We recommend to every new website client that they have a blog on their website. This is for one very simple reason. Google loves blogs. A blog is a great way of adding new content to your website on a regular basis, and having new content appear on a site regularly is one of the best ways to improve your Google search engine rankings.
Unfortunately having a blog isn't enough. You need to use your blog. You need to post to your blog regularly. If you're really serious about using a blog to boost your rankings we'd recommend adding new content to your blog at least once a week. But if you can't keep up that kind of momentum you can still get benefit from a blog provided you post at least once a month. Any less frequently than that and your blog starts to look stale, and can in fact detract from the rest of the website.
So if you really want to keep your blog buzzing how can you ensure that happens? There are three steps to keeping a blog active, and we'll look at each step in turn.
Let's be honest. This is by far the hardest step! There is always something more important to do than spending 20 minutes writing on your blog. One key thing to remember is that blogging is marketing. You need to market your business. If you want to get business from organic search engine results blogging is simply part of that marketing expense. Blogging is not frivolous, it is a serious investment in marketing your online business.
But there are still things you can do to make finding the time easier. You can set aside a regular time, such as 30 minutes every Friday morning, and make that your blogging time. If that's not possible you could set aside a morning once a month to write an entire month of blog stories, and schedule them to go live over the next month. One thing we always try to do at Webfuel is have at least 2 stories lined up ready to go-live, so if you do have a suddenly mad busy week your blog doesn't suffer.
This is the hardest step, but it's also the most important step. Blogging is a key part of an SEO strategy. You wouldn't neglect other forms of marketing you depended upon, so if you want to get sales from search engine results don't neglect your blogging and schedule it into your weekly workload.
Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it is impossibly hard. The key here is to realise that it's far less important what you blog about than that you blog about something. One of your primary targets when blogging is the Google search bot, and frankly it couldn't care less what you blog about. All that matters is that blog is at least tangentially related to your business so it hits just a few key words here and there. Even if it contains zero of your target SEO keywords it is still valuable from an SEO perspective simply because it makes you site larger and more active.
If you're worried about what your readers may think of your topic, don't worry about that either. If your blog is active, and contains many posts, they won't read them all. They will skim the titles and pick the ones they are interested in. You can't please everyone, so really the key is to blog about the first thing that comes into your head. If you have two or three good ideas, write them all down so you can blog about the others later.
Some people find turning their idea into approximately 500 words of well written, crisp, clean copy the hardest part. A blog post should be as well written as you can make it. Spelling or grammatical errors will put off your visitors and there is evidence that Google can detect excessive mistakes in copy and will penalise the site as a result.
If you're the kind of person who finds writing magazine quality content easy then this stage should be a piece of cake. But if you aren't you could consider a copywriting service such as our content generation service as an option. For as little as £35+vat we can turn your concept into a 500 word article ready for posting to your blog.
Hopefully these ideas will help you turn your blog into a buzzing feed of business tip, insights and stories, and keep your visitors (and Google) coming back for more.