What is blogging and how do you do it?

Blogging comes from the term ‘weblog’ and means uploading regular content online, in the form of a diary or article. Photo and video blogs also exist. Anyone can keep a blog and many businesses keep their own blogs to update their current and potential customers with company news and insight.

A blog should be part of your website rather than being at a separate address and can be a great place to showcase company knowledge, so that your customers recognise you as an authority in the field. This places you in a class above the companies selling similar products or services but either with no blog at all or a purely self-promoting one. For example, a company selling pet insurance could be blogging about useful pet care advice or a bakery could be blogging about good bread and cake recipes to try.

Not only will the blog give more credibility to your company, but it will also allow you to establish a personality with your audience. An active blog also enables a company to look exciting and modern, rather than a static website with no new content. The opportunities a blog can bring are endless, as it could also allow you to highlight certain products, industry changes, company events or promote certain key members of your staff.

Blogging creates opportunities in the search engines

A blog also has many search engine optimisation benefits, as fresh content helps Google to index your website more often and may rank it higher than before in the listings. The more genuine the blog posts, the better the ranking will be, so using relevant keywords and phrases to your business is key.

This is where regular series of blog posts is useful, where you can mention a similar topic every week providing topical information that internet users may be searching for. For example, a garden centre should be blogging about what plants and seeds can be planted and when.

Blogging will also provide you with something to talk about and share within your social communities. This, in turn, will generate more inbound links to your website, raising your credibility rating; another factor that boosts search engine rankings.

Starting your own blog

If you are thinking about starting your own blog for your business, we’d recommend following these tips:

• Write well: Nothing will look worse than a blog full of spelling and grammatical mistakes.
• Contribute regularly: At least one post a week will keep your readers engaged and help SEO.
• Use a mixture of content: Not every blog post has to be a long article. You could upload videos and photos too to make it more visual.
• Include links to other blogs or articles: This is good for SEO, so try to link to at least one other source in your posts.

We can build your blog into your company website, or advise on the best platform to use. We also provide tailored content packages which involve blog writing services and can be combined with social media packages to help grow their website profile and invite social signals which will help with social awareness and SEO.

If you would like to know more, contact us on 01743 272609 or email studio@vibecreative.co.uk.