As a small business owner, having an
online presence is key to staking your claim in your local market. An
essential component of your website strategy should be blogging.
Not only does blogging help with SEO because of the ability to populate your site with valuable keywords, but it can also help to establish you as a subject matter expert.
#1 Build a Website or Convert to WordPress
To start blogging effectively, you need to have a user-friendly infrastructure. Depending on your skill set, you may want to build a website, or you can even convert a website to WordPress. WordPress is extremely easy to manage and to post to. Whatever you can do to streamline your process, will help you to post frequently.
#2 Hire a Blog Writer
As a local business owner, you no doubt wear many hats. It’s entirely
possible that you don’t have the bandwidth to devote to blog writing
with the frequency that it requires to be successful for brand
development and to grow your business. It’s also possible that you don’t
have the skill set to write quality content. Either way, it can make
good sense to outsource your writing by hiring blog writing services.
Make
sure that you collaborate with a writer who understands your voice,
target market and business objectives so that they can write effectively
on your behalf.
You’ve also got to write effectively for SEO, so
leveraging the experience of a professional writer might be to your
benefit in this regard too. Do you know how to incorporate keywords
naturally? What do you know about formatting and tagging to improve your
SEO? If it doesn’t sound like mastering this is something you can
reasonably add to your to-do list, hire help.
#3 Reciprocal Guest Posting With Other Small & Local Businesses
Want
to populate your site with good content and improve your Google ranking
with backlinks? Develop a relationship with area businesses that are
either part of or complementary to your niche. In order to have a
high-quality site, you need to post regularly, to be visible locally and
to be seen as an authority on information for your niche. You
accomplish all of these by establishing a reciprocal relationship with
other local businesses. Make sure any links you obtain are strictly white-hat only. See our guide here on white hat back linking benefits.
#4 Keep it Relevant
You will engage far more visitors and convert more leads if you are providing content that is relevant, topical, and enticing for your niche market and your local area. Using a tool like Buzzsumo will help you to identify what is trending in your space. It’s safe to say that if these topics are trending, they will be of value and interest to your target audience too. It’s no good just to write content. You’ve got to create impact by directly addressing the needs of your audience.
In addition to researching topics, also research
keywords related to the topics, so that you can include those in your
posts and boost SEO.
#5 Involve Your Social Media
Creating content on your website isn’t just about enhancing the user experience for visitors; it’s about driving visitors to your site in the first place. Integrate your social media links by posting on there whenever you update your blog; don’t post the blog on your social media feeds, but rather post a link back to the blog on your website to generate traffic. There are a number of great SEO tools you can use also that will help gain a better understanding on your your blog posts are performing.