The need for a strong web presence for small businesses is becoming increasingly demanding. For your business to be seen by the right consumers, online marketing and branding come into play.
One of the best ways a small business can connect with consumers and build brand awareness is through blogging. By providing your target audience with high-quality, relevant content, you can drive traffic to your site, gain credibility within your industry and attract more potential leads.
This article will discuss the importance of blogging and how small businesses can make their blogs stand out from their competitors.
Why Is Small Business Blogging Important?
Blogging is a way for businesses to connect with their customers on a more personal level. Since brand awareness is such an important part of maintaining your credibility in the industry, blogging will allow you to engage with your consumers while adding value to their lives.
The way businesses market their brand has increasingly evolved. To gain a customer and develop customer loyalty, it takes more than just an advertisement to grab their attention.
All consumers gather information differently and blogging gives businesses a way to creatively develop their brand through a different medium.
Attracting customers to your site doesn’t always have to be backed by a sale, and blogging is a true testament to that.
Here are some of the benefits of small business blogging:
- It develops your brand as a leader in your industry.
- Brings in more leads
- It’s good for SEO and can help you rank higher on search engines
- Your business will gain more visibility online
- You can partner with other bloggers to promote your brand
- Blogging is another way for businesses to engage with their audience and gather feedback about their products or services
How Can You Stand Out From The Rest?
Now that we’ve briefly covered the benefits of small business blogging, let’s talk about the different strategies you can use to make your small business blog stand out so you can start reaping all the benefits.
1. Produce high-quality content
High-quality content is the most important element of every successful blog. If you want your small business blog to stand out from competitors in your industry, you need to try to create content that your readers will be impelled to choose over your competitors.
So, what can you do to make sure your content is high-quality? Well in simple terms, every post you publish on your blog should educate and inform readers without being overly filled with useless information.
Remember, you should be adding some sort of value to their lives. When they leave your blog, they should be leaving with some sort of takeaway.
Evergreen content is a great strategy in producing high-quality content that will continue to remain relevant long after it’s published. Think infographics, how-to guides, and tutorials.
When creating your content ask yourself, “will this be relevant next month, next year, or in 2 years?” If your answer is no, then it’s not considered evergreen.
How-to or “X Ways to …” articles are an easy way to create relevant evergreen content. Consider a struggle that your readers commonly experience and write about that.
Here is an example of a “How-To” blog post that remains popular due to its evergreen content that appeals to its audience:
Since evergreen content continues to remain relevant, it can help you establish yourself as a business and continue to generate traffic to your blog, thus having the potential to increase your sales.
2. Develop a unique brand image
Not only does the content of your blog have to be high-quality, but the look and feel of your blog should be high-quality too. The text of your blog post could be extremely valuable, but if it lacks visual appeal, chances are customers won’t even continue reading it.
This is where your unique brand image comes into play. Your brand image is what’s going to make you stand out from your competitors. The more visually appealing your blog is, the more likely readers will engage with your content and continue to come back for more.
Pro Tip from Wesley Ward, VP of Marketing, Hausera: “Be consistent in your brand’s image. Use the same fonts, colors and layout style throughout your website and make it unique. Visual branding allows you to create a memorable experience for your users.”
The more consistent you are with your image, the more you will be able to stand out as a leader in your industry.
3. Be consistent
As previously stated, consistency is key to maintaining your brand image, but it’s also key to getting your name out there. Posting frequently will help you build your small business blog and continue to acquire new leads.
If you aren’t posting frequently, readers won’t have content to engage with, thus decreasing your chances of obtaining loyal readers. If you want them to keep coming back, you need to give them something to come back for!
Set up a content calendar so you stay on track with your publishing schedule. Take the time to plan your content out ahead of time and stay on top of it.
4. Make sure your content is easily readable
When readers come to your blog, too much text may overwhelm them and lead them to click right off the page. To minimize your bounce rate, break up your content so it is easy to scan.
High-quality blog content is broken up into short paragraphs, uses bullet points when necessary, uses proper headings and subheadings, adds images and infographics, makes use of proper text size, style and color, and includes relevant credible sources to support the topic.
You can see how well infographics can integrate into blog content throughout SmartMove’s website. They even offer readers a drop-down menu where they can look at infographics exclusively.
Infographics should offer valuable information in a convenient and easy to process format. Snappy headlines, fun fonts and eye catching images are a must!
5. Optimize your content for search engines
Probably the most important strategy to make your small business blog stand out and get you noticed is by optimizing your content for search engines. When your content is optimized, you have a better chance of gaining traffic from your target audience.
Do a bit of research and make sure you are using your keywords with SEO intent. Use tools like SEMrush to find out which keywords are trending in your niche. Having data to support your content creation strategy will help the process make more sense.
But of course, be sure not to over stuff your content with keywords, as this may end up looking spammy and illegitimate.
6. Craft click-worthy headlines
Part of optimizing your content includes crafting a strong headline and meta description. When you take the time to craft a headline that stands out, you increase your chance of the reader clicking on it.
Headlines and meta descriptions are extremely important for search engines. Typically, a user will look at the title of the content and description before deciding to click onto the page.
Pro Tip from Jeff Arnett, CEO of Arnett Credentials: “Speak to your audience how they speak to each other. If there is common lingo and slang in the industry, don’t shy away from using those terms in your headlines. Using common colloquialisms in your content will make your audience feel more connected and trusting of your brand.”
Your headline should grab their attention and include keywords that your target audience is searching for.
Conclusion
There are so many benefits that small business blogging can have on your business. In such a competitive niche, you must take the time to produce high-quality content that will help your blog stand out online.
By implementing the tips in this article, your small business blog can be well on its way to gaining more visibility on search engines and gaining more traffic to your site.
