An important reminder to all seasoned Marketing Managers about blogging.
Blogging is a powerful tool for any marketing team who wan’t to position their medium sized business as the “market leader” or “expert”. It allows you to showcase your expertise, build a community and even open up opportunities for PR. Whether you are a professional copywriter, a multi-skilled marketer or a business owner, using words to help the right people find you is crucial. In this article, we will be discussing the importance of blogging and search engine optimization (SEO) for marketing teams in medium sized businesses.
Blogging is a great way to showcase your expertise and share your knowledge with your audience. By writing blog posts on topics related to the industry, you can establish your brand as the expert it’s your field. This can help attract new customers and clients, and also give you a platform to grow your community. In addition to attracting new customers and clients, blog posts can also open up opportunities for PR. By writing high-quality, informative blog posts, you can attract the attention of journalists and bloggers who may want to feature your business in their publications or websites.
SEO is also an important aspect of blogging. SEO is the process of optimizing your website and blog posts for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. By optimizing your blog posts for SEO, you can make sure that your content is easily found by people who are searching for information related to your industry. This can help increase your website's visibility and attract more traffic to your website (and my gosh, as Marketers, don’t we all just love getting website traffic?).
Many people believe that shorter blogs are better because of short attention spans, but this is not always the case. (This is a really interesting point and something to pop on a post-it note above your screen every time that you start writing a blog.) When readers are searching for specific information, they are more likely to engage with and remember longer content that addresses their needs. This is why it's important to write in-depth blog posts that provide valuable information to your audience.
If the post-it note isn’t enough to inspire you to write long-form content, remember Google favours longer blog posts. Studies by HubSpot, The Drum, Yoast, and Moz all indicate that blog posts with a word count of 2,000 or more have a higher chance of ranking well on search engines. However, it's important to remember that quality should never be sacrificed for length. A long blog post that is poorly written and provides no value to the reader will not rank well on search engines (so if you are thinking of adding in random adjectives to boost the word count. Don’t.).
If you're new to long-form blogging, it might be unrealistic to aim for 2,000 words right away. Instead, try setting a goal of making 4 out of 5 blog posts around 950 words. This will help you develop the skill of writing meatier content and still meet Google's preferences.
Aside from length (because size doesn’t always matter) are a few other things you can do to help improve your SEO and make your blog posts more easily found by search engines.
One of the most important things you can do is to use keywords in your blog posts. Keywords are the words and phrases that people use when they are searching for information related to their industry. By including relevant keywords in your blog posts, you can make sure that your content is easily found by people who are searching for information related to your industry.
Another important aspect of SEO is link building. Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your website. When other websites link to your website, it tells search engines that your website is important and relevant. This can help increase your website's visibility and attract more traffic to your website. However, your inbox will most likely be flooded with “SEO companies” who can sell you 100 links for £50, under no circumstance should you buy those links without doing your research. These links are most likely on websites unrelated to your industry with low domain authority, remember that in digital marketing, as in life, if it seems too good to be true, it is.
So before you put “finger to keyboard” remember that blogging is an incredibly valuable tool for medium-sized businesses. It allows you to showcase your expertise, build a community, and even open up opportunities for PR. By optimizing your blog posts for SEO, you can make sure that your content is easily found by people who are searching for information related to your industry. So, don't be afraid to get a little wordy in your blogs. With a little practice and the right approach, you can create engaging, informative content that will help the right people find you.
