Blog Content to Bring Visitors to Your Website
If you’ve recently set up a business online you may have heard that your blog content can help to increase the amount of visitors to your website, but do you understand just how it works? Once you do you’ll be able to make the most of your blog to bring prospective customers to your door.
First things first – if you don’t have any blog content, or enough of it, your blog can’t help you! Of course, blog content needs writing. If you’re a bit of a wordsmith yourself and you have the time, you’ll probably enjoy writing your own blog content. If not, you can always hire a blog service like ours to do it for you.
If you’re doing the blog writing yourself the next thing you need to do is decide what type of content you will display on your blog. For many, it will be a mixture of promotional blog posts and ones that are informative and helpful to site visitors. A few personal opinion posts are okay too – as long as they relate to your industry or products.
You’ll need to generate some ideas for blog posts to get things going. Can you offer ‘care tips’ or ‘how to’ information that is relevant to your products? If you’re a service orientated business perhaps you can write posts about relevant situations your prospective customers might be in and how your services could assist them. A few posts that provide prospective customers with information that’s free and likely to be useful to some of them won’t go astray either.
So just how will your blog content bring new visitors to your website? This is how it works – when someone is searching the Internet for something, be it information or a product or service, they type a word or phrase into the search box. If that word or phrase is included in your blog content, there’s a chance they’ll find your website.
How likely they are to find your site before others will depend on how close to the top of the organic search results your page is listed for the words they’ve searched. The words people use to search are referred to as ‘keywords’.
For some keywords and phrases, the number of websites actively trying to rank well for those words by including them in their website content might make it almost impossible that a searcher will find a blog post you’ve created that contains them. For less popular keywords and phrases however, you might find that your site comes up within the first few listings.
Okay, you probably want to know how to use keywords that will result in visitors finding your website. There are two approaches to this. The first approach is to simply ignore the subject of keywords altogether and write fabulous and site relevant blog content that will interest prospective customers who land on your site. What will happen if you do that is that keywords and phrases you may never have thought of are likely to occur naturally in your blog content.
The second approach is to choose appropriate keywords for your blog content and write your blog posts accordingly. To do this you’d need to research the popularity of keywords and find out what the level of competition is like for keywords and phrases that relate to your business. This can be done using the Google Keyword Tool External.
You’ll discover that the most popular terms are usually the most competitive. One strategy that works well for many blog writers is to choose ‘long tail keywords’ – they’re longer phrases that less people search. Because they don’t generate a huge amount of traffic, site owners are less inclined to intentionally use them in their content, and that can mean that using them in your blog content results in your post coming up in the first few listings when searchers use that term.
Either of the approaches described can work well – provided you add a good amount of content to your blog. You don’t have to do this all at once. If you write just a couple of blog posts every week, you’ll be slowly but surely building your blog content and increasing the ways in which prospective customers could stumble across your website.
