The Power of Online Content: Why Should You Be Blogging?

For any business to succeed they need to be adaptable and move with the times. Over the past 20 years, the internet has had a significant impact on society, how we communicate and how we shop. It can sometimes appear that the ‘internet-age’ is at odds with traditional values and ways, but if used correctly the online world can be a powerful tool for even the most traditional of businesses.

Advertising Is Changing

The way that people interact with their smartphones is dramatically changing the way we live. Our attention is being drawn away from billboards and television screens and instead directed into the palm of our hands. Retailers can take advantage of this by using social media, blogs and other online platforms to reach their target audience at a fraction of the cost and with a much wider reach than traditional advertising mediums.

Where Does Blogging Fit In?

Your business’s blog is the epicentre of your online presence. It is where you can have complete control over your voice and message and it can attract a wide readership, who can then be converted into customers. People are starting to connect more to the people behind brands, and your blog is the best place to tell your story.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

When you blog, you are adding a page to the book through which search engines (like Google and Bing) look through when someone searches for ‘gift shops in London’, for example. The more you blog about ‘gift shops’, the more pages you add, the more search engines are going to trust you, and show you as a result. So, if your blog contains lots of great content – articles, photos, videos – about your London gift shop, then your website is ‘optimised’ to be found by search engines.

Keywords

Keywords are phrases that your customers might be searching for such as ‘London gift shops’ but they might also search for ‘husband gift ideas London’, ‘personalised gifts south London’. They are called keywords because they are the golden phrases that you can use to tap into what your customers are searching for, the type of blog posts they might want to read about and therefore what you should be writing about. Use keywords as a guide to create content, and also make sure to mention these phrases multiple times in each post so that the search engines will have a greater chance of picking them up.

Content Is King

The more technical side of blogging and SEO used to be quite daunting, especially for small businesses. That’s why in recent years, search engines are changing to make the whole experience more ‘user friendly’. So long as you write authentic, original content and people engage with it, that is enough to start boosting your search results. The most important things is consistency. Blogging once is not enough, it needs to be a continued and long-term effort to really see a result.

Sharing Is Caring

Writing blog posts is great, but sharing them to be read is even better. Once you have written a blog make sure to share it with your followers and also send it to anyone that might be interested. Maybe you have featured one of your suppliers or bestselling products? If they like the post, they might share it with their followers too. The more places that a URL link to your post appears, the more ‘trustworthy’ your blog post becomes to search engines.

What things are your potential customers searching for online?

 

Let us know: info@savethehighstreet.org – Subject: Bloggers