Information is the currency of engagement. Companies increasingly harness the power of blogs to provide that currency, generating informative and engaging content to connect strategically with their audience. According to Orbit Media, 80% of businesses that blog say the practice drives results, and Social Media Today reports that over three-quarters of internet users read blogs.
The practice of blogging isn’t just about writing; it’s a dynamic marketing approach that amplifies brand presence, products, and services. Blogging for businesses is a cornerstone of modern digital marketing, enabling diverse industries to engage, educate, and achieve their unique business objectives.
By embracing business blogging, your company becomes a beacon of expertise, sharing industry insights and valuable knowledge. This content-driven strategy establishes credibility, fostering trust and positioning your business as a thought leader. Regular blog updates keep you current and enable you to address emerging trends, catering to the ever-evolving needs of your audience.
Discover the fundamentals of successful blogging for your business website with our comprehensive guide below. We’ll explain what you must do to ensure a successful blog in the 2023 digital marketing landscape.
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
Table of contents
What is blogging?
Blogging for business is a strategic and dynamic marketing practice where companies utilise blog platforms to create and publish informative, engaging, and relevant content to promote their brand, products, and services. It is an integral part of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. Businesses across diverse industries employ blogging to enhance their online presence, connect with their target audience, and achieve specific business objectives.
To maximise the impact of blogging for business, you must maintain consistency, tailor content to your target audience, and integrate relevant keywords to optimise search engine discoverability. A well-executed business blog can be a powerful tool for nurturing leads, converting prospects into customers, and building enduring relationships in the digital landscape.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of blogging?
Blogging can be a powerful but surprisingly complex marketing channel for your business. While the traffic, leads, and eventual sales of a successful blogging strategy will justify the effort, you should consider the pros and cons to decide if this is an undertaking you can manage yourself. For many businesses, the digital marketing experience and writing chops of a professional content marketing agency can be the ideal outlet to keep your time and energy focused on your business.
Advantages of blogging for business include:
- Grow your audience – Effective business blogs generate more traffic, which leads to more leads, which leads to more sales.
- Strengthen your brand – Blogging helps you reach more online users, boosting your brand awareness and establishing you as a trustworthy source of helpful information. Users tend to remember that when they’re ready to purchase.
- Your only investment is time – Blogging is one of the cost-efficient ways to promote your business online.
- Visibility with staying power – Blog posts that rank on search engines for key phrases can do so for months or even years before they need updating, providing lasting online visibility.
- Outrank your competitors – SEO can be a surprisingly zero-sum game. The more your blog posts move up the search rankings, the more your competitors move down.
- You probably already have what you need to get started – If your business already operates a website with a recognisable CMS platform, you’re probably only a few clicks away from starting your business’s blogging journey.
Disadvantages of blogging for business include:
- Blogging can be time-consuming – Yes, your only investment is time, but we should mention that effective online content can take hours to produce.
- Old blog posts need regular updating – Blog posts can slip in the rankings over time if Google and other search engines determine that more timely information is available. You’ll need to dedicate time to reviewing and updating your old posts to keep reaping the benefits.
- Blogging is hard! – Let’s face it; blog posts are to the internet what grains of sand are to a beach. Poor—and even average—blog posts will quickly vanish into the abyss of mediocre online content. Effective blogging requires proficient writing and communication skills, technical prowess, a creative streak, a wealth of time, and an understanding of content marketing best practices. That’s a lot to ask if you devote your time to being an expert at your business!
Is blogging good for business?
Blogging offers a wealth of benefits for businesses. It drives organic traffic to the company’s website and enhances search engine visibility, improving search rankings. Engaging content encourages social media sharing, amplifying brand reach and awareness. Furthermore, blogging facilitates customer interaction through comments and feedback, fostering a sense of community and customer loyalty.
Choosing the best platform for blogging
Countless Content Management Systems (CMS) exist today, but not all provide the functionality, scalability, and interface to deliver attractive, optimised blog posts. Here are a few of our favourite platforms for business blogging, available to New Zealand businesses in 2023.
- WordPress – With a streamlined interface and some of the best SEO functionality available, WordPress is easily among the strongest blogging platforms for businesses. Businesses generating revenue through their website should consider the self-hosted WordPress.org over the free WordPress.com. WordPress is compatible with Yoast’s powerful SEO plugin.
- HubSpot – HubSpot offers an excellent user experience for its blogging platform, with clean functionality, a wealth of blogging templates, SEO tools, and built-in features like content search engines, subscription capabilities, comment controls, and reporting.
- Wix – Wix offers an accessible blogging platform, and its SEO functionality has improved meaningfully in recent years. This is one of the less sophisticated platforms on the list, but that could make it ideal for less experienced content marketers who want to stay focused on the information.
- Squarespace – Squarespace offers heaps of built-in features that many platforms can only achieve through plugins.
- Contentful – Contentful prides itself on its scalability. It offers API-first architecture that makes integration with other services simple and easy and a built-in content distribution network (CDN) to deliver omnichannel content to users anytime.
The top 9 benefits of blogging for businesses
Blogging is great for your brand and marketing, but it’s also great for your audience! Information is valuable currency in the digital sphere, and a smart blog offers a wealth of benefits for your business:
- Boost brand awareness — Putting more content in front of more readers builds stronger brand recall.
- Increase visibility — Blogging helps you appear in a wider range of relevant search queries, improving your online presence.
- Stay relevant — With consistent, current information, you signal to search engines that your website is thriving and to users that you are a valuable source of information.
- Capitalise on linking opportunities — With more content across more pages, you can weave a more expansive web of internal links to and from relevant, high-value pages. Shareable content can also earn you backlinks from other websites.
- Build authority — Google and some other search engines are shifting toward a topical authority model that measures your experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness in a topic to determine the value of your pages for given queries.
- Earn Trust — Search engine users who routinely see you as a reliable source of information are more likely to trust your product or service when they’re ready to buy.
- Produce shareable material — Blogs are the perfect boost for stagnant social media channels. Blogging gives you attractive content to share on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networks to divert social media users to your website.
- Establish your brand — Blogging is a powerful way to communicate your brand’s voice and values to potential customers.
- Elicit action — Increased visibility and brand awareness have knock-on effects that ripple through the conversion funnel to traffic to leads to sales.
Seven tips to optimise your blog posts for SEO
Effective content is clear, concise, informative, and engaging, but you’ll need to stir in some SEO best practices to ensure your effective content is also visible. Explore our extensive guide to SEO Best Practices for Blog Posts to explore these insights in greater detail. Also, check out Pure SEO’s Good Content podcast, where Pure SEO Director of Content Marketing Rollan Schott discusses best practices for blog posts.
Keyword research
Keyword research offers the two-way benefit of finding your audience and helping your audience find you. Here are the four most important factors to consider as you conduct keyword research for your blog.
- Relevance – No other statistics will matter if your keywords are irrelevant to the topic. Google will scour the content around your keywords for related and contextualising terms to determine their relevance.
- Intent – You can sort keywords into four basic user intents: commercial, informational, navigational, and transactional. Your blog keywords should be informational. You can Google them to check if the top results are other informational content such as articles and guides.
- Difficulty / Competition – Blog post pages typically carry less weight in search rankings than homepages or product/service pages with broader, higher-value appeal. Choose less competitive keywords for “easy wins”.
- Volume – You don’t need to find keywords with thousands of monthly searches (particularly difficult in New Zealand), but you also don’t want keywords nobody uses. Check tools like Google Keyword Planner or Semrush to ensure you have an audience for your keywords. Remember that consistent, quality content can also rank for similar or adjacent keywords.
Prepare your blog post for the SERPs
Don’t just optimise your on-page content; remember that many of your readers will see a search result before seeing your blog post. Do what you can to make your search results appealing and persuasive.
- Page meta title and description – Google often rewrites meta titles and descriptions depending on their relevance to the query. Still, you can write keyword-rich page titles and descriptions for your blog posts. Google will read these, even if it doesn’t serve them to users.
- URL structure – Search engine results feature an abbreviated version of the page URL. Ensure your URL features relevant keywords, as seen in the example above.
- Structured data – Structured data markups (or schema markups) flesh out your search result, providing more information or insight upfront for users and commanding more (and more eye-catching) space on search engine results pages. Article and breadcrumb schema are common choices for blog posts. Consider author schema if a known name within your industry wrote your blog post. Finally, consider ImageObject and VideoObject schema if your blog post contains multi-media elements.
- Optimising for SERP Features: Google your blog post’s focus keywords to see what SERP features—if any—appear on that results page. For example, if you see a featured snippet, could you offer superior content to what you see in that snippet? Be sure to try. Also, check the People Also Ask section for other relevant questions to answer in your blog post. Our Featured Snippets Optimisation Guide can help you target some of these SERP features effectively.
Blog post headings
Headings help readers understand the organisation of your blog post and skim specific information if they know what they’re looking for.
Here are a few best practices for blog post headings:
- Use a hierarchical heading structure – Your first heading should be an H1; that’s the blog post’s title. Then, use H2 headings to split the content into key sections, H3 headings to split those sections into subsections, and so forth.
- Use keywords in your headings – This practice is most important for the post’s H1 heading, but including keywords in other headings can reinforce that the entire article is relevant to the topic.
- Headings should be intuitive and self-explanatory – Don’t make readers guess what information follows.
- If your heading introduces an idea, state it clearly in the heading – There’s no need to repeat the section’s theme in the opening paragraph; get straight into it!
Content & copywriting
Content is the meat in the blogging burger.
Copywriting is responsible for 99% of a blog post’s user experience and SEO. Your content needs to juggle all the following chainsaws at once:
- Clearly and accurately satisfy the user’s query.
- Reflect your brand’s values and voice.
- Persuasively position your product or service as a solution to readers’ problems.
Break your content into digestible sections and subsections so that key points have an associated heading. Headings make your content skimmable and thus more accessible.
Choosing the right blog post type can help you organise your content. Check out our list of essential blog post types for your business blog.
Internal links
Search engines use internal links — links to other pages on the same website — to help establish a hierarchy of your website’s most important pages. Internal links also enhance the user experience by directing readers to additional relevant information.
Follow these best practices for internal linking:
- Use anchor text relevant to the page you’re linking to – If you have designated target keywords for all the major pages on your website, try to use them as anchor text whenever possible.
- Links should be relevant to your blog post – Don’t shoehorn irrelevant links into your blog post just because you want to promote that page. Leave it out if you can’t arrive at an internal link naturally.
Image optimisation
Images and visual media are increasingly important in today’s online landscape. Quality images make your blog content more appealing and digestible, but their size poses additional challenges to your website.
Follow these best practices to optimise blog post images:
- Serve images in the right format – JPEG and PNG files are well-suited to blog post images.
- Optimise your image alt text – Screen reader apps serve this text to users, but search engines rely on it to understand the image’s context and relevance.
- Compress your images – Large files, such as high-resolution images, can inhibit page load speed, harming the user experience.
Mobile friendliness
Content reads differently on the vertical orientation of smaller mobile screens. Paragraphs that feel appropriately sized on a desktop may overwhelm a mobile screen with text. Furthermore, attractive desktop layouts that feature text wrapped around graphics and images may feel blocky or confusing when presented in a single vertical column.
Keep these best practices in mind to maintain mobile friendliness on your blog:
- Embrace responsive design – Responsive websites adjust to fit any screen size or orientation.
- Use shorter, simpler words – Keep the language clean, spare, and efficient so that your content stays information-rich.
- Use Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test tool – This tool will suggest simple improvements to make your page more mobile-friendly.
Make Blogging a Key Cog in Your Business’s Marketing Strategy
Blogging is a proven method of reaching your potential customers. With the right approach, you can take your business to the next level with only the power of the written word! Check out your competitor’s blogs for inspiration, draw upon your extensive experience with your customers’ most common questions and pain points, and chat with a local content marketing agency to find the right topics to get you started.
Blogging glory awaits!
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