Starting a blog is one of the easiest ways you can start taking advantage of being found on the search engines. A blog about your business also helps you stay connected with your customers and it provides them valuable insight about your company. With that said one of most difficult part of starting a blog for small local businesses is trying to think of what to write to keep your blog fresh and updated. So let?s first start by covering some basic concepts to write about.
Your content is extremely important as local customers will find you through the search engines according to what you write about. It is very important that you choose a variety of topics that directly relate to your company, your industry, and your geographical location. The easiest thing to blog about is recent events or news about your company. If your company has denoted to a charity or if you have acquired new equipment to enhance your service than you should blog about it and let your customers know. Remember to mention your company?s name and the geographical location of your company in your blog. For example, if you?re a dentist that had just acquired a new x-ray machine you?ll want to write something like this:
?Today we finally received our X-Ray 5000 machine. Dr. Smith ordered it about a week ago and it just arrived to our Wible Road, Los Angeles dental clinic today. We are so excited to start taking digital dental x-rays.?
This piece of example covers a lot of grounds as it talks about the name of the doctor, the location of the office, the name of business, and some other valuable keywords that may result in your local customers finding your bossiness on the search engines. Aside from news and updates, you?ll want to consider blogging about your work process or your work log. Taking the dentist example, you can write about what the exact steps are in using the x-ray machine and explain what it means to the customers. Remember the whole idea is to blog as much about specific keywords that relate to your company. You can also blog about events and put pictures on the blog. Make it fun, keep it relevant, and keep it fresh.
Many third party websites will let you sign up and register for a blog for free. Companies like Blogger and Wordpress offer free blogs to whoever wants one. The advantage of registering it on one of these sites is that its free, they are fairly search engine friendly out of the box, and they are easy to setup. Unfortunately you also very limited control on modifying third party blog sites and you get a generic domain attached these companies site. If you already have a website you?ll probably want to keep the blog within your own website. Hosting your own blog has many advantages such as having full control over the blog (design and programming). You also keep your customers within your site and increase the chances you can turn them into a lead. Most importantly you can better optimize your blog for search engines. It can be quite a challenge to setup your own blog and Softline Solutions has setup hundreds of blogs in the past and we are definitely an expert on this matter. If you need help we can point you on the right direction.