When it comes to improving your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) results, one of the easiest and most effective ways to do this for any Small Business Owner is by inserting a Blog onto your Website.
Unfortunately, many Businesses today fail to capitalise on the enormous marketing potential of a Blog. The reasons are varied, but this is mainly due to a lack of time and resources to publish high-quality Blog posts on a regular basis. In fact, a recent study by a Blogging Website found that that approximately 60% of Businesses worldwide have Blogs, with 65% of these failing to update the content in more than a year.
But these Businesses, they’re seriously missing out. One of the major drawcards of a Blog, it that it allows you to constantly add fresh, new content to your Website. This is something that Search Engines value incredibly highly when it comes to ranking your Website in the Search Results. And remember, the higher you rank, the more likely you are to attract valuable traffic to your Website.
A Small Business that completely neglects the addition of new content to its Site on a regular basis is really shooting itself in the foot when it comes to SEO results and is likely to result in a steep plunge in your Search Engine ranking.
This is why prioritising an up-to-date Blog should one of the core strategies of every Small Business Owner’s Digital Marketing plan.
If you’re wanting to improve your rankings on Google and are yet to implement a Blog, listen up. Here are several reasons why Blogs matter to your SEO efforts and what you can do to create a great Blog that Search Engines will love you for!
Avoid Outdated Strategies
Google’s algorithm now prioritises Websites with content that they deem as valuable and relevant to their users. For this reason, implementing this kind of content on your Blog will be key in winning favour with Google and increasing your search result rankings.
In recent years, Google has been cracking down on webspam, black hat strategies and poor-quality content, through implementing algorithm updates, such as ‘Panda’ and ‘Penguin’. As a Small Business Owner, you should be forgoing the old SEO mindset of keyword stuffing and spamming your content with internal links, and instead focus primarily on providing high-quality and relevant content that users want.
Give Your Blogs a Clear and Relevant Heading
By giving your Blog Post a clear and relevant title, this will enable Search Engines to more easily identify what your Blog is about and therefore offer it to searchers looking for content like yours.
Try incorporating relevant keywords into your Blog Post’s heading, as this will assist Google in its endeavours to match relevant content to the users search. Be careful though, try not to overstuff too many keywords within your headings, as this could just be seen as “spam” by Google, seeing your Site pushed down the search results.
Regularly Optimising Blog Content
One of the great things about a Blog, is that you don’t just need to publish brand new posts all the time to generate what Search Engines will deem “new” content. After all this could be quite time consuming as an already busy Small Business Owner!
Instead, you can work on publishing just one Blog a week, but instead of publishing it and then pushing it aside, you can perform small updates and optimisations on the post over time, as this too is considered as new, fresh content. The key here is to keep your Blog “fresh”.
Try to identify additional opportunities to optimise existing Blog posts. Even using different angles to a particular topic that revolves around your Products, Services and more importantly, your customers, can be helpful for your SEO. You can also add internal links to other relevant pages on your Website, or try uploading new images, video content, infographics and audio to posts. Again, these are factors that Google will assess your Website on and rank accordingly.
Keywords are Key
When it comes to an effective SEO strategy, one of the major ways a Blog can assist in your efforts is by allowing you to incorporate more relevant Keywords into your Website content.
Effectively implemented Keywords within your Blog Posts will help Search Engines such as Google identify your Site as being relevant to a particular user’s search. For example, if you are the owner of a personal training business and run a health and fitness blog on your Website, some of the keywords you could aim to including within your blogs are “personal training”, “health”, “get fit”, “weight loss”, “strength training”, and so on.
It is however important to make sure that the Keywords are actually relevant to what they blog is about. If you simply resort to “Keyword stuffing” techniques, that is, adding as many targeted Keywords into your content as possible, you’ll likely be punished by Search Engines. Google frowns upon this technique and, even more so, your Blog visitors won’t be able to make any sense of your content, leaving them confused and alienated from your Brand.
Optimise Images, Photos and Videos
Including rich content into your Blog Posts, such as images, photos and video is highly effective in improving your SEO Rankings. And by remembering to include and optimise these with descriptive alt tags and descriptions you can get double the SEO bang for your buck!
Try including high-priority Keyword Phrases where appropriate in your image Alt Tags and Image Descriptions, as this will help Google to identify the image as relevant to the user’s search when it “crawls” your Website.
Furthermore, by including this rich content on your Blog, you’ll be encouraging viewers to hang around for longer, to scroll through an image gallery or engage with a video. And when people stay on your Site for longer, this improves your bounce rate. This will help Google to determine that your Site’s content is of value to users as they’re spending a good deal of time there, thus seeing you rise in those rankings!
Mobile-Responsive Blogs Help Too
Understand that visitors are not always by their desktops or laptops reading your Blog Posts, but are using smartphones and other tablet devices. In fact, Mobile usage has increased at such a phenomenal rate that having a Mobile Responsive Website and Blog are almost a necessity when it comes to being ranked highly in search results.
By making your Blog Mobile Responsive, you’ll not only be creating a better browsing and reading experience for your customers, but also appealing to the likes of Google.
Whatever you do, don’t skip this important step, as Google now punishes Sites that don’t make the switch to being Mobile-friendly.
Having a vibrant, relevant and well-researched Blog is a great way to not only boost your general Online Marketing efforts, but also provide you with a great way to improve your SEO, helping you to rise through those Google Search Result rankings. If you need more advice or want professional Bloggers to bring your Small Business to life Online, then give us a call here at Sites n Stores today!