Blogging for your business: How to use SEO to grow your business
Not using your website as a marketing tool is a huge missed opportunity.
And in order to maximize reach through your website I highly recommend blogging for your business growth!
You might be wondering, why does blogging matter? Or how can a blog help you grow your business?
The TLDR version:
- It builds authority with your audience AND with Google
- It boosts SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Drives traffic to your website, resulting in more leads and ultimately more clients/customers.
- Grows an engaged community
- Helps build your email list!
I’m going to share a bit more detail about each of these topics and then we will talk about how you can get started with blogging for your business.
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Blogging builds authority with your audience and with Google
Building website authority is extremely important to start ranking higher in SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
When you are consistently blogging you are building trust and authority with both search engines and your community. You are providing valuable content that makes people want to come back and read more or learn from you.
Or if they land on one of your blog posts and you have other related posts linked at the bottom, they may continue browsing. Keeping your visitors on your website longer, shows Google that your content is helping solve their problems.
Google is like your digital bestie, it wants to show your content. It wants people to spend more time on your page because this shows Google that they’re doing their job by giving their users the right answers.
Simply put…
“In order for people to view you as an authority and to be on their minds when they are thinking of experts in their field, you need to get your content in front of them consistently.
By consistently delivering quality content, you can build your reputation and each post you publish will help you reach new readers.”
Profit Blitz
Blogging boosts SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
This one is just simple math..
The more SEO optimized pages you have on your website, the more opportunities you have for your pages to rank on SERP.
Let’s just take one quick moment to review what SEO is if you’re not familiar.
“SEO (search engine optimization) is a set of processes aimed at improving a website’s visibility in search engines, like Google, with the goal of getting more organic traffic. SEO is about fulfilling users’ search needs by creating relevant, high-quality content and providing the best possible user experience.”
Semrush
It’s important to mention here that it’s not just about pumping out as many blog posts as you can. It’s important to be strategic about your topics and optimizing for SEO. That’s a whole other topic which we won’t be covering in this post.
But if you do want to learn more about how to optimize your website for SEO I have a blog post on it! You can read that here. If you have specific questions about creating a blogging strategy and optimizing your blog posts, feel free to book a free consultation!
Hubspot has a great, one sentence answer to this topic:
“Blogging helps boost SEO quality by positioning your website as a relevant answer to your customers’ questions.”
Drive traffic to your website, resulting in more leads and ultimately more clients or customers.
When you are blogging for your business you should have a blog strategy in place. You will be creating posts based on researched topics. The most important thing for business owners is ROI. Return on investment, and that doesn’t just mean financial investment. I’m talking about your time.
There is no point in taking hours to write a blog post about a topic no one is searching for. We want to create strategic blog posts that we know your ideal clients are actively searching for. This increases your chances of getting in front of your clients. This is when you are increasing your website traffic, these people can turn into leads and then ideally turn into clients or customers.
Grows an engaged community
We all know how important a community is for your business. No matter what industry you are in! But especially in the wellness industry because it requires a lot of trust for a client to choose you!
As someone who has suffered from chronic pain for almost a decade now, I can confidently say, I am very particular with the people I choose to treat me. Whether that’s a Physiotherapist, RMT, Yoga Instructor, Therapist, you name it! Choosing someone to have a direct affect on my mental or physical health is not a decision I take lightly. And I am positive, anyone else who suffers in any way would feel the same.
Building trust and a relationship with your clients will make them feel like you are the one for them. And this isn’t just going to help your business, it’s going to really help your patients. They need to feel like you are going to help them heal. Or at least support them on their healing journey.
When you are consistently blogging you are growing that community. You are bringing people who need your services into your world. When you show up consistently and provide valuable information through your blog, your people will find you. And just think about the impact you can make!
Helps build your email list!
Your email list is such a valuable asset to your business. People are saying yes to have you show up in their email inbox. To contact them directly! This is so powerful because these are people who want to hear from you.
Most people who come across your content on social media might not be interested in your services. But when you post a blog, you know the people who find it are actively searching for the answers you are providing. They are already a warm audience but that doesn’t mean they’re ready to book/buy.
The best way to stay connected with this warm audience is through an email list. You can continue to provide value and stay top of mind. And when they are ready to take the leap and book their appointment, they’ll think of you!
And the reason your blog is a great way to grow your email list is for the same reason it’s great for SEO. If each blog post is answering a question, think about how much value you are putting out there. It’s just more opportunity to get in front of more people.
Be sure to have an opt-in form to your email newsletter or a freebie on every single blog post.
How to get started with blogging for your business
Now that you know how blogging can help you grow your business let’s get into some practical steps you can take.
Defining your blogging topics
The great thing about blogging for your business is that you have a built in topic! You will be writing posts about the services you provide and the industry that you are in. But if you are serious about using blogging as a marketing strategy your blog needs to be easy to navigate. It should be really easy for your readers to find their way around and to find what they are looking for. A great way to improve user experience on your blog is to have blog categories.
Blog categories are going to basically file each blog post within a specific topic. This makes it really easy for your readers to find related posts. And bonus, this makes it easier for you to find topics to write about.
You can have anywhere from 3 to 5 topics. You can have more if you choose to but you should at least have 3-5. For example, if you are a nutritionist, your topics could be:
- Healthy dinner recipes
- Gluten free recipes
- Meals for kids
This helps break down your blog as it grows. So a mom looking for meal ideas for her kids can easily go to this category and find more posts that would be specific to her needs.
Moreover, this helps you with your content creation as well! Think about only writing blog posts about healthy dinner ideas! You could feel like you’re running out of ideas or it could just start to feel redundant to write. When you have categories you can just write one post for each category. And if you’re posting once a week and have four categories that would mean you’re only having to come up with one post for each topic. It just takes some of the stress off of coming up with ideas to write about!
Set up your blog
Of course you need a website to host your blog. There are so many options these days on what platform you can host your website/blog on. I highly recommend hosting your website on Showit, that’s the platform that I design my client websites on. The reason I love it is because it works seamlessly together with WordPress. And WordPress is the best blogging platform!
You could have your website on WordPress as well. However, Showit is a very user friendly platform. Once your website is set up it will be really easy for you to maintain it. This means you don’t have to pay a monthly retainer or hourly fees every time you need to update your website (unless you want to!).
I have a blog post on how Showit and WordPress work together if you want to learn more about that!
Develop an editorial calendar for your blogging strategy
I mentioned this earlier, but you don’t want to just be writing about any topic that comes to mind. You want to be very strategic with the topics you choose to write about. And it’s very important to implement SEO on each blog post.
If you’re reading this, I will assume you are serious about using your blog as a marketing tool. It honestly is such a powerful marketing tool! And if you are serious about it, I highly recommend working with an SEO expert to build a blogging strategy for you. If you want to work with me, I would love to learn more about your business and see how I can help you! You can book a free call here.
Do your research and work with someone who aligns with your business and what you are looking for. You can create your own content marketing strategy by using Google and Pinterest to see what users are searching for. To take blogging seriously there is a more strategic way to come up with topics! Which is where an SEO expert can step in and take any guess work out of it!
One thing to note is that blogging is a long term marketing strategy. It can take anywhere from 6-12 months for your posts to start ranking and to actually get clients from your blog. Eventually there will be a snowball effect and once your post start to rank they can continue to rank for years!
I will say, you should enjoy writing to some extent if you want to have a blog for your business! Or you can always invest in a copywriter to write them for you!
You do have to be extremely consistent just like you would with any other marketing strategy.
Optimize your blog posts for SEO
We have chatted quite a bit about SEO already so I won’t harp on that anymore! But I do want to reiterate the importance of optimizing each blog post for SEO. This goes hand in hand with topics we have already discussed. For example, come up with a strategic content marketing plan! Write posts based on SEO keyword research to ensure people are actually searching for the posts you are spending time writing!
And then there’s the technical SEO part of it which is adding these keywords to specific areas on your post including:
- Post Title
- In your headers
- Alt text on images
- Throughout your post
One thing you want to avoid is what’s called “keyword stuffing”. This is when you are just adding the keywords over and over in a way that doesn’t really make sense. Google caught on to this a long time ago! Make sure you are always writing for humans first! You want your posts to be readable and packed with value!
Measure your data!
It’s important to measure your blog post data just as you measure your IG posts! Take a look at what the data is telling you. You can get some great insights from both Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Again, you can either set these up yourself or invest in an SEO expert to do this for you. I would recommend getting this set up whether you have a blog or not. You still want to see how your website is performing.
The great thing about Google Analytics is that it will show you where your traffic is coming from. So you can measure other marketing efforts as well. For example, if you are posting on Instagram regularly or Pinterest. You can see how many website visitors you are getting from each of these platforms.
And then you can use this data to determine what posts are ranking and which ones are not. You can see what type of content you should make more of!
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