If you have an existing business website, a blog can increase traffic by nearly 434%. However, growing a business blog can take a lot of work, so you should approach it wisely.
When building a company blog and finding readers for it, you must take it one step at a time and should have a solid strategy in place. Creating great content and ensuring it shows up on search engine results pages are two things that are easier said than done.
Fortunately, we’re here to guide you. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll tell you how to grow a business blog successfully.
Start With a Strong Foundation
To grow a business blog, you must ensure that you’re starting with a strong foundation. Here are a few things you should do to get your business blog off to a good start.
1. Choose a Reliable Web Host
If you haven’t created a website yet, be sure to carefully consider the hosting service that you choose for your blog and website.
Ensure that you choose a host that offers great speed and performance. Using a fast and well-performing host will help improve SEO and make it more likely that your site will rank in search engines.
Be sure to compare your options, read reviews, and choose a website host that’s fast and has minimal downtime. Finding a great host is an important step toward starting a successful blog and getting the most out of it.
2. Design the Perfect Blog
The next step in starting and growing a business blog is to ensure that you have a reliable blogging platform to use.
WordPress is one of the most popular website platforms and is usually the best choice for starting a blog from the ground up. However, there are other platforms that you can use when starting a blog. Make sure you choose one that’s easy to use and add new posts to.
You’ll also want to think carefully about how your blog fits in with your website’s design. Many businesses choose to make their blog look like an integrated part of their website with a similar design and feel. However, you may decide to make it stand out visually as well.
You’ll want to think carefully about your blog’s design and ensure it’s user-friendly, easy to navigate, and attractive.
Remember that your blog will serve as the first point of contact for potential customers, so you must ensure it looks great. Spend some time getting the user experience and visual design right to ensure that you’ll have the best success with other parts of growing your blog as well.
3. Use SEO Techniques
If you want to create a great business website, you must use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and strategies. These techniques and practices can help you optimize your site, making it more likely that Google will add it to search engine results pages.
You must ensure that your website is easy for both visitors and search engines to understand. While there are many techniques that can help improve SEO, here are a few of the main things that you’ll need to do to improve your blog:
- Optimizing website speed
- Ensuring your blog is mobile-friendly
- Creating content focused on long-tail and low-competition keywords
- Structuring content to help it appear in featured search “snippets”
- Getting more backlinks to your site from elsewhere on the web
- Improving your internal linking structure
- Optimizing metadata, including titles and descriptions
- Compressing and optimizing website images
There are many more things that you can do to improve SEO. Be sure to work with an SEO expert or stay on top of the best practices by reading SEO blogs and articles.
SEO changes regularly, so you must keep up with the latest best practices to ensure that your blog posts have the best chance of ranking.
4. Set Blog Goals and KPIs
Before launching a blog and writing content for it, you must understand your goals and expectations. Be sure to have a strategy for your blog and ensure that you know why you’re launching it in the first place.
You should think carefully about who your target audience is and create buyer personas. Carefully consider how you can provide value to them and educate them.
You should also know exactly what you want visitors to do after landing on a blog post. You may want a visitor to click on a page on your website to learn more about your products, get in touch, sign up for your email list, or something else.
Additionally, set specific goals for your blog. This might include the number of visitors you want to get or how many new sales you want to make per month.
Set some key performance indicators (KPIs) for your blog. Then, track them closely as time goes on. KPIs could include the number of new leads you get, the number of email list signups, blog visits, and social shares of your blog posts.
Develop and Post Valuable Content
Once you’ve set up your blog and defined your goals, you can start working on the content. Here’s what you should keep in mind when doing so.
Set a Content Schedule
Before you start thinking about what to put on your blog, you should make sure you have a schedule in place.
It’s important to stay consistent if you want to grow your business blog successfully and ensure that you can build a reader base. You should aim to post new articles consistently so that readers who follow your blog know what to expect each week and month.
Whether you choose to post daily, weekly, or monthly, ensure you stay as consistent and organized as possible. Use a calendar tool to mark the days you’ll post and be sure it’s enough.
Posting daily or several times weekly is ideal if you want to grow your blog and have a good amount of content on your site while attracting new visitors through search engines.
Spend Time on Keyword Research
Once you’ve set up your blog, identified your goals, and created a content schedule, there are still some things to do before you start writing your content.
First, you should do some careful planning and keyword research to ensure that you prioritize the right blog topics. When creating content, you should consider your customers’ and visitors’ needs and do some keyword research.
Spend time looking up keywords using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and other SEO keyword tools. Using some of these free and paid tools, you can identify keywords with low competition. Generally, it’s best to target long-tail keywords rather than general keywords since there’ll be less competition.
Keep in mind that although you may want to choose one keyword to focus on for a blog post or article, you’ll usually add several additional keywords.
Researching the right keywords is a big part of creating blog posts that rank well in search engines, so don’t leave this step to chance. If you do, you may waste a lot of time writing content around keywords that are impossible to rank for.
Make Your Content Readable
Once you’ve researched keywords and started writing blog content, make sure you don’t only write your content with search engines in mind. First, make sure you write quality content meant to be read by real people.
Your blog content should be easy to read, and you should use simple language and sentence structure. Split up long paragraphs into smaller sections when possible. You should also include headings, bulleted and numbered lists, and other formatting elements that can make your content easy to understand.
Additionally, make sure to add media like images and videos to your content to support your topic and inform your readers.
You should also ensure that your content is long enough to adequately cover the topic you’re writing about and give readers enough information on it. Blog content should be between 1,000 and 2000 words, since this is what tends to rank best in search engines.
Make sure you proofread and edit your content to perfection. The easier your content is to read, the more comprehensive and useful it is, the more likely someone is to read it, and the better it will rank in search engines.
Promote Your Content and Grow Your Blog
Once you publish a high-quality and informative blog post, you need to ensure that you promote it as much as possible. While you may get organic traffic, don’t just post content and expect people to come to it automatically.
Here’s what you should do to promote your content and grow your blog:
Share Your Content on Social Media
When launching a blog, make sure you’re working to have an active presence on social media. Then ensure that you share all new posts that you create on the platforms you use.
When posting about a blog on social media, be sure to include a summary of the post and do your best to encourage followers to click on it.
In addition to posting on popular social media sites, it’s a good idea to participate in niche forums and on popular forum sites like Quora and Reddit. You might also want to expand your audience by republishing content on sites like Medium and LinkedIn to get additional traffic and visibility.
At Proofed, we distribute most of our content to our audience on LinkedIn.
Implement an Outreach Strategy
One of the most important steps to take to direct more attention to your blog and improve SEO is to do some targeted outreach. It’s important that you get links for your website from other sites on the internet, since this will help prove your authority and expertise.
There are many ways to get new backlinks for your website.
Some backlinks will come simply from writing great content. Other website owners may come across your blog and decide to link to it. You can also get backlinks by reaching out directly to site owners and asking if they’ll add a link to your site pointing to relevant content.
One of the best ways to get new backlinks is by guest posting. Offering to write blog posts for other websites and blogs can be helpful. Doing so can help improve your authority and allow you to get backlinks from new sites.
Create Ongoing Visitor Relationships
Remember that your blog isn’t just for visitors who are coming across your site for the first time. It’s important to improve your blog so that visitors will decide to return time and time again to read more content.
Pay attention to what blog content is performing the best and what people seem to react to the most. Continue crafting new content to capitalize on your previous successes and get people who enjoyed your blog posts the first time around to return.
Ensure that you’re creating content for those in various stages of interest in your product or industry. Ideally, you should ensure that there’s content on your blog that relates to every step of the buyer’s journey.
Additionally, be sure you’re working to foster ongoing relationships with your customers by using lead magnets. Offer free downloadable content or other perks to visitors who decide to sign up for your email list. Then, continue sharing new blog posts with them through email marketing and social media channels.
You’ll have a much easier time building your blog over time if you work to build ongoing relationships with visitors who land on your blog and get return visits.
Successfully Growing a Business Blog With These Tips
If you want to grow a business blog successfully, don’t underestimate the work it’ll take. You must be sure that you think carefully about the keywords you use, the content you create, and the ways you promote it if you want it to be successful. For more advice on this topic, check out our guide to creating and maintaining a business blog.
Need help proofreading and editing business blog content at scale? Click here to learn more.
