If you have a website or you are thinking about setting one up then one consideration you should have in mind is whether you want to publish blogs. Blogs are a well used marketing technique to attract new visitors to your website and making your website easier to find through search engines.
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The benefits
The way that search engines rank websites and pages is very important in terms of your business success. The higher your website appears in a list of search results, the more chance of someone clicking on your website. The more people who visit your website, the more likely they are to make a purchase or enquire about your services. You main objective as a business owner will be to generate more sales and leads, so anything that will enable this should be a priority.
The negatives
Creating regular content for blogs can take up lots of time and essentially take you away from doing other work. Plus if you don’t really like writing or you’re not sure what to write about, it could take you a long time to create your blogs. You will also need a basic understanding of how to publish blogs on the platform that your website is built on. Writing irrelevant content that isn’t adding value for the reader can actually work detrimentally as you can be penalised by search engines.
SEO
If you can see the huge difference that high quality blogs can have in your overall business success then you will want to know a bit more about how to write effective blogs. The first step we would advise you to take is to learn the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). To create good quality blogs, you need to understand how to build content that the search engines like. So using keywords, image tags, meta descriptions and backlinks are some techniques commonly used by SEO experts. You can find out more about SEO through a variety of channels such as business sites like Entrepreneur or SEO expert’s websites.
The Topic
Some people find the hardest part of writing a good blog is thinking of an appropriate topic. To get this right, you need to have a good understanding of the needs of your target audience. It also has to link well to a solution that your products or services can provide.
Let’s say for example, you are a plumber and you are wondering what to write about. Ask yourself about the types of problems your customers usually encounter. Maybe they have a leaking tap for example. They could be trying to fix this themselves but can’t seem to manage it. So they decide to see if there are any helpful tips available on the internet. Boom! Your recent blog on how to fix a leaking tap has led them straight to your website.
You may be wondering how this is supposed to win you business. Well if they still cannot solve the problem themselves, if you are local to them then you will probably be the first company they contact. If they do manage to fix the issue themselves, when they have another plumbing problem in the future, they are going to call the expert that helped them out last time!
So there are different ways that a useful blog can attract new customers and most business owners who have used blogs for marketing will tell you that the results make it well worth the effort you put in. If you decide to go with blogging, make sure you opt for a host that can support growing storage requirements for blogs, like SiteGround or HostGator.