The Importance of a Blog on Your Website

The weblog (“blog” if you’re hip) sometimes gets a bad rep. It’s often associated with websites like tumblr, Myspace, or other seemingly “teenage” brands. Admittedly, some users write a blog as a form of socially interactive journaling, like an online diary. But a blog can also be used by serious businesses to increase Google SERP ratings and boost customer conversions.

Here, we’ll go over what a good blog post should look like, how to write one, and how it affects your company’s performance on search engines. The goal, as always, is to boost your search engine optimization (SEO) so that you can get your business in front of more people more of the time.

Separating the Wheat From the Chaff: What a Good Blog Post Should Look Like

The internet is a treasure trove of advice on the best ways to write a blog post, but many people either ignore the advice or fail to vet what they’re told by others. In reality, your blog should look different than another company’s in a different field. The important factor is to ensure that the writing you present on your blog page is professional, well-structured, grammatically correct, and reflects the kind of brand personality you want to display to your customers.

For example, most companies should not have high-school-style blog posts with no capital letters. It looks too… well, high-school. Some of the important telltale signs of a good blog post are:

• The blog post’s topic is highly relevant to your business/industry.
• The title is catchy and the layout conforms to standard best practices for writing for the web.
• Text is broken up by white space, bullet points, and other techniques that help you avoid page-long chunks of exposition.
• The post makes use of headers and subheaders that provide a roadmap to the reader.

Additionally, try to treat your website’s blog as just another one of your webpages. This one just happens to be updated consistently, at least once or twice per week. Don’t fall into the trap of giving your blog a separate feel than your other webpages. Consistency in colors, design, use of media likes pictures or gifs, etc. is key.

How to Write the Perfect Blog Post

First, dispense with the idea of perfection. You’re not trying to write the perfect blog post so much as you’re trying to write a post that works. What does it mean for a blog post to “work”? Simply put, it means that the post elicits the desired action in the reader. Desired actions are as unique as companies, but there are common steps every business will want online readers to take, such as:

• click a link to the online store page
• commenting, “liking,” or sharing the blog post
• making a purchase
• signing up for a newsletter
• calling or emailing the business

If the blog post is truly effective, it will result in an increase in desired actions among the population of readers. So, that begs the question: how do you write a blog post that works?

While everyone’s writing is different, there are a few key steps you should take to ensure that your blog post is effective. For example, select a topic that you believe your audience will engage with. You can discern this by doing keyword research on the target audience, through a host of online tools such as SEMrush, and designing a content strategy that includes many of those keyword topics.

Remember: some will say a blog post is another form of SEO article. It’s another tool to put in your arsenal as a way to have consistently updated material. Plus, blogs can engender discussion if your business decides to allow comments. A high rate of comments can signal that your post resonated with many people, possibly leading to new customers or increased purchases from your current customers.

How Blog Posts Affect Search Engines

There are many ways that having a blog can boost your site’s performance on search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, it can make you rank higher on Google. HostGator provides several reasons that this is true, but we’ve taken the best ones for this article.

1. Regular blog updates keep your site current instead of outdated.
2. Blogs retain attention and on-site time for users, as they can click on different topics.
3. Blogs provide ways to internally link to some of your other pages (such as shops or law firm practice areas), boosting those pages’ traffic and increasing your Google ranking.
4. Updating your blog gives you real-time information on your audience’s likes/dislikes/preferred content or topics.

In truth, it’s best to let the professionals handle your blog posts for you. With a professional SEO writing company, you can rest assured that your weekly blog posts are written correctly, in the right voice, with the right tone, and with an eye toward best SEO practices.