Everywhere you turn these days on and off the internet, you and your business are told “set up a blog.” Many business owners jump in and start writing away. However, the important question to ask is whether your blog gives your business an economical search engine optimization solution.
Blogging is a time-consuming activity, or if outsourced, somewhat expensive. If your blog isn’t generating a return on your investment, then it’s not an economical search engine optimization activity for your business.
That said, a blog isn’t solely about improving SEO. Many businesses write a blog to bolster credibility. A well-written blog that offers information about particular services or products can increase sales.
However, in our view, any blog that isn’t search engine optimized is missing out on a massive opportunity. Every blog post should be optimized to pull in more traffic.
How to economically search engine optimize your blog
It doesn’t matter whether your blog is part of your website or a stand-alone blog — in our view, it should be optimized.
The first step is using carefully selected keywords in every post. We don’t mean the same keywords in each post; rather each post should use its own keywords.
For example, if you run a Volvo repair shop in a Canadian town, and you use the keyword “service mechanic”, it seems on the surface to be a good keyword. However, keyword research reveals that “service mechanic” is not searched in Canada, yet it’s in over 1 million websites.
Take “Volvo maintenance”, for example. “Volvo maintenance” is a keyword found on only 32,000 websites, yet is searched 24 times per day. That is a decent keyword to use because:
- people search it,
- it’s relevant to Volvo mechanic shops, and
- the competition is relatively weak – i.e. there aren’t too many other websites with that keyword.
Every blog post (that’s a single post, not the entire blog) that uses a well-searched, low competition keyword will provide economical search engine optimization. because it will attract traffic resulting in sales. The fact is more traffic = more sales (unless your website is offensive terribly unappealing).
A blog can be both informative and offer economical search engine optimization
You don’t have to compromise the message or content of a blog post in order to search engine optimize it. This means you can write a highly informative blog that bolsters your credibility by informing your customers AND get more traffic.
Okay, we’ll hammer the point home again with another example because so many businesses fail to fully appreciate the importance of keywords.
Many websites optimize keywords for the home page only. Even then they use the most widely searched and most competitive keywords. The problem is all other pages on the website and blog posts don’t take advantage of the keyword opportunity.
If you optimize two keyword phrases for your home page only, you will only get traffic (assuming you rank well for those keywords) for two keyword phrases. The fact is, in every type of business, there are dozens, hundreds, and perhaps thousands of keywords used by the market.
What you need to do is isolate the good keywords, and there are usually at least 40 to 200 excellent keywords to use for any type of business. If there are only 60 keywords, for example, and you use 2 keywords on each web page, that means you should set up 30 web pages. Ideally you’ll set up 60 web pages and use the same keywords on two web pages for a double listing.
Now you can see why a blog is so useful – a blog is a very convenient way to add web pages for a business. If you have 100 great keywords, start writing posts for those keywords.
If you set up your blog the way set out above, and you do some great off-site SEO, your blog and website will be an economical search engine optimization solution.
Proper meta placement is critical for on-site SEO
As an aside, setting out your chosen keywords as meta keywords is a waste of time. Your keywords must be used in your meta titles, heading tags, and throughout your content. Don’t just add your keywords to your meta keywords and be done with it: that will do nothing for your site and is far from being an economical search engine optimization solution.