Tag: engagement
This post is the second part of “Using Blogs for Small Business SEO”. Last week we established that blogging helps keep your website fresh. Google and the other search engines love fresh, new, unique and compelling content; uploading a blog post once a week (or more), gives the search engines exactly what they want.
So what’s the second reason blogs are brilliant for small business search engine optimisation? Keywords. If you are writing a blog post about your products or services, you will naturally include a number of keywords which are the terms prospects use to search with.
Not only will your blog posts contain your all important keywords, but they’ll also probably include a host of variations on these keywords – plurals and synonyms are almost as important as the original keyword in the first place. An addition to your keywords, you’ll be using keyphrases – these are often known as the ‘long tail’. These are longer phrases that people may use to locate what they are searching for on the web. An example of this search would be: “how can I clean paintbrushes without damaging them?”, this is a typical example of a longer search query that a searcher may enter into Google. If you have written a well rounded blog post on your easy to clean paint brushes, there is a good chance that you will match this long tail search term, and your blog post will rank high in the search engine results.
A well written blog post will be focused, with keywords naturally occurring in the title, headers and body section. There are many schools of thought on keyword use, but all agree that in order to rank for your desired keyphrases, you need to include them in certain aspects of your website copy. The recommended ratio of keyword to text is about 5-10%. Don’t go over 10% as this may appear like you are ‘keyword stuffing’; a very old technique which only serves to get your site penalised by the search engines.
Because your blog post will be focused on a specific area, this, combined with the fact that it is new and unique content, means that Google and the other search engines will rank your blog post higher in the search results for the keyterms used in that post than possibly static pages of your competitors. Getting people to your site via your blog is a great way to drive an increase in relevant traffic, and if you provide high quality content with strong call to actions, people will contact you/make a purchase/or whatever other result you are looking for.
If you’re still unsure whether a blog is right for your small business, call us on 023 8083 7271, and we’ll be more than happy to try and convince you! Or, if you know that a blog will help your small business website (which it will), get in touch and we can help create it for you.
Let us know of any other reasons why you think a blog makes a great tool for any small business – leave your comments below, we love reading them!
October 29, 2009
The first thing I ever tell my small business clients, no matter what marketing service they are using from SMEketing is “Get yourself a blog!”. Blogs are probably one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective marketing tools out there for small businesses today.
They have so many benefits, especially in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO). This weeks post will focus on just one of the benefits (come back next week for the next benefit):
Benefit Number 1: Google LOVES Fresh Content
Google, and the other search engines love fresh content; same as humans, we don’t want to read out of date content, and neither do the search engines (not that they actually ‘read’ the content, but they don’t want to present old content to searchers). Because of this, Google will prioritise fresh content over old content in their results. So imagine you have recently created a blog post all about the benefits of your product – such as your particular brand of easy clean paint brushes. When someone searches for ‘easy to clean paint brushes’ in Google, there’s a good chance that your blog post on your super easy to clean paint brushes will show up high in the search results. Your result is likely to be higher than some of your competitors who just have a product page featuring their brushes, that they’ve not updated in six or more months. In terms of search engine optimisation, you must remember that search engines don’t rank websites, they rank pages – and they love brand spanking new pages! Having a site with regularly updated content and regular new pages also means that overall your site gets more ‘trust’ from the search engines. So some of the benefit from the new content will roll over to other pages as well, even if they haven’t been updated in a while.
Another benefit of adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis is that the search engine bots will crawl your site on a more regular basis – meaning that any crucial updates you’ve made to your site/content will be refreshed in the search engine results a lot quicker. Have you ever wondered what the ‘cached’ link means when you look at search results in Google? Clicking on this will show you the last time Google crawled that web page – so you can see exactly what Google is seeing. If you have updated your website with some new product pages, Google will not know about it until the next time it comes to crawl your site. So if you hardly ever update your site, Google will be in the habbit of only crawling your site on a monthly (or so) basis. This means that none of your new product pages will appear in the search engines results during this month – not until Google crawls your site again. However, if you constantly add new content to your site, Google will get into the habbit of crawling your site a lot more often – the ideal crawl amount is daily, but realistically, weekly will do. Having your site crawled on a regular basis, means your brand new product pages will show up in the search engine results a lot quicker.
So we’ve established that the search engines love fresh new content. However, it can be difficult to continually add new content to your site - you don’t to be adding pointless pages to your site just for the sake of it – this is where blogs come in. Each time you add a new blog post, that creates new content and a new page on your site. Ensuring that you update your blog at least once a week means that the search engines will start to crawl your site on a regular basis and will start to prioritise your new pages (and pages in your site in general) in their results.
Come back next week for ‘Benefit Number 2′.
In the meantime, if you want any assistance creating a blog for your small business, please come and talk to us here at SMEketing. Not only can we create blogs for you, we can also write and optimise your blog posts! Click here to contact us.
October 20, 2009
You can’t miss the doom and gloom of the current economic climate. All businesses, large and small, must carefully spend their marketing budget. Gone are the days of frivolous spending. So I wanted to outline five cost effective ways of spending your small business marketing budget. With online marketing become more and more vital as part of a small business marketing plan, there are many ways which small businesses can promote their business and help drive leads.
1. Blogging: Setting up a blog can be completely free! Yes, we love anything free. But like most freebies, in order for it to be effective you need to plan it well and invest your time into it. Using free blog providers like Wordpress and Google Blogger are great ways of getting involved in the blogging world, without costing you a penny. There are so many different benefits of blogging, one of the biggest benefits is to your websites ranking in the search engines (aka Search Engine Optimisation - SEO): Google loves new and unique content. Blogging is a great way to constantly add new content to your site. Plus your posts will be tagged and full of relevant keyword. Blog well and others in your industry may link to you, increasing the number of valuable inbound links. For more on the benefits of blogging, read this post: Blogging – just for teenagers, or good for your small business?
2. Twitter: Again, another freebie! Twitter is great for promoting what you do and learning about latest industry trends. By joining the conversation and providing useful information, you will soon generate a loyal base of followers. Use Twitter to answer questions relevant to your industry, learn about new goings on, promote your product, events and news (but don’t be pushy). For more information on using Twitter to promote your small business, read these blog posts: Twitter: Small Business Success Stories – Will yours be one of them? and Guide to Getting Your Small Business Started on Twitter
3. Email Marketing: Email marketing can cost as little as 1p per recipient and £5 per mailshot (well, those are the rates for using a self managed SMEketing Email Marketing solution, but we like to think these are pretty competitive!). If you don’t have time to maintain a close working relationship with your customer base, email marketing is a great, cost effective way of keeping them updated with your latest news, products and offers. Email marketing can also be used as a lead generation tool. Send out well targeted mailshots to relevant recipients and you will find visits to your web site go up, and conversion rates increase. For more information on the benefits of email marketing read this blog post: Email Marketing for Small Businesses
4. Google AdWords: These unfortunately are not free (we wish!), but you completely control your budget. If you only have £10 a day to spend, that’s fine! Make sure you get the most from your budget by using relevant keywords, focused adverts with a strong call to action, and a well thought-through landing page. Google AdWords can be a great way of driving relevant traffic to your site, and the results are completely measurable. If something isn’t working, you know straight away. This is why AdWords are one of the most cost effective advertising mediums out there. Add Conversion Tracking to your adverts and you’ll be able to see exactly what ad’s are providing the highest conversion rate once visitors are on your site. Once you know that, you can direct your budget to keywords and adverts that are giving you the highest Return on Investment (ROI).
5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): You know I said Google AdWords weren’t free, well there is a way that you can get Google to promote your site FOR FREE! How? Improve your website’s ranking for relevant keywords, and Google will display your site in their search results – free of charge! But again, this is something that will take an investment in your time. Make sure your website is well designed – good navigation, lots of keyword rich content, no broken links, good use of anchor text in your links, etc… Once that is done, you need to boost the number of high quality inbound links. Go to Yahoo and type “linkdomain:yourcompany.com -site:yourcompany.com” to see the number of your inbound links. Do the same for your competitors and see how you compare. Next create a plan to increase the number of incoming links – sign up to relevant directories, promote your blog, create great content on your site that people want to link to. Links should be from high quality sites – link farms are NOT GOOD! The page giving you a link should have few other outgoing links on the same page, and the anchor text should be optimised to promote what you do, not necessarily your business name. An example of a good link to SMEketing would be: “SMEketing is a fantastic source for small business marketing advice and services.” The anchor text here tells Google that the link (www.SMEketing.com) is relevant to “small business marketing”. If the anchor text fell on the business name, it would just tell Google that “SMEketing” is relevant to www.SMEketing.com – which to be fair, it probably had figured out anyway!
Read here for more SEO tips: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid
If you want to learn more about any of the above marketing strategies, please get in touch. At SMEketing we’re experienced in all these marketing mediums and have seen first hand the benefits when small businesses employ such tactics.
July 1, 2009
I was sitting at my laptop last weekend brainstorming ideas for our small business marketing blog when I got a call from a friend of mine to see what I was up to.
When I told her that I was brainstorming ideas for my blog on a sunny Hampshire Saturday afternoon she thought I had gone mad!! She pretty much told that they are a waste of time, that they are for teenagers or for people that love to complain about the world. So it quickly came apparent to me that the subject of SMEketing’s first blog post should be about why every small business should be maintaining a blog.
So here it is…. 5 Reasons To Blog!
1 – Blogs are AMAZING for search engine optimisation purposes. You can use them to build links into your main site, search engine spyders crawl your blog and follow your links into your site so you get crawled more often. They are great for you site’s stats as you can use them to generate traffic via social bookmarking (and build more backlinks), if your content is interesting people will spend longer on your site so the search engines think you have valuable information and this will help improve search rankings.
2 – You can control your brand reputation through your blog so don’t be afraid to approve negative comments. It is better to have the negative comments about your business in your blog over anywhere on the net that you might not find out about until it has damaged your business. Often you can use the negative comments and turn it into a positive situation with a well planned and structured response.
3 – Share the love! Add social share icons into your blogs so your clients, employees and potential customers can share your information, services and products with the world!
4 – Blogging for small businesses is a brilliant opportunity for your employees to take an active role in promoting the company. Blogging should be done with a passion so sharing the responsibility keeps it fresh and ensures you don’t get burnt out. Share the task with a range of your employees and colleagues so they can deliver a new perspective and have time to be creative and capture their point!
5 – Remember that people buy your products and services, so give them a window into your operations so they get a feel for your style. This can help increase your chances of getting that next deal or closing the one already on the table.
I wish I could go more than 5 reasons, the rest will have to wait for another time. If you have any other reasons why you think blogging is great for small businesses, leave a comment below.
March 29, 2009
