If you want to have a strong SEO regime, good content is just part and parcel of the deal. With social media dictating much of the recent SEO practices, a company blog is a great way to direct traffic towards your site. The come for the blog, and stay for business… it’s brilliant!
In theory.
Most businesses start blogs with the best of intentions… but then things go horribly wrong, and the blog that was set up with so much hope becomes a dark, musty corner of the site no one wants to visit. Rather than the big ‘traffic generator’ you expected it to be, your blog ends up becoming dead weight. So how can that be prevent? Here are a few ideas:
Define what you’re doing:
Why is this blog being made? Are you acting on a whim, or was this the result of a serious business discussion? Whatever the reason, make sure that your blog is a project that you and your coworkers are willing to put time and effort in. A flimsy halfhearted blogs is not just useless… it is negative marketing.
Now… who posts on this blog? If you’ve got just one unexperienced employs typing out blog posts on minimal pay, you’ve got a problem. First decide, what this blog it about, what’s it like? Is it casual and fun, impersonal and informative, or just plain cute? Once you’ve got that down, you can go about designing posts for it in several ways…
You could hire a professional blogger to hunt down relevant, current topics and post on the blog on behalf of your company,
You could make the blog an open forum and have everyone on the company post whatever they find interesting or worth sharing,
You could even ask clients who have worked with you or experts from outside your company to take out some time and pitch in a guest post.
If you make the blog ‘open to all’, it may be a good idea to appoint one person to monitor and approve all the content that gets posted, to maintain a standard and a general tone.
Quit with the wordiness:
Why just words? Get into the blogging community and learn all the great and creative ways people have used this space to send out their message. Start with articles, but then move on to other forms of communication, like videos, pictorials and Q&A sessions between the author and someone related to your work who people would like to hear from.
Your readers should feel that the blog is their space, and is being worked at keeping what they would like to see in mind. If you work at a blog thinking ‘SEO SEO SEO’ you’re going to have a crappy blog, just like a TV show produced thinking ‘ratings ratings ratings…’ is a crappy TV show.
Blogging for business is a great SEO practice, just remember don’t fool around, but do have fun with it!
