Category — Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Blogs have a lot of benefits: they help with search engines (and rankings), they show your company’s personality, and they encourage customer participation. These are things a company, regardless of how long they’ve been in business, can capitalize on.

However, having a company blog may not be the best solution for you. There are many things to consider before you start a company blog, but here are three highlights:

Technology: How are you going to host the site and perform site maintenance? You need to decide if you can afford to host it yourself and if you have the technical skill-set at your company to handle the set-up and maintenance? There are different blogging solutions that you can take advantage of, based on your technical skill set: free, developer-hosted platforms, premium developer-hosted platforms, stand-alone platforms.

Time for blogging: How much time can you, or someone at your company devote to this? Once you start blogging, you should make sure you post something regularly: at least once a week. Can you devote the time to this? You need to make consistent posting a priority, not an option.

Relationship management: How do you plan to manage what is said about your company? You’re building online relationships with your customers but if there is a bad experience you need to be able to manage it – do you have the systems in place to do so? Are you willing to have the good and the bad displayed on the web? Keep in mind, it’s probably already out there – you just don’t know about it. If you have an online presence, you have more control over negative comments, and can capitalize on positive comments.

Starting a blog can be a great step for your company and can really help you start social branding. It’s an easy first step into social media marketing. Don’t have time to start your blog or need help with your social strategy? Contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing and we can help you get started right away.

As a small business, you may not be able to keep up with the national companies online advertising budgets, however, you know that for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes, new content for your website is a must. If you have already started a company blog, you may be asking yourself, what do I do next? The next step you need to take is to start driving traffic to it. You can take the relevant content you’re creating and use it to help keep current customers and drive new business. So, here are a few steps you can take to start driving more traffic to your website using your new, or existing, company blog.

1. Inform people that you have a blog. Tell your current customers, leads, friends, and family that you have a company blog. Make sure all of your employees tell their friends and families about the blog as well. You can put together a quick email to friends and family that all employees can send out – and send an email to your current leads and customers. Have all employees add a line to their signature line asking people to check out and subscribe your blog. Make sure you have a feed for your blog. Your blog should have a built-in ability to create a feed, or you can use Feedburner or another similar service that offers tracking statistics.
2. Submit your blog to pinging services. There are great services out there like Ping-O-Matic, Pingoat, Google Ping and My Yahoo that you can inform that you’ve written a new post. They’ll send their spiders to go and look at your blog and include in into their blog results. This is very necessary if you have your blog for SEO purposes.
3. Become active in the blogosphere. Start reading and commenting on relevant blogs you find that may have readers interested in your content. This provides two great results. The biggest reason you want to do this, however, is to provide that blog’s readers another place to get information on a relevant topic. You also may get a link to your site, which can be useful for SEO purposes. There are many times a blog may not pass the “link juice” from your link… but you will still get traffic.

In order to maintain traffic to your site and increase it, you need to keep blogging regularly. Whether your blogs are daily, bi-weekly, or weekly, you need to make sure your readers have something new to come back to. By blogging consistently and trying some of these tips to increase your traffic, you will see results… an increase in traffic!

If you need more help in driving traffic to your blog, contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We specialize in marketing solutions for small businesses.