Effective Blogging for Small Businesses

September 27, 2018ScooterMediaPublic Relations

Many websites now include a blogging feature for organizations to provide relevant content to their industry. From who should contribute to the blog, to what topics to cover and how blogs can boost your bottom line — if you’re unsure of where or how to start, check out our blogging guide for small businesses below.

Where to Start

Start by doing some keyword research – look at what popular keywords people are using to find information about your industry. These are important to know as you create content that incorporates those keywords into your article title and blog post – leveraging popular keywords will boost your blog’s visibility. Topics to write about can include top customer questions, writing about topics that show your expertise in your field, roundups of industry news, and even inviting guest contributors to discuss related businesses or organizations. Don’t be afraid to show your fun side, too. A financial services client recently published a blog on their team’s favorite shops around town to grab coffee with a client and it has outperformed other recent content in popularity and discussion.

Be sure to update your blog regularly. You obviously have a small business to run, but consistently updating your page with new content via a blog is a great way to make your site favorable among search engines constantly shifting ratings for websites.

Get an Outside Perspective

As the old saying goes, “You can’t read the label from inside the jar.” Sometimes an outside perspective can be what you need to create content relevant to what prospective clients are looking for. An affordable way to do this is by polling current and prospective customers, as well as colleagues and industry peers, to ask what type of content they’d find beneficial. If your budget allows, consider bringing on a partner to help with content marketing/blogging. One obvious benefit is taking the task off of a small business owner’s plate (which is full of many tasks), but an often under-appreciated benefit is the outside perspective a writer can bring.

Case Study: Ourselves

After re-launching the company blog last year to coincide with the agency’s fifth anniversary, we placed a renewed focus on a digital strategy to support our work and the business. Our team revamped our digital footprint in order to better serve current and potential clients and positioned the agency as a thought leader in the areas of public relations and social media.

The team executed a plan to create relevant content made up of evergreen and timely/trending topics, as well as content that positioned the company as a leader in our field. We’ve seen a robust return on our investment, including a 64 percent increase in page views over the last year and an 80 percent increase in new viewers to the site. The campaign had a dramatic impact on our organic search rankings – more than 3,300 users found our content via organic search, and our rankings increased among major keywords for our industry. Our original content generated new business leads via the website, including a Fortune 100 company that reported finding our agency via Google search. They reached out to our small business due to the content they read on our site.