If you still don’t know what all the fuss is about, there are two main reasons why so many companies set up a corporate blog on their website.
First, a blog is a great public relations tool that can help an organisation to strengthen relationships with its customers and build up positive brand awareness. Secondly, and most importantly, a blog is simply an excellent way to drive traffic to your website
The reason is simple – search engines look much more favourably on sites that are regularly updated with fresh and unique content. And there’s no better way of doing this than writing a blog.
What’s more, if your blog builds up a healthy following then more and more people will link to it, which will increase the number of pathways by which visitors can reach your site. In addition, these links serve as an indicator of your site’s importance and so will help to push it further up in the search engine rankings.
You want the people who follow your blog to be the same group that are interested in the products you offer. Therefore, as what you write about dictates how you show up in search engine results, it stands to reason that you should talk about topics that relate to your business and what it sells.
If, for example, you sold kitchen equipment then you could write about new additions to your range or offer recipes. But were you to instead write about your favourite hobby, such as windsurfing, then you’d end up with completely the wrong search traffic from water-sports fans, who are somewhat unlikely to be interested in kitchen utensils.
So think carefully about what you would write about and what keywords you should include in your posts. If in doubt, contact your eCommerce provider or enlist the services of a copywriter, who can write on your behalf.
You can encourage sales by writing features about products that you want to promote or by offering exclusive discounts to followers of your blog.
And don’t be afraid to use you blog as way to address customer issues, as this can help you to improve your service and also show that you listen to your customers.
For SEO purposes it is widely considered that frequent short posts work best. People themselves also prefer to consume regular bitesize pieces of information rather than more infrequent and substantial posts that take longer to read. Ideally you should write something every day, although two or three times a week is sufficiently regular.
Your eCommerce site can really benefit by complementing it with a relevant, interesting and carefully considered blog. But before you start, glean as much information as you can from both your eCommerce provider and the wealth of information that is available on the web.
The word ‘blog’ is an abbreviated form of the term ‘weblog’, which essentially means a website maintained by an individual or group of contributors with regular entries of news, reviews, events, pictures and videos.