Everyone seems to be blogging at the moment, writes Natalka Antoniuk, Marketing Manager, Digital Storm.

The question is, does your business need a blog? And how often should you update it? What should you even blog about?

We’ll answer these questions and more in this month’s edition of Digital Matters.

Digital Storm always recommends putting a blog on your businesses website.

It’s a great way to keep your customers updated, but did you know that regularly updating your site with fresh content can also help you find a new customer base.

Some of your go-to blogs are probably run by a business.

Eventbrite, G2 and HubSpot are great examples.

Between them, they’ve created thousands of resources that help people like you develop new skills.

That’s what your business blog should aim to do.

Writing content and updating your blog is a cost-effective way of offering more value to your customers.

In doing so, you build stronger relationships, increase brand awareness and find new prospects.

Why your customers love your business blog

Your business blog should provide as much information as possible to your existing and future customers.

Whether it’s how to get the most out of your product or service, or just information regarding your industry.

Your blog isn’t an opportunity to sell your products.

In most cases, readers will switch off when they feel like you’re pitching your products.

Instead, you should focus on delivering valuable information that you know your customers will benefit from.

Looking at businesses like The Colour Works as an example, you should write content that solves your customers’ problems.

Yes, you could hire business consultants to provide virtual training.

However, if it was your team that needed coaching, would you try to work on it yourself first?

The Colour Works use their business blog to help people improve their leadership skills, develop team working abilities and create a vibrant working environment.

That’s the secret to creating a winning blogging strategy that builds loyal, returning customers as well as finding new leads and growing your business.

Forget your product or service for a second, think about how you can add value.

Why search engines love your business blog

It seems counterproductive now, doesn’t it?

Why would any business want to invest time into telling people how to solve their problems without them?

Marketing is supposed to increase sales, not turn them away.

Search engines reward websites that keep their content fresh as it shows you have a good grasp on your industry.

Frequently publishing new content that users engage with demonstrates trustworthiness, authority and knowledge – all of which are factors that search engines look for when indexing and ranking your website.

This is why having a business blog that helps your potential customers is a surefire method of getting those individuals onto your website.

Another thing worth noting is how keyword targeting has developed over the years.

By now, we all know that keyword stuffing is a bad idea.

However, SEO strategies have evolved and search engines now look at your overall site to find out whether you are a knowledgeable, authoritative voice on a subject before deciding whether or not to rank you on the results pages.

That means, if you keep updating your business blog with content that relates to your industry, product or service, you will keep feeding information into the search engine’s algorithm to help them pinpoint exactly where to rank you.

How to manage your business blog

Now that you know the benefits of creating content for your business blog, you’ve probably got a lot of questions.

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about blogging, but if there’s anything left unanswered feel free to get in touch.

How often should you update your blog?

If time and resources weren’t a factor, we would recommend updating your blog as often as you can.

The more content you produce, the more value you are adding to your customers and the more pages search engines are indexing.

Realistically, you should aim to produce a new blog post once every other week.

This gives you plenty of time to write, edit and publish new blog posts as well as promoting them on social media.

With that being said, don’t rush to create as much content as you can on a quiet afternoon.

Think quality over quantity – one long form piece of content that covers 20+ keywords could deliver massive search exposure and bring a lot of organic traffic to your site.

A content strategy like this does require time.

If your in-house marketing team is dealing with other projects you may want to consider hiring an agency to produce and publish content for you.

This also means that they’ll be able to optimise your blog posts for SEO, giving you a better chance of ranking.

How long should your blog posts be?

Search engines prefer longer content, but in some cases, this isn’t necessary.

Think about your customers – do they want a 2,000+ word guide to help them solve their problem or can you summarise it nicely in 800 words?

Long form content has been on the rise over recent years and is viewed as being far better for SEO.

Simply put, the longer your article or blog post the more keywords you can target.

Search engines appreciate this level of authority on a given topic.

They are more likely to rank your content based on your proven knowledge.

Whenever we create new blog posts, we look at the websites already ranking for that topic and try to match or exceed their word count.

This is a great strategy because we know search engines are looking for blog posts of that length and we also know that people are reading blog posts that length.

What should I blog about?

As we mentioned before, your blog isn’t an opportunity to sell your products.

You should write blogs that add value and prove you are an expert in your field.

A packing and freight company might write about the benefits of air freight compared with land freight or offer advice to help people fill out their documentation.

A good way to find topics is to do some keyword research.

Look at recommended searches or the ‘people also searched’ section on the search engine results pages.

Eventually, you’ll have built up a list of content ideas that you know people are already keen to find the answer for.

Have you got the time to invest in your business blog?

Time is a huge factor when it comes to managing a business blog.

Every post can take a few hours from beginning to end, is that time that you have to spend?

It’s important to keep updating your website. Improving your ranking in search engines will help people find you.

It’s also important to offer existing customers more value as it keeps them coming back.

Yet, we see more abandoned business blogs than we do successful ones.

The reason for this is that small business owners just don’t have the time they need to invest in it.

If you’re worried that you don’t have enough time, consider splitting the workload across your team.

Perhaps everyone could produce one blog post a month and your role could be to edit and publish each piece of content.

Your other option is to bring an agency on board to manage your business blog.

That way, you know you are getting optimised content published according to your schedule and you can put that project to the back of your mind.

If you have any questions regarding your business blog or want to find out more about bringing an agency in to manage your content, just give us a call at Digital Storm.