Welcome to the second half of 2018! It's crazy how quick time flies! Here's a quick recap on the business topics we cover on the blog from January till the end of June. If you missed anything important, you can always go back and have a read. To avoid missing anything from now on, subscribe to get an email every time a new blog post is published.
January - Starting a business, essential aspects
February - Building customer relationships
March - Goal setting, motivation and organisation tips
April - Business transitions - value, price, time away
May - Social Media - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
June - Social Media - Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, IGTV, Google+
I'd really love to share with you what the team and I achieved over this period, so here's a 1-minute video summarising MBC's efforts and proudest moments in the past 6 months.
In May we also spoke about the 5 different components (plus time and consistency) that will grow your business and increase the sales through your website. These were the web design, the web copy, the content, the social media engagement and the SEO. And since we spent two months discussing valuable social media channels and techniques for business, it's now time to focus on the SEO.
If you are going to run a successful business online you need to understand one thing. SEO is not magic and it's not a stand alone activity. To optimise your website you need to pay a lot of attention to your content and spend many hours engaging on social media. Furthermore, you need to build authority backlinks, index your pages and so much more. But let's take it step by step. Today we will concentrate on the importance of blogging for achieving good SEO results.
Why is Blogging Essential for SEO
Fresh Content
One of the components that give you the most points in search engine ranking algorithms is how often you update the content on your website. Obviously, you can't update your "About" page every other week, so the next best option is starting a blog. The recommended frequency of posting new content to your website is at least once a week. Those who do it more frequently get better results much quicker. In addition to that, you can easily make your web pages keyword rich, without abusing Google keyword density regulations and avoid penalties.
Don't think you are great at writing? You can outsource or start a vlog! Videos are more popular than written content, drive more traffic and improve your SEO insanely.
Link building
There's a limited amount of quality external links and backlinks you can get just on the main pages of your website, unless you are a major organisation, a directory or free online service that everyone wants to use. The solution for the rest of us is to include links to high authority websites in our blog posts and write valuable content that others would like to link to. A great way to get some good backlinks is guest blogging. Connect with established bloggers or organisations in a niche similar to yours and offer to write a blog post for their platform free of charge in exchange for a backlink. Do that several times on popular websites and you will see the difference it brings to your SEO.
Build more visual content
Images on social media have proven to drive more engagement than status updates. In blogging terms, articles whose content is broken down by the insertion of images are read and shared more often. There's another reason to include quality pictures in your blog posts. This way you can take full advantage of Pinterest, which is built around creative images and useful information for the future.
Read more about Getting More Traffic to Your Website with Pinterest
One of the best online tools to create quality images that get a lot of repins and engagement on other social media channels is Canva. They have templates for almost any network - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. With Canva you can even create some of your print marketing materials like brochures, flyers, business cards and many more.
Brand Popularity
Google will rank you higher if your website is visited by many people and those people engage in some way with your pages. The engagement that counts the most is social shares. If you write useful, interesting and entertaining content, people will share it often and that means your SEO ranking points will multiply.
So as you can see blogging is an essential part of your SEO strategy. You may get quick results by touching up some technical details on the backend of your website, but your position on the first page of Google won't last longer. Your pages will soon be pushed down by a new entry that has used the same set of keywords and got more shares. You see how relevant and fresh content really matters in your ranking?
Have you been turning a blind eye to blogging because you thought perhaps is not that important to your business success? Well, if you've reached these last lines, maybe the article you just read provoked you to think otherwise. Or at least I hope it did.
Don't stress too much about how you are going to make this blogging think work. The hardest step is always the first one. So just begin.
