Blogging for Business [Development]

To blog or not to blog? The immortal words of one William Shakespeare – well, not quite.

Many people ask what it takes to get listed higher in the search engines. It is a simple response, “Google looks for 3 things: Content, Links to your website, and Updates. Google is looking for the authority for each search.” Accomplishing this task is not always that easy, but a blog can actually do all three at once.

A blog, like this one, gives the owner of the website a reason to generate content. That content has to be specific, just talking about everything and anything does not help your search engine ranking. If you talk about your business, how you help your clients, industry trends, new technologies that relate to your business you till use numerous keywords that describe your business. For example, we talk about construction, brand marketing, A/E/C (Architecture/Engineering/Construction), website design, web marketing, social media, construction marketing, and graphic design. All of those keywords are great fodder for the search engines that will attract prospects to my website.

Secondly, great blog posts not only bring people to your website via the search engines, they also make people want to share your great content. People sharing your blog via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and even message boards create links to your website. Search engines see links to your website as respect therefore ranking your website as more of an authority because of these links.

The final of the three is more obvious – Updates. Many people simply do not know what to update on their website even though Google loves updates. To be the authority, you need to have updates and a blog gives you an easy way to update your website and a reason for people visit your website again. Also, these updates position you as the expert in your industry. The worst thing you can do with a blog is not use it. Prospects hate going to a website and seeing cobwebs on the blog where the last post says, “Hello world” and is 1-5 years old. This tells your prospects that you’re obviously too busy to update your blog and too busy to help me.

You might ask, “Your blog title is Blogging for Business, so why are you talking about scoring higher in search engine rankings?” That’s simple, the more traffic you bring to your website, the more prospects you should generate. If that is not true, you’re either bringing the wrong traffic to your website or your website needs to be retooled to sell. We can help with either of those and if we do, then this blog generated business for our company. See, blogging can bring your business.

Want more proof? To give you a few first hand experiences, a large subcontractor association contacted us last year about putting together marketing materials for their 250 members to use as well as a one-day marketing workshop for their upcoming conference. Earlier this year, a huge international construction company with over 15 locations contacted us about a brand positioning project and when we asked how they found us, they said one of their communication managers regularly reads our blog. (In the end, it wasn’t the right project for us so we passed, but it still shows the power of blogging.) We also have several small instances of contractors and sub-contractors contacting us about redeveloping their brand and website because they found our website and/or blog via Google by searching something like “construction websites”, which we normally rank #1. These construction companies are scattered throughout the country and knocking on their doors is not nearly as cost efficient as blogging and almost impossible.

So, are you going to blog now?