One of the best investments you can make for your business is starting a blog. Yes, you heard that right! Blogging and content marketing have lifted businesses to new heights, helping them build authority, increase brand recognition, and sell more products or services. You’re probably familiar with personal blogs like fashion influencers or travel enthusiasts. Now, companies are using the same blogging and search engine optimization (SEO) tactics for their own websites to reach customers totally organically.
It’s super important to recognize the difference between a personal and business blog, especially when you start to create content. There are certain rules and guidelines your company should follow when blogging to keep your brand identity alive. You want your business blog to look professional and reflect your company’s values and principles. To help you jump-start your business blog and become a thought leader in your industry, we’ve rounded up the most important blog guidelines for companies to follow.
9 Blog Guidelines for Companies
Align with business goals, values, and branding.
When you first started your company, you probably thought long and hard about your goals and values and how you present yourself to the world. Now, it’s time to showcase them through your blog. You want your audience to come to your website or blog and instantly understand what type of company you are, who you help, and what kind of service they can expect from your business. If you have a mission statement, everything should reflect that!
Part of staying aligned with business goals and values is maintaining consistent branding. This means ensuring the tone, style, and visuals follow the company’s overall branding. So, your logo should be present along with your brand colors throughout the blog’s theme. These little details make a huge difference, especially when it comes to strengthening brand identity and becoming recognizable to your audience.
Create a brand voice.
You’ve already created a business identity and aesthetic through a logo and colors during your initial business planning now, it’s time to create a brand voice and showcase it in your business blog! Creating a unique tone and voice for your blog posts will help your content stand out from the rest. You can manipulate voice through word choice, punctuation, tone, style, and so much more!
Strategizing a brand voice that speaks (no pun intended!) to your customers is one of the most important blogging guidelines for businesses. Just as you would study a buyer persona for your customer, consider creating a writer persona for your business blogs.
Consistently create quality content.
One great blog post isn’t going to get you tons of traffic and brand recognition. In order to see growth, you need to be posting consistently. We recommend 1-5 posts per week to boost your SEO, reach more people, and hit all your brand goals. However . . . you can’t just post A LOT, what you post also has to be super helpful things your potential customers with search for! Think things like answering common questions, sharing detailed info about your industry, and highlighting the need for your product/service.
While the aesthetic of your blog is important, it is the content that is the backbone of your business blog’s success. The quality of your content also reflects your brand’s authority and voice. If you want potential customers to see you as the choice for a chosen product or service, your content has to SCREAM credibility.
Optimize for search engine results.
A business can start a blog no problem. But building a successful blog that attracts traffic is the difficult part. When businesses start blogging, it is important for them to understand how search engine optimization (SEO) works, so their website shows up high on search engine rankings. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing prioritize content that uses strategic SEO tactics such as using target keywords, enhancing user experience, personalizing content, and, of course, creating quality content.
Following SEO blogging practices boosts your content on search engine results pages (SERPs), driving more traffic to your website. Honestly, optimizing your business blog using SEO is one of the best investments you can make when it comes to marketing and promoting. As a business owner, you’re already super busy managing other aspects of your business, so let us help you out with our SEO package to ensure your blog is using the latest SEO strategy to end up on page one of Google results pages!
Prioritize user experience.
Running a successful blog is about more than writing engaging and informative blog posts. It’s also about creating a pleasing user experience. What does this mean exactly? In terms of blogging, it means designing a beautiful, easy-to-navigate website for your audience. From organizing menu categories to choosing a readable font for your blog, your reader should easily find the information they’re searching for on your website and skim through your blog posts.
Include a call to action.
The point of your business blog is to convert readers into leads and customers. The number one way to achieve this is to include a call to action (CTA) in every piece of content you create. Whether you’re sending out a newsletter or wrapping up a blog post, you should always communicate a clear action you want your reader to take.
The key to successfully converting readers to leads is placing a relevant CTA in your content. For example, if you offer business consulting services, you may have your reader request a free business analysis in a blog post about how to increase monthly revenue. You always want to offer a helpful solution to the problem your content addresses.
Follow a content calendar.
Starting a blog for your business can feel a bit overwhelming, especially when you realize consistency is super important. One of the easiest ways to stay on track with creating content is having a content calendar filled with blog topics. Researching popular topics and keywords related to your niche can give you the jump start you need to create the first 15 blog posts to launch your website.
At the beginning of each month or even quarter, sit down with your SEO specialist or content manager to create your content calendar. Whether you’re writing one or five blog posts a week, having them planned in-advance will help you hit your deadlines, stay consistent, and take some pressure off. This shouldn’t be stressful!
Use a variety of media.
Blogging for your business is an excellent way to increase your potential customer reach. However, to run a successful business blog, it’s important to include a variety of media types in your content it can boost your views by 94%! While the bulk of your content will be blog posts, publishing photos and videos within your posts will help boost your SEO score, engagement level, and overall credibility.
For example, if your business sells products, post high-quality photos of the product or videos explaining how to use the product (or anything else you want to share about it!) Not only will this help your blog grow, but you can also post the photos and videos to social media platforms and lead followers back to your blog. So, for every blog topic you have on your content calendar, think of another piece of media that you can pair with it to take full advantage of your online presence and SEO strategy. (Just don’t forget your alt text.)
Proofread and edit thoroughly.
The one thing that causes a brand to lose credibility and authority is spelling/grammar errors. While these simple mistakes may not be the end of the world, a reader could turn their nose up and think less of your content. To avoid this, have a dedicated proofreader to review blog posts before hitting that Publish button. There are super helpful tools like Grammarly and ProWritingAid that can help identify spelling and grammar mistakes in a matter of seconds too!
How Blogs Help Businesses
Starting a blog for your business is one of the best investments you can make to grow your target market reach, build authority, and dive into the world of content marketing. There are so many benefits of SEO for small businesses that can double or even triple your revenue when done correctly! But this isn’t a quick fix for business starting a blog is a long-term commitment with a big payoff.
When you create a blog for your business, you’ll experience the following benefits:
- Boost search engine rankings (SEO)
- Establish authority
- Drive website traffic
- Generate leads
- Enhance customer engagement
- Improve brand awareness
- Build customer relationships
- Boost conversion rates
- Promote long-term results
- Support email marketing
- Differentiate from competitors
- Support content marketing strategy
Plus, when you establish and follow blog guidelines for your business, you have a guaranteed formula for success!
Start blogging for your business and watch your brand and revenue grow to new heights.
Whether your business already has a website or you have to start from scratch, adding a blog section is one of the best investments you can make in your marketing efforts. We are in the age of content marketing which can save businesses up to 62% in marketing expenses so why not take advantage of it with a blog?!
We get it running a business consumes a TON of your time. Adding blog management is just another thing you don’t have time for on your to-do list. Don’t worry InfluencerSEO is here to help! We can handle everything from weekly blog writing to SEO strategy to technical blog maintenance to ensure your business blog consistently creates content and follows your business guidelines. Now is the time to start that business blog and bring your brand to the next level!
Jordan Becerra, founder and Lead SEO Strategist at InfluencerSEO, has spent almost 15 years in the creator internet space, the last nine building InfluencerSEO into the go-to SEO partner for content creators, with 500+ creators served from pre-launch to massive publication. She learned creator monetization and community building strategy from the inside working for Lauryn Bosstick of The Skinny Confidential prior to founding InfluencerSEO, so she understands both halves of the game: how search actually works AND how creators actually build a strong community online and make money. Her job now is to stay ahead of where search engine optimization is going, especially as AI rewrites the rules, and to make sure the creators she works with get there first.
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