If your Home Page is your shop window and your Service / Product page is your sales pitch, then your Blog is your shop’s own personal newspaper or newsletter. In it you share updates on your company, specials on offer, how-to guides, pictures or anything else you think your audience should be aware of. The Blog page is usually the life blood of a business website. With content being added to it (hopefully) on a regular basis, it shows your visitors that your site is alive and kicking and that you continue to exist / prosper as a business. With many industries getting highly saturated and very competitive, it is very important – read critical – to continue to build new content on your site. This is especially important if you generate leads primarily from search engines. Google loves fresh, original content and has placed more and more emphasis on it in their algorithms in recent years.  (Don’t believe us? Google actually filed a patent on this factor! See Fresh Content by Moz – the authority on SEO.) If you keep your site up to date with new content then Google will know that your site is active and worth paying attention to in results. But what should you write about in your blog. Essentially anything even remotely related to your business. As long as you can tie the piece of content back to your core business then it is worth posting in your blog. Here are some ideas on what you can blog about:

• Demonstrate your industry knowledge by writing short “tips and tricks” posts – “how to change your car’s oil” for example if you were a car mechanic. This shows that you know oil changing so well that you can teach others to do so.
• Share updates on how your business is growing. Your clients or potential clients will be delighted to see that your business is thriving and others are buying from you. It will give them more confidence in going ahead with their purchase or purchasing from you again.
• Provide commentary on changes or news in the industry. Again, this demonstrates to your clients (and your peers) that you know what is going on in the industry and you are staying current with the times. To go back to the mechanic, say for example there is a new synthetic oil that has been developed. You could write about this oil and what the potential benefits could be in layman’s terms.
• Publish pictures of work that you are particularly proud of. Blog posts need not only be pure text. Think about how popular magazines are versus newspapers! Posting a recent pic or two will be highly interesting to visual people in your audience and is more likely to be shared on social media.
• Interview interesting people in the industry or clients or partners. Everyone loves a good interview! You could even post it as a video interview with a transcript posted below for people who would prefer to read it.

There are many options on what to write for your blog and the above are just a few examples! In the future we will share some more ideas for you. Writing for your blog does have some un-written rules to get the most out of your content. Here are some tips on how you should publish your blog:

• Keep posts short but not too short. Ideally you want to aim for a length of between 400 and 800 words. Any more than that and it would be better to split the post into a mini-series. This series actually started out as one post but got so huge we decided to split it up and now look at it! Any less than 400 words and it would be seen as a fairly low quality page by Google. Plus, how much helpful information can you really give someone in less than 400 words?
• Write in a tone that is consistent with the rest of the site. Of course you have a little more leeway because of the different content types you are posting. If you are professional, be professional, techy, be techy etc. You can get a little more informal on Social Media.
• Try to include at least one image with your post. It really helps to break up the text when you add visual aids to represent what you are talking about.
• Break up paragraphs of text with things like bullet points, callout quotes, interesting links etc. Remember that thing about magazines vs. newspapers?

At the end of the day any type of content that can demonstrate that you are a reputable business that knows what they are doing and talking about will put a potential client’s mind at ease. If a client inquires with you after browsing a well written website, converting them to a sale once you meet with them will be a breeze!