about blogging for business from a business with a new found passion for blogging. Bear with me…
There are three main ways that your website can be found online:
- Someone searches for the name of your business. Easy but not a lot of traffic. For this to be effective you have to put a lot of energy into building your brand and marketing it so that potential customers know who you are.
- You appear near the top of search results for the key search terms in your industry. This is great if you can do it but those prized keywords are very competitive: ‘adelaide accountant’, ‘melbourne magician’, ‘sydney sausage maker’. You’ll pay through the nose to rank highly for those and if you are up at the top, you may find that a lot of the leads you get this way are not very sophisticated anyway.
- People might just stumble across your site when searching for something specific or obscure that relates to your business. That would be a stroke of luck but perhaps the least useful of the three you might think. Think again.
Why create a blog? Business blogging is strategic and has two main focuses. The first is creating a large collection of content relevant to your industry that potential customers can regularly stumble across. The second is building an ongoing relationship with these people by offering them more and more insights and knowledge in order to be seen as a thought leader and to remain front of mind until someone is ready to buy.
Imagine this scenario. Your competitor who ranks number one on google in your industry gets 50 visits each day from that all important search term. Your site might not even be on page one for that search but your 100 blog posts rank number one for 100 different obscure search terms that each only get one visit a day. Congratulations, you just doubled your competitors traffic and you brought in visitors who have specific interests that you’re already addressing. This is why blogging is so effective.
You may have heard of the ‘long tail’, the concept that the few blockbusters and smash hits that are wildly successful right now are in fact outsold by the ongoing trickle of demand for everything else that came before. Business blogging is the long tail of search and it’s a proven way to get more business.
This approach is successful for two reasons. Firstly, it’s much easier to rank highly for those terms because most of your competitors are focused on a few highly prized keywords and ignore the long tail. Secondly search engines are smart these days and they’re happiest when a particular web page has one key theme. Those web pages are easy to classify and can rank highly for that theme.
For business blogging to be effective, a strategy and some research is required. You need to find out what relevant search phrases people are using and be able to incorporate those effectively into your blog. And you need to write quite a lot.
Business blogging will not cause an avalanche of new leads for your business overnight but you will soon see the positive effects of it and over time as your archive of industry relevant content grows, your traffic and leads will grow with it. And you can always hire a copywriter to help you.
We’ve just launched an eBook that details 28 important features of a highly effective business website. Blogging is one of those. Please download the eBook for free to learn more.
Topics: Marketing