It might be a surprise to you that maintaining a high-quality business blog can be imperative to your business’s success. You only need to look at some of the statistics to understand how important blogging can be for your SEO and your general online presence. For example, companies that blog get 55% more web traffic than those that don’t; imagine having the opportunity to impress another half total of your regular visitors. This is a remarkable statistic, but the importance of blogging doesn’t stop there!
Another example of the importance of blogging is that companies that blog get twice as many inbound emails from visitors than companies that don’t. This represents a massive potential increase for inbound enquiries into your business. Blogging isn’t easy, though. It can take nearly four hours to write the average blog post. Furthermore, the average blog post is 1236 words in length.
In this article, we’ll be going over some of our best tips to teach you how to maintain a high-quality business blog.
Create a Content Calendar
This is one of the most important things that you can do. Your content strategy needs to be consistent to help you generate the best SEO benefits possible from your blog. This means that you need to create a content calendar and stick to it. Rather than posting on random days as you feel like it, you should select specific days to post your content and set aside time to create and curate content for your business blog. Alternatively, a copywriter would be able to write this content for you.
Having a content calendar is a great way to improve your blog’s quality, as you can plan your content well in advance. This allows you to focus your content creation efforts on the things you want to display to your visitors more effectively. For example, using a content calendar, the Driven Media Solutions team may dedicate a single week to launching one of our new product lines, rather than doing it as and when we want to. This creates an additional focus for the campaign and would boost viewership numbers.
Post Regularly
SEO can take a long time to build, whether you’re improving it through your blog or other means. One of the most important things you can do for your SEO on your blog is to post regular content and try to make sure that you’re posting on the same days. Some sources have stated that for smaller businesses to get the maximum benefit from blogging, they need to be posting new content on their blog between four/five times per week. Of course, this can be an incredibly daunting task, and only posting once a week will still generate some benefits for you, even if not as much.
As was previously stated, you may be able to alleviate some of the pressure involved in posting regular content by contracting a media company or a freelancer to write these articles for you. Depending on how many times you want to post per week, hiring a freelancer on a per-piece basis may work out cheaper for you than hiring someone specifically to care for your blog on an employed basis.
It has been recommended for larger companies that there should be activated on your blog every day, and some companies even take this a step further and post multiple times per day. It can be easier for these companies to update their blog regularly. They will have larger budgets to either hire people to handle this aspect of their business, whether those are employees or freelancers.
Ensure Your Message Is Relevant To Your Audience
This is incredibly important. You need to think about who you want your audience to be. These will generally be the people that would have used your products and services. Say, for example, you’re a company that specialises in the provision of business energy to your customers. Your viewers are going to benefit more from a post centred around energy saving advice than they would a post about the top ten best beauty spots in the UK.
You should also be thinking about whether your content will capture your required audience’s mind and keep them reading. This means that you should make sure that your writing uses a conversational tone as if you’re speaking to the reader. We’ve made allowances for certain types of content, such as guides on serious topics. This doesn’t change the fact that tailoring your business blog content to your customers is a key ingredient for success.
Think About The Length Of Your Articles
It may be surprising to know that your posts’ length will also influence the impact that your blog will have on your SEO presence and your readership numbers. The best average length for your article will depend on the type of content you’re posting, but on average, the ideal blog post length is something around 1,600 words– which roughly converts as seven-minutes of overall reading time. You’ll also find that making posts that are around this length will allow you to bring more value to your reader in general.
You should also note that posts that make heavy use of images can be shorter in length, closer to 1000 words or below. The above image also highlighted that longer-form content tends to appear closer to the top of Google, with posts above 2000 words dominating the average top ten positions on Google. This shows that the minimum word count that you should aim for with a blog post is anywhere between 1600-2400 words, depending on the subject and the content itself.
Use Images In Your Pieces
This nugget of advice shouldn’t come as a shock to you, but blog posts that use images perform much better for SEO than those that don’t. You should at least make use of one image in your blog posts as it tells Google and other search engines that the content in your post is engaging and valuable, therefore increasing its value to users of the search engine. This is a surefire way to ensure that your content performs better than it would normally.
If you are using images in your posts, you need to make sure that you’re using Alt-text on your images. What is Alt-text? It’s a small text description of an image that visually impaired people can use to get an idea of what the image represents. Ensuring that your content is accessible to people with visual impairments will make Google flag your content as more valuable, meaning your content will be pushed up the Google search rankings even further.
Although you should use images in your blog posts, you should also make sure that you’re not oversaturating your content with images. This can be quite jarring for a reader and can convince them to click off of your blog before they even get halfway towards the end. You can make use of images, but be smart when doing it.
Answer Customer Questions
This is an excellent approach to blogging that can bring a great deal of value to your readers and increase people’s volume that visits your blog. If you’re a business, then there’s a good chance that you have specific customer questions which crop up more than others. A great way to create a passive form of answering repetitive customer questions is to implement blog posts that seek to answer these questions in detail. If you advertise these posts correctly, you can get great reader numbers and prevent common problems.
An example of how we’ve done this at Driven Media Solutions is that we commonly ask why customers should contact their website designed professionally rather than using a DIY service such as Wix or Squarespace. We then decided to create a blog post dedicated entirely to the benefits of having your website professionally built by our team. Doing this provides a valuable resource for your customers and will go a long way to increase your viewership numbers.
Research Your Keywords
This is an essential aspect of ensuring success for your blog, and it can be quite common for novice blog writers to overlook their importance completely. A keyword is a term or a word that is the best indicator of what your content is about. It should also be noted that you should try to use your keyword in your blog posts as often as you possibly can, this is because if you only use your keyword twice and other potential keywords are used more often, Google isn’t going to know the best way to define your post.
![Keyword Research for SEO: All You Need to Know [2021]](https://mangools.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/3-steps-of-keyword-research.png)
Another reason why it is essential to research your keywords isn’t just for the benefit of Google. It’s also for the use of your potential readers. You need to get into the readers head and understand what they are most likely to search for when looking for something related to your business. For example, if you’re a graphic designer that’s just starting, your ideal keyword to attract new customers may be “cheap graphic designer”. This is a common search term, though, and it may be a fight to get to the top of Google for it. This is why keyword research is fundamental.
Measure Your Performance
This is incredibly important. You should always be measuring the performance of your posts. This doesn’t mean to only check how your latest posts are doing after only one week of posting them. SEO takes time, and blogs generally tend to get more organic traffic, the longer they are up on your website. This means that you should always check how your older posts are doing and the viewership and retention numbers for your more current blog posts.
One main reason you should measure your blog posts’ performance is that it allows you to understand what is working and what isn’t. For example, if you see that you’d written a blog about a subject which you think is essential for your customers and it’s getting no traffic, but another similar article is getting more traffic, you can get an understanding of what you’re doing wrong and what you need to improve in the future.
Alternatively, find that a specific subset of your posts is doing incredibly well. You can look at what you’ve been doing differently with those posts and then continue to incorporate those methods into your blog posts moving forward. Measuring your performance, whether good or bad, can be vital to ensuring future successes.
Conclusion
This article has gone over the best methods to maintain a high-quality business blog. Some of the most important aspects that we have discussed are creating a content calendar so you can better plan your content campaign and post regularly so that you can enjoy the maximum boost for SEO on your website. We also explained the importance of tailoring your content to your audience and how using images in your post could be a big boost for your search ranking aspirations.
It was deduced that conducting adequate keyword research is imperative for ensuring that your blog posts get seen by the right people. It is essential to ensure that your blog posts get seen at all, even to an extent. Finally, the importance of measuring your blog content’s successes and failures is vital for allowing you to begin making changes to your future content and tinkering it for success in the future.
If you need help with running your business blog, you can contact the team at Driven Media Solutions for a free consultation and a quote on your requirements. So, in closing, get blogging and try to improve your readership numbers on your company website.