Should Small Business Websites Have A Blog?

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You've seen blogs on other small business websites, and now you're wondering whether creating a blog on your site will help you with your marketing efforts. But answering the question, "Should my website have a blog?" isn't completely straightforward. You'll have to look a little deeper into what your marketing goals are and the resources you have available.

The Case for a Small Business Blog

There are two audiences for a small business blog: Google (and other search engines) and potential human customers.

Google is the search engine giant in the industry, handling more than 100 billion searches every month. That means that your website probably gets the bulk of its traffic from people looking for companies like yours in a Google search. Understanding what Google likes to see is important.

What Google likes to see: Good, timely content. Blogs fill this requirement nicely. They are updated regularly and contain a lot of information about what your business and industry do.

Plus, blogs are a great way to incorporate more relevant keywords into your site. Let's say you are a local beauty salon and you'd like to get more wedding parties in for hair and makeup. A blog post on "Wedding Trends in [Your City]" or "Five Perfect Hairstyles for Your Wedding Day in [Your City]" will help attract local people looking for your services. Such a post with lots of details and relevant keywords is more likely to get indexed high in Google results for your community than your home page that has a single line about your wedding services.

Getting more search engine traffic is an important goal, but you also need to think about the actual humans who come to your site. If you're a local pest control business, and you have a blog with 25 articles about all types of bugs, birds and local wildlife and how to keep them out of your house and where they belong, you'll look like an expert.

Few visitors to your site will read all 25 articles, but they'll get the perception that you are very knowledgeable about what you do. This compares favorably to your competitor with a three-page website that only lists location, hours and services. Writing a blog is a great way to make potential customers see that you are the best at what you do.

When a Small Business Blog May Be a Bad Idea

There are tremendous upsides to writing a blog for your business, but if you don't do it right, you will give off the wrong impression.

What are the most common errors that small business owners and managers make with their blogs? Here are a few:

  • Failing to be consistent: A visitor to your site needs to see that you've updated your blog. If the most recent post is from November 2014, you'll lose credibility.
  • Posting poor quality content: Posts with spelling and grammar errors or that are long and rambling may give the impression that you aren't attentive to detail or able to focus on what you're doing.
  • Not posting frequently enough: Your industry and what your competitors are doing will dictate how often you should post. But posting once a quarter or even once a month may not be enough to pull in the search engine traffic you want. A Hubspot study found that companies who blogged more than 16 times a month got 3.5 times the traffic of a company that blogged fewer than four times. You may not be able to post daily, but slightly more often than weekly seems to be the sweet spot.
  • Writing only short posts: Longer posts rank higher in Google and stay relevant for longer. Many businesses post blogs of 500 words or less, but you need to mix in an occasional 2,000-word article to maximize your results. It's a little intimidating and definitely time consuming to create these longer posts, so you don't need to do it all the time, but don't shy away from a long post every month or two.
  • Getting too personal: It's definitely fine to give your business blog a particular style, but don't make it all about you. A post about how you traveled to Orlando to attend an industry conference can work well; a post about your vacation drinking piƱa coladas on the beach in Hawaii is probably not good material because it's not relevant to your audience (unless you're a travel agency).

If you have tried to blog before and come up against any of these issues, it's best to either make a solid plan for how to avoid these pitfalls or pursue a different marketing strategy.

Blogs can be a great way to enhance your authority and bring more potential customers to your small business website. But if you create a blog, make it a priority so you'll focus your attention on doing it right.

A penny for your thoughts!

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