How to write a business blog — and why you need one.

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Twenty years ago—heck, even ten years ago—if you’d walked into a local business and informed the owner that in order to compete and maximise their sales they would need to learn how to write a business blog, you’d have been met only with bewildered stares. 

What use could a cobbler, a locksmith, an estate agent, a cleaning agency, or a funeral director ever possibly get from a blog?

Well, it’s 2021, and the answer to that is: quite a lot, now that you mention it.

Why do I need a business blog?

Having a blog is crucial for your website’s SEO—that is, Search Engine Optimisation—and SEO can make or break a business in the internet age. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, we’ll quickly explain what we’re talking about.

SEO is the process by which businesses can ensure they appear in prime position in the results pages of search engines such as Google. To appear on the first page on Google for a particular search term, say ‘knitted socks for sale’, a website must be clearly related to said term. This means having the term ‘knitted socks for sale’ placed in key locations throughout the website, as well as meeting many dozens of other metrics Google judges the quality of a website by, including loading speed, how well it displays on mobile, and more.

So where does the blog come into all this?

Well, let’s say you’ve got an online shop, and you sell several hundred different products. You’d be hard-pushed to get the name of every product you have onto your home page, without it looking cluttered and spam-tastic.

Instead, you ought to have ‘product pages’ set up on your site for specific products. For example, if you sell knitted socks, you’d create a product page for each variant of sock you sell, such as ‘pea-green knitted socks’, ‘yellow knitted socks’, and ‘knee-high stripy knitted socks’. Each page would contain the name of the description product in question as the keyword, and be optimised for it, so as to increase the odds of your products appearing in Google when people search for socks to purchase.

Now, rather than optimistically hammering ‘SOCKS’ into the search engine, people often search with more specific intentions. In the winter, for example, a lot of people will be searching for things like ‘warm woolly socks for winter’. You likely won’t have a product page optimised for this key-phrase, however. That’s where the blog comes in at last!

Why you should learn how to write a business blog

Learning how to write a business blog means you can cast a very wide net across Google, drawing in all kinds of new potential customers who might otherwise have never come across your business. To use the key-phrase above as an example, you could write an article on your blog called something like ‘A review of the best warm woolly socks for winter’, or something to that effect. If you optimise the article correctly—that is, ensuring you meet all of Google’s quality metrics, and have the key-phrase mentioned enough times in the article—your new blog post will appear on Google whenever people search for ‘warm woolly socks for winter’, and people will be guided to your website. And a percentage of those will turn into new customers!

Over time, with enough blog articles on your site, you should notice your average monthly visits to your business website ticking up. SEO isn’t a quick process, nor is building a blog (unless you have a lot of writers on hand!).

how to find business blog ideas 2021

How to create a business blog

If you want to create a successful business blog, you need to write a mixture of articles. Some you write will be more sales-focussed, such as ‘Ten Reasons to Buy Woolly Winter Socks’, while others will be more editorially-focussed, with titles that aren’t concerned with convincing the reader to buy anything at all, such as ‘The Illustrious History of the Humble Sock’.

The latter may seem a little pointless at first. After all, you’re trying to sell woolly socks, not spin a yarn (hehey!). However, the internet is a very large and very peculiar place, and any informative content you create on your site will draw in new readers. These readers—sock historians, in this case—may not buy anything from your website. That doesn’t mean they’re not useful, however.

How to kowtow to Google

Google’s metrics—the metrics by which it judges which websites are worthy of the hallowed first page of its search results—are based around a website’s popularity. If you are drawing in huge numbers of readers with excellent editorial content about things like ‘The Amazing Benefits of Wearing Two Pairs of Socks at Once’, Google will take note of your site’s newfound popularity with the masses, and your site’s ranking on Google will be boosted as a result.

Factors Google considers include the amount of time readers spend on any given page of your website, and how many pages they click on before they get bored and look elsewhere. If you can keep readers on your website with interesting articles, even ones that aren’t trying to sell anything at all, the rest of your site will be increasingly likely to appear highly in Google’s listings as a result. It’s exposure, my friends.

How to find business blog ideas for 2021

There’s a nifty little tool used by all and sundry in the SEO biz: it’s called Keyword Planner, and it’s a tool created by Google themselves. To find great ideas for your business blog in 2021, it’s a simple matter of creating an account with Keyword Planner, then logging in and bashing a few choice phrases relating to your business into the search bar. From there, you can view the number of people in each country around the globe who are searching for specific phrases every month.

Once you’ve made a note of the most popular phrases people are searching for that relate to your business, you’ve got the makings of a content plan! For each key-phrase you decide you want to target, try to think of a fun and engaging article idea, whether it’s editorially-focussed or sales-focussed; ideally you want a good spread of each.

From there, it’s a simple matter of writing the articles!

Don't stress about your business blog

And if that sounds like too much hassle, and you’d much prefer somebody else did the hard work so you can sit back and soak up those sweet new sales? Well, hello there. We’re Suki Marketing. Pleased to meet you.

Let’s jump on a call and see if we make a great match.

Looking for a little help? Let's chat.

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