This is the second post in the ‘Why Blog’ series (in addition to the intro post last week.) Here’s a list of the posts in this series:
~ Why Blog When There are So Many Out There
~ Blogging Helps You Be Found
~ Be Trustworthy (because, shouldn’t we all be trustworthy?)
~ What’s Your Take on That? ~ Blogging helps you establish your positioning
~ They Want To Know ~ Blogging allows you to educate your clients
Let’s start our series of ‘Why Blog’ posts by talking about how blogging can help you be found by search engines.
How often do you find yourself heading to your favorite search engine to find the answer to a question? Search engines provide a whole list of websites with possible results, right?
See, search engines ‘crawl’ websites. This is when they basically review sites for the information on them. If the search engines think your site has great information, they might also index your website pages so the right results are shown in the search results.
Blog Posts are Fresh
Your website has certain pages that won’t change very much. The home, about and contact pages don’t usually change too drastically, and your services or products pages likely won’t change very often either. That doesn’t make a search engine want to revisit your site. But when you start blogging they’ll have something new to come crawl.
Now, before you start thinking about blogging about ‘anything’ so that search engines will see fresh content, think about how that will help you show up in front of anyone, let alone your ideal audience. That approach won’t really help.
If you’re blogging about topics your ideal audience is interested in, chances are they’re already using search engines to answer some questions or learn more about their topic of interest. So it makes sense to blog about those things, rather than just anything that might not pertain to your industry or product.
Blogging Strategy
Having a more specific topic base to blog about, topics (categories) related to what you do and how you help your ideal client is one way that you can attract an audience. You’ll hopefully be showing up in search results for the right audience.
For example, if you’re a coach, blogging about family trips to tour soccer stadiums isn’t necessarily going to place you in front of people needing your coaching services. Blogging about mindset and overcoming self-doubt, or increasing your client base likely will depending on what type of coach you are. See how there’s strategy involved?
Addressing possible questions your ideal client has in blog posts will draw them right to you, right? Well, maybe. There are a lot of other factors that go into that which we’ll cover another time. For now just understand that adding content that is relevant to what you do for your clients in some way will help search engines actually realize you are a possible help to THEIR clients (the ones doing the searching.)
I think you can probably start to see how blogging can also help you connect with and built trust in those who find your site. Let’s visit that next time.
Take Action
Do you currently have a blog on your website?
If so, think about what your clients or customers are asking you and start making notes of 4 to 5 topics related to your offers.
If not, reach out if you need help getting this set up. Then start brainstorming what relevant information your visitors might be searching for.
