Search.
John Jantsch has an interesting post on his Duct Tape Marketing blog about the reasons small businesses should blog. He makes the point that for the small, local firm search may be the best reason to start a blog.
“If your intent with a blog is to develop a large, engaged, readership and to stake your claim as a thought leader in your industry, a blog is a wonderful vehicle, as long as you realize you must work like crazy to implement this strategy. If, however, you simply want to show up in Google searches for things like “Denver accounting software reseller” or “Boise hair salon,” then posting keyword rich, education based, location aware content a couple of times a week on a blog is your ticket to success.”
The three points that jump out at me are ‘keyword rich’, ‘education based’ and ‘location aware’.
Small business blogs should be Keyword Rich
If your intent is to turn up in search results then you need to be aware of the terms and phrases your prospective customers are using to find what they are looking for. I include phrases in this because getting to the top for general terms like ‘accountants’ will likely be (a) too difficult and (b) very little use to a local firm serving a local client base. Do you really need inquiries from half way across the country? Better to go with ‘accountants in Derry‘ (see below) or ‘tax accountants for restaurants‘.
Small business blogs should be Education Based
People search in order to help solve a query or problem. Often that means search terms that are phrased as queries. This site gets consistent traffic from the search phrase best way to market a small business as it’s the title of a previous post. Moreover, once someone does land on your site, informative and educational content is key to getting them to stick around, come back, subscribe to your feed and see you as a trusted resource – all good things.
Small Business blogs should be Location Aware
If your market is primarily local then there’s a good chance people will use local terms in their searches. Using place names in your page and post titles as well as liberally throughout your post copy will improve your rankings for those terms.
Blog content is also good for attracting inbound links which will also improve your rankings.
Of course, blogging is just one way to create quality content to feed the search engines – you should also consider and include articles, images and video (with appropriate tags) and static site content.
If you’re a small business blogger, what’s your main goal? Is it search related or are you aiming to build a community? Or both? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Image: Danard Vincente
