You’ll probably have heard that it’s a good idea to have a blog on your website.
But are you clear about why? If not, then follow me.
Many people make the mistake of thinking of their blog is a place to dump company news: award wins, new starts, work anniversaries etc. But that’s not really how it should be used.
Yes, it’s good to include these stories somewhere as part of the rich tapestry of information you’re weaving about yourself and your business, but it’s underusing your blog’s potential for driving people to your business organically, ie without you having to pay for advertising.
And you need to drive people to your website somehow if you want to be found online, otherwise, what’s the point of having it?
So how does that work?
Well, like it or not, we’re all a slave to search engines if we want to get our websites found. Much of the detail about what ticks a box in Google’s eyes is a mystery, but much of it isn’t. In fact, it’s common sense.
Generally speaking, Google wants to deliver the most accurate results possible to a searcher’s query. That’s what makes its audience happy. So if you can help it deliver those accurate results, it will favour your website more highly than anyone else’s, because you’re helping it to do its job.
How do you do that?
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Useful content
By writing posts that answer your target audience’s questions.
If you do this regularly and consistently, you’ll gradually convince it that you’re an accurate source of information on the topic of, say financial advice, and that will further boost your rankings for search terms associated with financial advice.
Hopefully you can now see why a post on ‘How do I retire at 55?’ is far more likely to draw potential clients into your ecosystem than ‘Barney turns 5’. I mean, no offence to the office dog, but you’d have to be a real Barney fan to want to search for the answer for this. (And even then, this could get very weird).
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Original content
You can’t fake it.
It may be tempting to copy and paste templated content that’s been provided on mass, but Google is wise to this and will penalise sites that repost content that already appears elsewhere on the internet.
Original, bespoke content is what it’s looking for, preferably ‘long-form’ content (pieces that are at least 500 words) and content that’s in-depth, so it’s meeting the point about accuracy above.
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