What should I blog about?

This guide covers blogs or news sections of websites, because I see a lot of these on small business websites and a lot of the time they're not being used in the most effective way, and occasionally they might be doing more harm than good.

A note, I'm going to use the word "blogs" here but this applies to any news'y part of your website where you're creating dated posts and the site maintains an archive of old posts.

Why Have a Blog?

So why might you want to have a blog on your site in the first place?

First up is that if your blog has recently been updated it sends a good signal to your visitor that the rest of the website is up to date, and that you're actively improving it. You might not be, of course, but just seeing a recent date on a webpage is reassuring.

Secondly is that it can be a great way to write content that is useful for any visitors who read it, which is what search engines are looking for when they try and determine what position to show your site in. We'll get into this more in a moment, but blog posts can address the searcher's "intent" really nicely.

Thirdly, just the act of writing a blog post can help you think about your business in new ways, and writing one might inspire you to update and improve other bits of your site.

Fourthly, and this is a nice little bonus but I want to be careful to say this should not be the guiding factor in your decision to write a blog or not, Google likes recently updated pages. Just the fact that you've updated a page can help it appear higher in search results.

Reasons Not to Blog

And what are some reasons you might not want a blog?

Well, it's a bit of a commitment. Lets say you start a blog, and make a number of posts, but you eventually stop updating it for whatever reason. The news section of your site will probably show the dates that entries were made, and if your last post was years ago then I think it sends a bit of a weird message to the visitor. Like, did nothing happen in those years? Did things get worse? Or maybe even, is the business still active?

Even if the visitor doesn't ask these questions, it gives an impression that things aren't changing in the business, or that you're not staying on top of keeping your website up to date and accurate. These assumptions could be totally untrue - you've probably just not thought to update the blog, it's really no big deal at all - but nevertheless that's the impression it could give a potential customer.

The other big reason you might not want to have a blog is because you can't think of anything to write about, or don't think anyone would be interested in the things you CAN think to write about. If that's the thing stopping you, then hopefully the rest of this will be useful. And if you don't want a blog because you don't want the commitment, that's totally fair and you're making the right decision, but maybe listen to the rest anyway and see if it changes your mind.

What to Write About

So, what should you write about? Well lets start with a bit of background on how Google works. In most cases, Google will only show one page of your site in search results. This means that when someone searches for "Party Equipment Hire in Prestwich", and Google decides that your site is relevant, they'll pick one page from your site to show in the results. And if it's a dated post, they'll show the date too.

This is useful to think about with blog posts, because each of these posts is kinda competing with the other pages on your site for space in the search results. And given that your other pages, like category or product pages, are probably much preferable for your visitor to land on than some blog post, it kinda rules out making blog posts that are JUST about a specific product or category - you might as well put that effort into the product or category page instead.

This means that a type of post I see a lot of, with content that basically amounts to "We offer Product A in Prestwich, get in touch to buy Product A in Prestwich". Like, just reiterating the same keywords that their Product A page is about. This might be alright for just blasting out on Facebook every now and again - although even then I'd say that you could do something more interesting, but in terms of searchers it's not very useful, because it's just competing against a hopefully much more interesting product or category page which you'd probably want Google to choose instead.

Blog Content Ideas

So what should you blog about, if not just write about specific products or categories? Well, what does your business get up to on a day by day basis? Probably it's something like "Installed Product A at a local hairdresser", or "Hired a Product B to a Church Fete". There are specifics to the job which would be kind of strange to write about in your product description, but which you encounter during your day to day.

By writing about these more specific events in your blog, you'll naturally mention other terms to do with the event. So lets take my church fete example, I might end up mentioning how the high ceilings meant we had space for a larger product, or that it was at Saint Stefan's church, or that it was for the Prestwich Carnival weekend.

Back to search engines - let's say I'm a member of the public, searching for "Hosting a fete at Saint Stefan's". You've wrote that blog post mentiong the church, mentioning you hired to an event there, and detailing the products you hired and why they were a good fit. Google ranks your post highly for me because it closely matches what I searched for. I see your post, click it, boom, it gives me an answer to the idea of how to host a fete there - to get in touch with your business, since you've done it before. Your site has attracted a high value lead which is likely to convert into a sale.

So what else can you blog about? Something I think warrants a blog post is any time you do some original research, discover something interesting that not many people will know about, or add some cool new aspect to your business. If you're building something new, then you can share updates on how it's going. Or if your business operates in an unusual way, maybe you can explain the reasons why. The visitors who find your site via these blog posts are maybe less likely to quickly convert into a sale, but they might mention you to their friends, or share your post around on social media or the wider internet, which is great publicity for you and might even result in some valuable backlinks.

Tips for Blog Posts

For each of your blog posts it's worth remembering that, like on every other page of your site, there's a chance the visitor has just clicked in from a search results page and doesn't know anything about your business. Gifen that, you might want to try and do things like linking to your contact page, or booking system, or to other places on your site where you can guide them into a conversion. You might also want to reiterate some important information like service areas or opening hours, or link to pages on your site where they can learn this.

Since you're spending the time writing these nice blog posts, you should be sure to share them across all of your social media profiles. By sharing as much of the content on social media as you can, you're helping your site show up in the search results on social media sites, which is where a lot of internet users do their searching. There's also the chance that they, or your followers, will like or share your posts so more will see them.

Posting Frequency

How often should you post? Well if you've got loads to say, then feel free to post as much as you want, but it'll take a lot of work and will be diminishing returns after a point. I'd probably instead just try and generally bear in mind that you might want to share something you've gotten up to via a blog post, and if you notice that it's been a couple of months since your last post, then try and bear it in mind a little harder. There's no point forcing yourself to post if you don't have anything to say - it won't be fun to write and very few people will read it.

Actually, speaking of that, it's worth mentioning that there's a good chance that these blog posts will get pretty low visitor numbers in your website analytics. Don't be too disheartened by this. It's always frustrating when people don't see your hard work, but bear in mind that the people who DO see the post in search results, and click through, are likely to have searched for something very close to the blog post's topic and could be a really high value visitor.

If you need ideas for blog content that drives traffic to your site, get in touch.