Does having a company blog make a difference?

If we are considering a company blog we are probably doing it for one of two reasons – we want to build the image of our company as specialists in a particular field or we are keen to strongly develop the visibility of the site through SEO efforts.

These two goals can, of course, be combined, and in the vast majority of cases they are. Companies create expert content and want it to be seen by everyone potentially interested in their products and services. And how to achieve this? The most effective and cheapest way is through SEO. 

What companies should create content for a blog?

All those who care about increasing their site’s visibility for a large number of phrases, not only generic but also long tail. As we know, in order to position a keyword, it must be found on a given page. In order for it to be on the page in a user-friendly way for the website user, it must appear within some content. 

Creating blog posts is the easiest way to put a lot of content on a site. One article of about 5,000 characters can really accommodate a lot of keywords related to our business, be it generic, branded or long tail. 

The blog post can be a great way to get a lot of content out there.

How to select content topics for a blog?

Anyone who plans to build widely developed blog content should first create a proper Content Plan. The easiest starting point for its creation is to first consider what topics are most strongly related to our services and list them along with the keywords we think best describe them. 

With the basis for building a Content Plan already in place, it’s a good idea to make use of tools – here, for example, Senuto, SEMrush, SurferSEO or even the free Keywords Planner in Google AdWords come to our aid. Within each of these tools (each in a slightly different way, of course), we enter the topics and keywords we have prepared to test their potential and review additional suggestions. Once we’ve made a selection of topics, assigned the right phrases with the highest possible potential, we can move on to dissecting the Content Plan over time. 

How often to publish content on a blog?

Frequency of publication depends, of course, largely on our capacity in terms of creating original content. However, in order for a blog to “live” and for Google’s robot to constantly visit it, it is worthwhile for new content to appear a minimum of 3-4 times a month. Regularity in blogging is very helpful in indexing our site. Google’s robot favors sites that evolve and develop. 

How should an ideal blog post look like?

The ideal blog post should be characterized by several very important elements:

– It should be long, so as to fully exploit the potential of the topic described. It is assumed that the optimal length of such content is about 5,000 characters with spaces.

– It should have an original title and description – these are especially important because they represent the user’s first contact with our website. Title should be up to 55 characters, while description should be up to 155 (more characters are not visible in search results, if the meta tags are longer than the indicated amounts they will be cut off, sometimes in the middle of a word or sentence). The title should contain the most important phrase for the subpage, and the description should contain the call to action. If the title and description fields are not completed Google will select random content for them that does not always make sense.

– It should have a well-structured text – the search engine robot works automatically by scanning our content. So we need to keep a structure that makes it easy for it to analyze the content. One of the most important elements are the H headings. They must be properly marked in the code. The structure of H headings begins with H1, and the higher the number, the less relevant the heading. In a traditional text structure, headings higher than H3 are rarely added.

The H1 header should always include the title of the article or page containing the most important keyword for it. So, if our article talks about living room lighting in the H1 header, the phrase “living room lighting” must appear. 

Further H headings can be used to mark mid-headings in the content – always remembering to include the phrase most relevant to the paragraph.

• It should have a lead text, which will be an abbreviated presentation of the main idea of our text. It is a good idea to include the most important keywords in the lead. Why? Because according to Google, what is realistically higher in the structure of the page is the most important.
• It should contain images and illustrations with completed alt attributes – each image added to the website has an “alt” attribute, which is a description, the name of the image displayed if the image is not displayed. Since Google’s robot does not read the content of images, it is necessary to “guide” it to the subject of the image by properly completing the alt attribute.
• Every article should have a friendly link – friendly links are a way of writing url addresses suitable for both the user and the search engine robot. The address should be short and consist of no more than 3 recesses and should not contain unnecessary parameters.
• In its content should appear links to other articles on the blog – internal linking in the content of articles is important in the context of SEO. With internal linking, we indicate to the search engine robot that the content on our site is consistent and interconnected. Internal linking aids the indexing of content on the site.

Benefits of running a business blog 

The primary and most important benefit of running a company blog is, of course, increasing the visibility of the site. The more keywords in various configurations appear on the page, the more Google will index them for us. 

As the keywords appearing in blog content are in most cases long tail phrases (long, elaborate, very precise) it is easier to position them, sometimes just by publishing content itself, without additional link acquisition. They are characterized in most cases by a small number of searches, but a fairly high conversion rate. 

So by expanding the content on an ongoing basis we can appear in the search engine for many phrases of this type, which will increase our visibility, which translates into traffic and then sales of products or services.

The second major benefit of blogging is building topical authority, which is a position of authority on a given topic in the eyes of a search engine robot. The more aspects related to a given topic we describe on our site, the more authority we will have for the Google robot, and this, as we know, translates into easier acquisition of high positions, no longer only for long tail phrases, but also for much more difficult, generic ones.

The second important benefit of blogging is to build topical authority, i.e. a position of authority in a given topic in the eyes of the search engine robot, and then the sale of products or services.

The third undoubted benefit, no longer strictly related to positioning, is building our image as specialists in a given topic in the eyes of a potential customer. If a person looking for a product or service has questions about it, the answers to which he or she will find on our site, he or she will definitely be more likely to take advantage of our offer.