Is-Blogging-Still-Relevant-to-Your-Business?

Is Blogging Still Relevant to Your Business?

Is blogging really still relevant in a world where social media allows you to communicate with your potential followers directly?

After all, if you can either write a 500 word post on your latest service or share the key points on Facebook, some businesses might now gravitate more towards one than the other for the sake of convenience.

The truth is, blogging is absolutely still relevant to your business in 2017 – and here are some key reasons why.

 

Blogs Fuel Your Social Content

 You need something to say on your social media channels, and somewhere to direct your current and prospective followers.

Simply sharing images and links to your product pages suggests you’re only interested in trying to sell, rather than engage. With regular blog posts, you can consistently share high-value content on your social accounts to entice people to your site with something more than a purchase.

Share snippets of your blog posts as a teaser, along with eye-catching images that tell a story relevant to the content itself.

 

Blogs are Still Effective for SEO

Blogging on a regular basis enables your business to boost your visibility and authority in a number of ways.

For starters: keywords. Back in the day, brands could write blog posts consisting of endless search terms offering little value to the reader, but now Google’s algorithm is far wiser.

The emphasis is much more on the quality of your content rather than the keywords, but they’re still important. Use your most effective ones a few times in a post, but always make sure they don’t affect its readability.

Blog posts add fresh content to your site regularly, which is crucial for solid rankings, as are social signals. Bear this in mind: 82 percent of markets blogging on a daily basis converted a customer using their blogs, while only 57 of those publishing posts once per month did so.

 

Blogs can Help You Build Credibility

Having a wide variety of blog posts on your business’s website builds your credibility. How so?

Blogging gives your brand an opportunity to become a thought-leader, sharing innovative insights and influencing others. This can lead to your blogs gaining a wider readership by peers and customers alike, driving more traffic to your site over time.

Your business will appear more reliable and professional with a portfolio of well-written, well-presented blog posts, rather than a bare-bones site.

 

Blogs Allow for Deeper Communication than Social Media

You have to establish a style and voice for your business on social channels, and Facebook, Twitter etc. are ideal places to communicate with your customers.

However, blog posts enable you to tell deeper, richer stories unsuited to the shorter, sweeter structure of social accounts. Yourself and / or your team can explore your processes, motivations, missions, products, and opinions in more detail.

Your readers will get to know you better, and feel more invested in your brand.

Looking to start blogging for your business, or want to improve future posts? At Nett Solutions, we’re an experienced Orange County digital marketing agency dedicated to helping companies of all sizes build better results! Give our expert team a call now!

Read More

Are You Sabotaging Your Own SEO?

Are you Sabotaging your own SEO?

Are you Sabotaging your own SEO?

In our years as an Orange County SEO agency, we’ve seen businesses of all sizes trying to handle their own digital marketing campaigns.

We’ve also seen them make the same mistakes again and again.

You simply cannot underestimate the negative impact even the smallest errors can have on your rankings. You could be sabotaging your own SEO strategy without even realizing it.

How? Let’s take a look.

 

Are you Using Too many Keywords in your Content?

Choosing the right keywords to suit your brand, your customers, and your place in the market is key.

So is using them properly.

Keyword stuffing is less prevalent than it used to be, but some websites still try to manipulate search engines by overdoing it.

When you stuff keywords into your content, you’re sacrificing the readability for your visitors. Google has steps in place to penalize sites employing this shady tactic too, so you could be sacrificing your place in the SERPs too.

Google cares more about relevance and context today, so including keywords in a natural way without overloading them is vital. The most important ones should appear higher up the page too, to maximize their impact.

 

Are you Neglecting your Title tags and Meta Descriptions?

Your title tag and meta descriptions are vital to attracting prospects and improving your rankings.

Your title tag and description appear on the SERPs, telling searchers and crawlers what to expect from your site. You should include a keyword in your title tag and description where possible, and sell the value of your content honestly.

Pay attention to how your biggest competitors or those high-authority brands you want to emulate appear on SERPs. How do they phrase their titles and descriptions? What about them makes you want to click?

 

Does your Website load too Slowly?

How many websites have you left because the pages took too long to load, or simply didn’t load at all?

Think about how frustrating it is. Do you want to put your customers through that?

Google’s research shows that load times of between one and three seconds increase your bounce rate to 32 percent, while one to five seconds sees this figure jump to 90 percent.

Anything up to six seconds creates bounce rate increases of 106 percent. Load times of up to 10 seconds? Your bounce rates increase to a staggering 123 percent.

Compressing images and text can make a big difference to your load times. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) give you the power to make your mobile site incredibly fast, targeting the ever-growing mobile audience.

 

Is your Content Good Enough?

Your content should be well-written, informative, and offer visitors real value.

No prospects want to waste time reading text filled with typos, half-finished sentences, and baffling jargon. Your content has to give them the information they need in a clear, simple way.

It doesn’t need to be an industry-leading piece of work, but content should at least appear professional and provide searchers with the solution they were promised by your title tag and description.

If you think your website could be sabotaging your rankings, don’t worry. Nett Solutions is an Orange County SEO agency with the skills to transform your online performance. Just give us a call for a friendly, transparent chat!

Read More