Your blog: the secret weapon for business success and search engine optimisation
If so, it's time to take a more nuanced look at the blog format. A blog can be much more than a stage for aspiring celebrities.
Your business has good reason to blog too. That goes whether you're a removal firm, a physiotherapist, a carpenter or a dentist.
A blog can be a valuable asset for your website in the battle for good rankings in the search engines. In other words, it can become a vital part of your SEO strategy. Play your cards right, and your loyal followers can become your loyal customers.
We dig into that in this blog post about… well, blog posts.
1. Content that benefits your customers and Google
In marketing, you'll come across the term "content marketing" now and then. We've touched on it before in our guide to writing a good landing page.
Content marketing can be anything from newsletters and guides to podcasts, webinars and videos. And, of course, blog posts.
Like all other marketing, content marketing has to attract and retain customers. On top of that, it has to deliver content that benefits the recipient.
So content marketing has to benefit your customers, not just you and your business. It's marketing with the recipient at the centre.
Content marketing also has a positive side effect: Google rewards you with better rankings in the search results. Among other things, Google assesses the content on your website based on how relevant it is to the user. And Google finds well-written, high-quality content with the user in focus especially relevant.
Good content marketing benefits both your customers and your visibility on Google. That can bring more traffic to your website.
So how can you use content marketing on your blog?
Your experience and expertise determine the content of your content marketing. You know what your customers will benefit from.
- Do you run a dental clinic? Write a blog post on how to avoid cavities and gum disease.
- Are you a bike mechanic? Put together a guide on how to tighten the front brake on a bike.
- Do you own a cleaning company? Explain to your readers the easiest way to handle the daily cleaning.
You might think it's business suicide to give your trade secrets away to your customers.
As a bike mechanic, you make your living repairing your customers' bikes. If you run a cleaning company, your customers' dirt is your livelihood. And if you're a dentist, your patients' poor oral hygiene pays your rent and your salary.
So why on earth would you pass up a chance to make money from knowledge that you have and your customers lack?
Don't worry. You might lose a few customers for the exact job you blog about. Your customers will come back. Or they'll read your good advice, see how skilled you are and decide they'd rather leave the job to you.
An example from two sports shops
Imagine you're a keen recreational runner. In a running magazine, you read an article saying that foot position and weight determine your choice of running shoes. Now you're wondering whether your fairly new running shoes are even right for you.
So you visit a couple of sports shops for advice and guidance.
Sports shop 1 is a local shop. The staff are experienced shop assistants, and customer care comes first.
Sports shop 2 belongs to a large chain. The staff are commission-paid salespeople, and sales come first.
In the first sports shop, you're told that recent research points to your personal experience of comfort, quality, cushioning and support as what decides your choice of running shoes. So running style and weight aren't the deciding factors. You conclude that your current running shoes are actually pretty comfortable.
You leave the shop without buying anything. But you no longer have doubts about your running shoes. The visit gave you knowledge and peace of mind.
In the second sports shop, the advice is different. The position of your feet and your weight mean you should buy the shop's most cushioned, most supportive and most expensive running shoes. Now you start to wonder whether the assistant in the first shop was right.
So you walk out with a new pair of shoes and a couple of thousand kroner less in your bank account. After a few runs in the new shoes, you realise your old running shoes were just as good.
So the visit gave you nothing – quite the opposite. You're DKK 2,000 poorer.
Which shop will you go back to the next time you need sports gear? The one where the advice gave you something, of course.
It's the same with your blog. If you're generous with good advice, your readers will come back to your business.
2. A blog builds bridges
Your blog is an obvious route to link building. And link building is probably one of the most important tasks in SEO.
If you're not sure what link building actually is, read our post “What do ancient Rome and link building have in common?”. We highly recommend it.
In short, link building builds bridges between pages. The bridges run internally between the subpages of a website and externally between different websites.
Internal link building is the work of building links between the subpages of your own website. External link building is the work of getting good-quality links from other sites, known as backlinks.
Internal link building helps tie the subpages of your website together and gives a better user experience. Good internal structure also makes it more likely that Google understands what your website is about.
External link building also brings you more traffic, and it works extremely well. Links from other sites tell Google that your website is relevant and high quality. The discipline is harder, because you don't decide whether others will link to your site. It's still achievable.
Here are a few examples of how to use your blog for both internal and external link building.
How to use your blog for internal link building
Take a dental clinic with a website. The menu has a "treatments" item with a number of menu items, and each item has its own subpage. There's a page on check-ups, for example, and one on treating tooth decay.
The clinic also has a blog on its website. Here, the staff give good advice to patients and anyone else interested in dental care. The blog should of course give readers something they can use. The clinic can also use it for internal link building.
Let's say the clinic writes a blog post with tips on brushing your teeth. Here, it makes sense to link from the post to the subpages on tooth decay and check-ups. The subpages also link back to the post.
Dentists are far from the only ones who can use their blog for internal link building. Whatever your industry, you have plenty of opportunity to tie the pages of your website together with a blog.
- Are you a removal firm? Add links to the subpages on moving boxes and packing in a blog post with tips for moving.
- Do you have a webshop selling wine? Add links to your best Italian wines in a blog post with Italian wine recommendations.
- Do you work at a web agency? Add links to the subpages on websites and SEO in a blog post about why your business should write blog posts.
External link building is harder but still possible
As mentioned, external link building is considerably harder. Other sites will only link to your blog if the quality is high. If you succeed, it pays off. Google rewards so-called quality links with better rankings and penalises "bad" links with the opposite.
An example of a quality link is a link to a restaurant's website in the online version of Politiken's iByen section. There's a credible source behind the link. Google likes that.
An example of a bad link is a link on a so-called private blogging network (PBN). In short, PBNs are fake blogs that web agencies use solely to link to their clients' websites.
So web agencies use PBNs to disguise links as informative blog posts. These pseudo blog posts are also called "link building articles". Google isn't so keen on them.
We've written countless link building articles for just as many PBNs ourselves during our time at another web agency. And we can almost promise that not a single one of them ever got a reader.
So PBNs are a no go. How, then, do you get links to your blog and your website?
You need to produce quality content, of course – content that credible sources judge to be relevant to the people you want to reach. Above all, that takes your own expert knowledge and your understanding of your industry.
3. You get found on specific searches
The right keywords are an important part of your SEO strategy. If you run a cleaning company in Copenhagen, for example, “cleaning Copenhagen” is an obvious keyword.
The problem is that Copenhagen has a lot of cleaning companies. They're all fighting for first place on “cleaning Copenhagen”. A generic keyword with lots of monthly searches therefore takes a serious round of SEO before you reach the very top.
The tougher the competition, the more you have to do to get a good ranking in the search engines and hold on to it. And the more common what you offer is in your local area, the harder it is to get to the front of the queue on Google. The same goes for Bing and Yahoo.
So what can you do to help your website fight its way up the search results?
Sometimes it pays to be modest. You can of course go after lots of visitors with a generic keyword with thousands of monthly searches.
The fierce competition can actually make it more attractive to go after a smaller audience. That increases your chances of being found.
It's a bit like playing Lotto. The chance of winning the jackpot is 1/10,000,000. Go for a more modest prize, and your chance of winning is almost infinitely greater.
The same goes for the battle for first place on Google. Here, it pays to keep your greed in check. There may well be 10,000 potential customers on a keyword like “cleaning Copenhagen”.
If you don't reach a single one of them, it's clearly better to go after a smaller, more achievable audience. You do that with a longer, more specific keyword. It could be, for example: “How do you remove limescale from the grout in the bathroom?”.
These longer, specific keywords are called “long tail keywords”. Use them in your copy when you want to bring potential customers to your website.
The readers you reach with long tail keywords are typically at a different point in the customer journey. Often, they haven't decided to buy a product or service at all yet. They may simply have a need they want met.
If you go after keywords people google early in the customer journey, you can nurture your readers towards the final stage of the buying process. That's where they actually decide to buy.
You can read more about choosing keywords in relation to the customer journey in our post on keyword research.
So how do you get long tail keywords onto your website?
For a page to be found on a keyword, the keyword needs to appear on the page a certain number of times. A long tail keyword can quickly seem clumsy and forced in the copy on a landing page or product page.
Take the keyword “how do you remove limescale from the grout in the bathroom?”. It's hard to make it appear x number of times in the copy on a subpage about domestic cleaning.
In a blog post, the keyword fits in naturally. And at the same time, you give the Google users searching for that exact phrase a useful answer.
Take a bricklaying firm, a bike mechanic, a dentist and a webshop selling stationery. Here, long tail keywords could be:
- How do you insulate a cavity wall?
- How do you tighten a bike chain?
- How do you get over a fear of the dentist?
- Best ballpoint pen for left-handers
The generic keyword “ballpoint pen” naturally gets more searches than the specific “best ballpoint pen for left-handers”. So the long keyword pulls in less traffic than the short one.
But the traffic it does pull in is highly relevant.
4. A blog keeps your website alive
You may know the feeling. You land on a website and think of a ghost town from a western. You can almost see the tumbleweeds rolling across the screen and hear the wind howling in the deserted corners.
At the very least, the site looks like nobody has updated it in months, maybe years. And you start to wonder whether the company behind it still exists.
Do you feel like staying on that site? Didn't think so.
Why would you spend your time on a website nobody looks after? If the company behind it can't even find the energy to look after its website, it probably can't find the energy to look after its customers either.
Your potential customers think the same. They won't stick around on your website if it feels abandoned and shows that you and the rest of the company have forgotten about it.
So how do you keep the pulse going on your website?
If you already have a subpage for everything you offer, it can feel a bit forced to keep creating new ones.
Take a law firm specialising in family and inheritance law. If the firm works in four areas, it makes sense to have one subpage on prenuptial agreements, one on wills, one on estate administration and one on custody.
So how do you keep your website alive when it already covers everything you offer?
The answer, of course, is blog posts.
A couple of blog posts a month give your website a much-needed blood transfusion and a new spark of life. You know your industry inside out, and you're bound to have plenty to say. After all, you already use your professional knowledge in your work every single day.
Move that knowledge from your everyday work onto your website with good, relevant blog posts. That way, the website always looks updated and current, which makes it more attractive.
Would you rather shop in a shopping centre full of shops, or on a deserted high street?
Imagine you have to choose where to buy your Christmas presents. You can shop in Magasin on the first Saturday after payday. Or you can take a stroll down a deserted pedestrian street in a provincial town where half the shops closed their doors long ago.
You don't need a master's degree in marketing to work out that the first scenario has the best chance of meeting your shopping needs. The same goes for your website. Your visitors gain more confidence that you can meet their needs when the site always offers new and varied content.
And there's an extra bonus when you update your website regularly: it ranks better in the search engines.
Google's algorithms reward fresh content and information. A website you update often signals activity and interaction.
5. Your visitors stay longer
Of course you want to draw visitors to your website. If they click away as quickly as they clicked in, their visit isn't worth much.
Think of a visit to a clothes shop. You go in to buy a new pair of gloves. Then you discover the shop has sold out of gloves. You leave the shop again. Why on earth would you stay when the shop doesn't have what you need?
If the shop had had a wide range of gloves, you'd have stayed longer and perhaps tried on several different pairs. You might even have bought other items, because along the way you discovered the shop had more to offer than gloves.
The same goes for your visitors. They won't stay long if your website lacks content that's relevant to them. Conversely, valuable and informative content shows them that your site is worth visiting and worth staying on.
Your visitors should linger and stay, not disappear
Naturally, you want to draw visitors to your website. If they click away as quickly as they clicked in, their visit isn't worth much.
Think of a visit to a clothes shop. You go in to buy a new pair of gloves. Then you discover the shop has sold out of gloves. So you leave the shop again. Why on earth would you stay when the shop doesn't have what you need?
If the shop had had a wide range of gloves, you'd have stayed longer. You might have tried on several different pairs. You might even have bought other products, because along the way you discovered the shop had more to offer than gloves.
The same goes for visitors to your website. They won't stick around for long if your site lacks content that's relevant to them. Useful and informative content, on the other hand, shows them that your site is worth visiting and worth staying on.
So how do you get your visitors to stay a little longer?
The answer is simple: write engaging blog posts that are relevant to your visitors. Write posts that make them want to stay on your site.
Quality content that matches what your visitors are looking for is one of the best tools for keeping them on the site. So a good blog can increase the dwell time on your website.
Get help with your blog posts
Need inspiration for your first blog post? Read our guide for the aspiring copywriter.
Is it hard to find time to blog in a busy working day? Or are you just not quite sure where or how to start?
Contact Amplify, your SEO agency, on +45 70 60 50 28 or at info@amplify.dk. One of our copywriters will help you write engaging, search-engine-friendly blog posts for your business.