Content Creation – Blogging for Business
As the SEOer at YCD, one of the main recommendations I make to clients is to keep the content fresh on their websites, with regular blog posting being a great way to do this. One of the problems for people is that they may not know where to start with blogging for their business so we thought we would put together a little guide to help you get your content creation underway.
Write about What You Know
The content you write about for your business blog should be relevant to the business and the users who will be visiting your website. If you know your business and know your customers then you are already at a good starting point. There can be a variety of categories which your content can fall into:
News About Your Business
- Are you working on an exciting project?
- Does your business have an anniversary or special event coming up?
- Do you have a new employee or employees?
- Do you have any offers on your products or services coming up?
- Have you had any great reviews about your services?
Information Relevant to Your Business
We like to call this kind of information expert advice, this type of content is a great way to show people that you and your team are knowledgeable about what you do:
- Industry News
- Top tips/Guides/Advice Articles
- Information about your latest projects or products
- Staff Profiles
- Answering Customer Questions
Content that Connects
Plan, Plan, Plan
Create a content plan for your blogs. While this can be flexible to allow for emerging news and information, it will give you something to get you started so you don’t have to wait for inspiration to strike!
When coming up with your plan you should do some research for holidays, awareness day/weeks/months or events in your area that will be relevant for your business to write about and help you come up with ideas for your content creation.
In general it’s good to plan around 6 months of posts in advance, while this might be seen as time consuming it’s actually a time saver in the long term and help you stay consistent with your posting.
Aim For Optimised Lengths
From an SEO perspective longer blog posts provide better results, while it can sometimes be difficult to create a lengthy post depending on the topic, we would always recommend that your posts are at least over 200 words. We aren’t saying post irrelevant content to get your word count up though!
A tip for ensuring your content is long enough is to plan out your topic:
1. Introduction – let your readers know what you are going to be writing about in the post
2. Content – split your content logically, for example if it’s a how to guide this will usually be fairly straightforward as it is tell people how to perform an action it can be broken into steps. If its a news round-up try to have at least 3 pieces of news to post about, use the topics of the news as your split points.
3. Conclusion – round-up your post and invite your users to do do something i.e book a service, buy a product, contact the business.
Help Your Readers Engage
Using visual materials within your blog will help to hold a users attention. This could be in the form of video, info-graphics, charts or images relevant to your subject. Posts that have images in their content get 94% more views than those that don’t. And as we might have mentioned once or twice before, video content is predicted to make up 80% of website traffic.
Find Some Guest Contributors
Finding some guest contributors for you blog can be great for saving you some time and for adding a fresh perspective to your blog. You could ask an industry expert to guest post, if you sell products you could ask there creators to talk about them or if you support a local cause or community project you might ask them for a contribution.
Also remember if you aren’t confident with the written word there are other types of content creation that you can try such as video and audio content…watch this space for more on those!
If you would like to chat to us about freshening up your website content, please get in touch