Why Your Local Business Needs A Blog

Have you noticed how so many websites have blogs? Even some small businesses are creating blogs, but why?

The answer is SEO.

SEO, search engine optimization, is how websites appear on Google and other search engines. Having a blog allows your website to appear for more keywords, what people type into the search bar.

There are many myths about SEO that if you haven’t dived into, might find yourself in trouble or overwhelmed. Optimizing a website and having content that ranks highly on search engines will ultimately boost the ranks of other pages on your website, including your homepage. Why do you think websites like wikipedia and news networks rank so highly? They have a lot of high ranking content.

Having a blog where you post about topics that relate to your business will help your website rank for new keywords, and raise the position of current ones. Blogs allow your website to receive traffic from people you otherwise would never reach.

Everyone that searches for something online is either looking for information or are satisfying a need. There isn’t a single thing that has been searched that doesn’t fulfill someone’s need. A blog will allow your website to satisfy the needs of others and increase traffic to your website.

Research has shown that longer blog articles generally get more page visits and rank higher on search engines. Blogs above 1000 words typically rank in the top 10 positions on Google. While this is dependent on the competitiveness of the keyword, having a blog will ultimately drive traffic to your website.

When planning what to write on your website’s blog, take a minute to stop and think about who you are writing for. Common sense will tell you that your blog should appeal to your customers, but you are only half right.

There are 2 types of readers on your website. Humans and robots. (Sorry but your cat jumping on the keyboard is not reading your articles) Humans will read your blog to satisfy a need or for information while robots will read your website to decide if it’s worth showing to humans.

Feeling confused?

Search engines like Google use robots to scan your website to make sure your content is worth showing to humans. There are hundreds of factors that search engines take into account when deciding which websites get to appear first in the search results. When you write your blog, you need to find a balance of writing for humans and robots.

Writing for humans sounds easy, just make sure things make sense and are spelled correctly, right? Wrong.

How often do you see a website and instantly leave because all you see is a wall of text? Writing for humans is more than just pasting a word document onto your website. Well-written blog articles are easy to follow, easy to read, make your readers stop to read, and can be skimmed. When writing for humans, we have always recommended to write in an “F-Pattern.” This means that the contents of your blog post should be easy to follow and the first sentence of every paragraph should be eye-catching enough to make readers stop and read it.

The most important parts of any blog article should be right at the top of the page so your readers can easily find the information they are looking for. Students and recent graduates might have been taught their whole life to leave their strongest points towards the end of a piece, but what they fail to realize is that nobody wants to read your entire article. People skim.

Now that you know how to write your blog for human eyes, how do you write for robots?

There are 3 primary things to think of when writing a blog that robots will consider good for human eyes. They are keyword density, inbound/outbound links, and HTML tags.

Keyword density is how many times your page’s primary keyword appears in your blog article. This is why blog pages with longer content typically rank higher because they will mention a specific keyword multiple times.

However, don’t just spam your keyword all over. Search engines can and will still read your content to make sure it makes sense and contains valuable information.

Inbound links can be hard to control when you first step into the world of SEO and growing your business online. Inbound links are when another website links to a page on your website. Think of these links as a vote of authority for your website, telling Google that your content is valuable.

Outbound links you can control. They are the websites that your blog links to. Many newcomers to the SEO world will argue that outbound links can hurt your website but research shows this isn’t the case. A healthy number of outbound links in a blog post (3-5) can actually increase your own domain authority and get your website ranking higher. So when writing a blog post, it is good to know how to link text.

The last thing to consider when writing a blog post for robots is your HTML tags. If you don’t know what these tags are they describe what each type of content on a page is. Your blog post should have 1 H1 tag and every subhead should be either an H2 or H3 tag. Search engines will read these tags to get a better understanding of what your blog is about. Thankfully website builders will often let you choose what kind of tag you want for your content so you don’t need to know a thing about coding.

Local SEO is a challenging and competitive landscape but the advantage for you is that most local competitors won’t have extensive amounts of content or backlinks allowing your business to stand out by implementing a blog on your website.

The more visits your website gets from your blog, the higher your website will rank overall. This means that your website will appear higher on the list of businesses for local searches.

If you are looking to add a blog to your website or have blog posts written for you, please contact us! Let’s work together.