Benefits of Blogging for your Business

Google loves to see your website being updated frequently and consistently. Blogging is one of the best ways to do this. Blogging allows you to target keywords that you want to rank for. For example, I want to rank for SEO (search engine optimization) in Brevard County, Florida. So you’ll see that I’m using that phrase throughout this blog post while doing other SEO strategies such as backlinking to a dedicated page about Brevard County SEO.  Targeting specific keywords gives you the power to hopefully outrank your competitors and gather more traffic from it. Other benefits to blogging is to create more for google to index, letting google know that you are knowledgeable about your industry, have more content to index, which generates more traffic for them. You can also utilize blogging as a content generator for your social media, as you should always share your post on your social media profiles to create a thickened and stronger web for your online presence. It also gives your customers and visitors a reason to return to your site, sign up for your email list, and potentially buy from you.

Hindrances of Blogging

Just like anything in digital marketing, there are cons to blogging. For example, blogging can be time intensive. Since it’s vital to be consistent and frequent on your blog, you’ll spend a lot of time doing the research, writing, editing, and posting of each post. You also cannot plagiarise anything, Google will know and it will hurt you bad in the rankings.

How To Blog for SEO

The main things to know when you’re blogging for SEO are that you needs to be frequent, consistent, reliable, informative, well-written, and focused. The first thing you should do is to determine your posting schedule.For example we post on Tuesday every week. This once-a-week frequency is perfect for us in both management and results. The next step is to determine your topic and your keyword or keyword phrase. Then you’re going to research your topic and keyword. This will allow you to find statistics in order to strengthen the reliability and trustworthiness of your piece. Once you’ve finished the research, and have written the blof you then must edit it. It’s important to make sure there are no typos or grammatical errors. You can use something like Grammarly to do this step. When posting your blog, you’ll want to ensure that all the technical SEO aspects such as the title, meta description, and links are completely and correctly filled out. After posting at your designated time, you should then share it on all of your social media platforms: facebook, instagram, twitter, linkedin, etc. Remember to use relevant hashtags to boost the visibility of your post.

If you’re looking for professional help with SEO feel free to learn more about our SEO services here. If you’re not sure what to do next when it comes to marketing your business online, feel free to call for a free digital marketing consultation!

The post Blogging – Why Your Business NEEDS An Active Blog on Your Website. appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

If you are selling products or services, chances are you good you probably have 10 – 20 questions your customers ask about how to use products, correctly, better or more effectively. Typically most companies create an FAQ where they answer all of these questions on one page. While this does work, it’s not an optimal solution from an SEO traffic perspective.

Unless your questions and answers are very short, ideally you want to create a single page optimized for each question, this gives you the ability to create narrowly focussed posts around specific keyword phrases that will rank better and drive more traffic. Bear in mind this is something of a balancing act, and you may find these posts don’t get enough traffic on their own and have to be combined, so there is some experimentation, trial and error involved.

The next thing you need to consider is targeting and writing your posts using the same natural language, phrases,and queries that your consumers use, and not using your own internal company terminology. For example don’t use the term “waste receptacles” instead of “trash cans”.

Once you’ve got the basic questions covered, you can expand showing them how to use your products in new ways they never thought off, how to take advantage of advanced features, and use little known aspects of your products. You can even look for opportunities to tie into social media asking customers to submit pictures of their products in use. Cuisinart holds a recipe swap every few months, home improvement stores look for before and after shots, and fashion companies look for UGC photos of people wearing their clothing, shoes or fashion accessories.

One last option to consider is optimizing for some of your competitions keywords. Bear in mind SEO for your competition is not without consequences and not for the faint of heart, so think about it before you decide to start down that path.

Another example is the Whole Foods blog. In addition to recipes they have posts about how to cook with styles customers may not be familiar with like learn how to cook broiled fish or how to use new food types like Quiona (it’s a small grain like cous-cous).

The key lesson from these examples is don’t blog just to get new customers, blog to reach and help your existing customers, if you do it correctly they will stay repeat customers and pass along their experiences with their family and friends, and share them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• Look at your popular customer service questions and inquiries and look for ways to create optimized posts around those topics
• Use natural language and phrases your customers use, avoid internal terminology and marketing language
• Look for opportunities to show advanced or little known features
• Make your customers smarter this turns them into brand advocates
• While there is some danger optimizing for your competitions keywords can sometimes work to your advantage

The post How To: Write Blog Posts for Existing and Repeat Customers appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

So what is an ongoing series? An ongoing series example would be doing a series called “Fun Fridays” where you post about something fun to do that weekend. You can center it around holidays, seasons, weather, etc. NPR did a “Sandwich Mondays” series where they reviewed a sandwich every Monday.

You can personalize this for your company or industry. Fashion companies can do “Floral Fridays”, “Throwback Thursdays”, “Wedding Wednesday”, and so forth. If you’re looking for more ideas, check out our “Social Media Hashtags” post to get ideas for your series!

You can do multiple series as well to enhance your online presence. Our advice would be to choose 1-3 series, and schedule them weekly, biweekly, or monthly. To stay on top of it, you can schedule them to post automatically at a set time using WordPress.

You should also link to other posts inside your content, either by referencing your previous posts or linking to your other series.

The post Creating Content – Use An Ongoing Series appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.