Small Business SEO

Do I need a company blog?

There are multiple reasons, and very good ones at that, for launching and maintaining a company blog, which is why I’m going to take a minute to explain to small business owners why a company blog is in their best interest. To begin, I’ll highlight the main benefits that companies receive from their blog, then I will explain in detail each benefit and discuss how to best maximize your blog’s potential. I’ll even give you some advice on how to quickly launch your company blog.

Scott Blitstein with Web Worker Daily wrote an interesting article titled, Company Blogs Can Provide Big Insights. In this article Blitstein states, “I have found that regular posting on a blog is a great indicator of a company’s general attitude about the importance of communicating with their customers.”

Personally, I couldn’t agree more. When a company decides to create a blog, they have essentially taken the first step towards connecting and interacting with their customers, clients, vendors, employees, and well let’s face it… the world, in the twenty-first century. Why not have a blog and use it as a media source to brand and discuss your products and services? After all, if you do it right, you’ve inexpensively reached a medium of tens-of-millions of users.

Note that I stated, “…if you do it right”, in other words you need to provide quality, informative data that is unique to your company.  To give you an idea of what constitutes a quality blog, read Mack Collier’s article Examples of Great Company Blogs. In this article you find that blogs belonging to companies such as Kodak, Dell, and LinkedIn have made the cut.

What’s the purpose of a company blog?

When creating a company blog, you should think of ways to (i) talk about your products and services, (ii) connect to your clients/customers, (iii) connect to your employees and other stakeholders, i.e. vendors and stockholders, (iv) report newsworthy stories, (v) share knowledge that may be privy to you or your line of business (note: this does not include sensitive information).

Writing about your services should be easy for most businesses to adapt to. If you have success stories, product sales, incentives, special offers, new product lines, grand openings, etc., be sure to tell the world in a blog post.

Connect to your clients/customers by publishing a monthly newsletter. Discuss accomplishments and share views on the future. You can even use your blog to promote your clients’/customers’ services. What better way to show your appreciation than to tell the world about how much you value a client and respect the services they provide within their own business?

Connecting to employees can be very important for large companies. A blog can be used as a motivational tool for encouraging performance, e.g. through announcing promotional competitions and organizational events. While at the same time a blog can be used to connect to stockholders by issuing quarterly and annual reports, i.e. retained earnings reports, income statements, and other financial statements and discussing future projections.

Your company blog can also be used to report newsworthy stories that effect your business and industry. For example, if your business is real estate related, you may wish to keep your blog readers up-to-date on real estate industry related news and perhaps local news events in the market in which you serve.

Finally, sharing information that is privy to you or your line of business is great because this means that your knowledge is unique and no one else, or very few, can report on it in the way in which you can. As mentioned, I’m not speaking of sensitive information that could be construed as say… insider trading; I’m referring to tips, hints, and tricks about your trade that the average Joe will find useful. Examples may include: lawn and garden care tips from a landscaper, floral arranging guidance from a florist, or even help with altering a picture with Adobe’s Photoshop if you are a graphic designer or photographer.

Can a company blog help my SEO campaign?

Another aspect of a company blog that makes it quite appealing to many businesses is its search engine optimization factor. Every time you write a blog post you are creating another page of content for your website. Suppose you write three new blog posts a week, at the end of one year you’ll have added over 150 new pages of content to your website. If there is one thing that the search engines love when considering how to determine the value of a website… it is content, the amount of content, and of course the quality of the content. Here is a great resource for help on how to create unique, quality content from Improve the Web.

So by now you should be sold on the idea that a company blog is just what your organization needs. So how do you get started? I would recommend using WordPress to set up your new blog. Have your web-developer upload the latest version of WordPress with the theme of your choice. Themes can be selected from WordPress directly or you can have a custom theme built for your company. For a one-time fee you can also hire a company to create a company blog for you.

The reason I recommend WordPress is because this is one of the few content management systems that takes on-site search engine optimization into account. This is mainly done through the use of third party plugins that are created specifically for WordPress. Here is an article written about SEO plugins for WordPress, which can be very useful for optimizing your new blog accordingly for search engine queries.

Remember, you need to evolve with your competition, so don’t fall behind and focus on staying above the curve. The Internet is widely neglected and even some Fortune 500 companies have failed to fully exploit the Internet and its capabilities until this year. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some out there who still haven’t accepted that the Internet is the future. Be a smart business owner and take the necessary actions to maintain your competitive advantage.