9 Ways to Make Your Blog an Important Part of Your Business Website

Is your business blog worth the time and effort?

There are a lot of businesses that don’t utilize their blog, but in the competitive world of the internet, it can give you an important competitive advantage. You want to take every opportunity you get to convince your audience of the benefits of your business, and a high-quality blog is the perfect way to do this.

Use it

Your blog is an amazing opportunity to show off your knowledge and expertise, so make the most of it. Too many businesses don’t use all of the capabilities their website offers them, and the blog is a big part of this.

Not only is your blog a great opportunity to boost your SEO and bring more people to your site, but it’s a resource that can help turn people into leads and eventually customers.

Invest in Quality

People come to your blog because they want answers to their questions or solutions to their pain points. However, if you’re just going through the motions with your blog and putting out 200-word posts that summarize what your products do, it’s not going to have an impact – that's for your product pages.

Instead, to maximize the effectiveness of your blog, you need to invest in quality content.

Everything you put on your website reflects on your brand, and your blog is no different. If you’re going to create leads, then this means you should be looking to create some of the best content on the internet. You’ve got the industry knowledge, so use this to create great content that adds value to your potential customers.

Understand Your Goals

It’s important you understand what you’re trying to achieve with your content. What is the journey you want people to go on once they land on your content, and what actions do you want them to take?

Of course, we’d like every person who lands on our website to become a customer, but what steps do they take before this happens? If you understand these steps, then you know how your content fits in with the customer journey and can write it accordingly.

Different blog posts will have slightly different goals. For example, “What is a CRM – Your Definitive Guide” will have slightly different goals to an article about “Choosing the Right CRM for Your Business” because the buyer is at a different point in the buying journey.

Understand Your Target Audience

You’re never going to achieve your goals unless you first understand what it is your audience wants to achieve.

It might be your website, but in many ways, your audience is the most important part in the equation. Understanding what information your audience is looking for, how they search for that information, and what type of content they want to consume is one of the first steps in your content creation process.

Take the time to understand your audience, and content creation will become much easier.

Research Your Keywords

If you’re going to write a blog, then it needs to be targeted and centered around the words people are using to search for information. When you understand your audience, it becomes much easier to narrow down the kinds of keywords you want to use, and this can help you create a content plan.

It’s important to remember that it’s not just about putting keywords in your content anymore. It’s about creating meaningful content around those keywords. Google is very good at understanding how topics link together, so really work on expanding on ideas and maximizing your content's value.

Internal Linking

Use internal links to keep your visitors on your site. If you’ve got an established blog, then you should have lots of in-depth information you can link to, and this is a great way of keeping people engaged and pushing them through your customer journey.

Make sure your links remain relevant, though, and only use them when they add value to your content.

Calls to Action

Ideally, you don’t just want people to read your blog but also take action. However, sometimes you’ve got to make it obvious what steps people should take next, and this is where your calls to action come in.

Your calls to action should be linked to the goals you have with each piece of content and encourage people to take the desired action. They might seem like a small detail, but CTAs can make a big difference, so really work on including the right ones in your content.

Proofread

Grammar and spelling are important. Your blog is designed to position yourself or your business as an authoritative source, but it can undermine this goal when you make basic spelling mistakes.

There’s lots of technology to help you out with this problem, though, so make sure that your final draft is error-free. If you’re producing lots of content, then online proofing software is well worth investing in and can make a big difference to your website.

Everybody makes the odd error here or there, but technology allows you to keep on top of this and make sure you’re offering your readers clean, valuable content.

Consistency

It takes time to build your authority and to see the true results of making the most of your blog. Content is an investment, but it’s one that can have big results well into the future.

If you’re doing all the right things with your SEO and producing brilliant content, the search engines will eventually take notice. It might be small keywords where you start ranking at first, but gradually, you can start bringing in a large volume of traffic. When this happens, you’ve created a consistent source of traffic, and you know your content is already optimized to convert people into customers.

However, it does take hard work to get to this point, and one of the most important aspects is remaining consistent with what you do.