Local SEO Video: Why a Local Business Should Blog

If you are a Small Business you Should be Blogging!

Here is a Local SEO video that I created a few months ago to help local businesses, such as; dentists, doctors, therapists, physicians, and etc. to get more new customers and be seen as an industry expert through a content marketing strategy called blogging. Blogging is a great strategy to engage with your website visitors. Most people are not going to just buy immediately from you.

Therefore, if you can create a blog post answering their questions, showing your business as an industry expert, this could be a great lead generation funnel.

Like most businesses, you have tons of competitors who have been consistently promoting their business online to generate more leads and sales. Therefore, blogging can push you ahead of the competition especially those that don’t have time to engage with their customers by writing free content that is answering topical questions.

This strategy can drive visibility, brand awareness, and leads because you are taking the extra step to show your customers you care about the questions they have and are willing to answer them for free through a blog post.

Here is our video about the importance of blogging for local businesses with more in-depth insights. Enjoy!

Local SEO Video Transcription

Video Transcript Start

Hey everyone, hope you had a happy Thanksgiving. I did miss last week’s episode obviously due to the holidays, but we’re back at it this week. And also when I give a big shout out to the Davidson Wildcats. They have a big win to earn today against the Tar Heels. But without further ado, we’re going to discuss if you’re a local business, why you should blog. I get this question a lot, so I thought it was pertinent to discuss it. So let’s jump right in.

So what is blogging?

So in a very simplistic explanation. A blog is an online journal that can be used to share news, ideas, thoughts, photos, and much more. So you don’t have to be some industry expert or have a ton of knowledge on a specific topic or be a journalism major.

Really, you’re just a person that have aspirations to share your ideas with the world. You have some experience on whatever you’re topic is and you want to just add value. And that is a key to blogging and you should do it frequently. So anyone can blog.

There are a ton of mommy blogs, there’s tons of trainers who blog, there’s tons of businesses that blog. So blogging is very important and it provides a lot of valuable for people researching online.

So how do you see a blog?

You may have been on the website and you don’t even know what blogging is. But just from a simplistic standpoint, here’s my website for Organic Clicks. And at the very top of every website, you’re gonna see the navigation. And that helps you to figure out where to travel within that website, to figure out what you’re trying to find.

So the navigation, you typically see the home page, how it works, Charlotte SEO, the portfolio page, the blog, contact, and then a free SEO audit. So the blog page is just a compilation of all these blog posts that we have written for our industry.

So if you’re on a site and you see the blog and the navigation or you see news or some kind of a specific page that’s geared towards that maybe is frequent content, then click on that page then you’ll see a list of posts like this.

So when you click on blog in our navigation, you will see all the content that we have put out there for our industry in our niche to really just to show from an SEO standpoint, there is so much to understand about SEO. So we’ve broken it down and added value through blogging, through different subtopics of the holistic view of SEO.

So if you own a website and you see this, this is what a blog will look like. It’s gonna be frequent content that’s being updated and you’ll see that in a paginate option at the bottom of the website. So you’ll see a list and then you’ll be able click on second and third page… you know different pages of the blog to see more blog posts.

All right, so why should you blog?

If you’re a business; you’re running a business, you’re trying to keep your head above water. We all know that it’s no easy task to run a business, right? But why should you blog as a business owner? First thing, there’s a lot of stats here.

I’m only gonna read the ones that really stand out and that will really grab your attention in a sense that you need to do it. Like you need to be an industry expert, you need to add value, you need to get more traffic to your website. But some of the most important stats here are some small businesses with blogs generate 126 more leads.

For me, as a small business owner, I want as many leads as I can get. So I’m gonna try to blog frequently because if that’s the ratio, then I want to make sure I’m in the upper part of that.

Also, interesting content is one of the top three reasons people follow brands on social media. So, interesting content. You’re not just blogging. You’re not just really blogging just 200, 300 words of content. You want to blog and provide interesting content.

So that may be 1,000 words or it may be 2,000. Who knows? But you want to make that content that you wrote to answer questions and really provide the insights that they can’t really get anywhere else all in one place and your brand will be followed on social media, Google will like you, you’ll get more leads that way. So creating interesting content is very important.

This is the big number that stands out that you see here is websites with blogs have 434 percent more indexed pages.

But what does it mean for your website to be indexed?

So Google has these crawlers and they crawl websites to figure out what the content is about and then they index these websites in their database. And then they show these websites online when someone searches for their keywords or their topics that’s relevant to that page. So you want to make sure that like if you… the more you blog… because Google doesn’t crawl every page on your website. They just don’t. And if they do, it’s a very slow process.

And there’s also SEO techniques that you can utilize that can ping your page to Google to help them know that you created a new piece of content. But from a general sense of just creating new blog posts on a consistent basis. But what happens is the more content you have… Google will index more content.

So the more content you create, they’re gonna find that content. If you interconnect those pages on your website within the content; the new content you create, Google will be able to crawl more pages on your website. So that’s why that number stands out so much. And the more pages you have indexed, the more opportunities you have to rank, the more opportunities you have you know for customers and drive sales essentially.

So this stands out more than anything and it’s… yeah you want to add value, you want to create really good content but blog frequency impacts customer acquisition. If you’re a business, you want to acquire a customer. That’s your ultimate goal, that’s how you keep your lights on, that’s how you pay your bills, that’s how you continue to generate more revenue, so forth. And if you look at the x-axis here.

So this is how frequently a business or businesses online blog. And thank you Inbound Marketing, Hubspot for providing this data. But what this says is the more you blog the more leads you get and the percentages for the bar graph is if you’re a business and you’re blogging this many times a day, you know here are the percentages of businesses that are generating leads based on how many times they blog.

So if I’m a business and I’m blogging multiple times a day, overall 89 percent of those businesses are getting leads from their blog post. So if you’re blogging monthly, 49 percent of those businesses that are blogging monthly are getting leads from their blog post.

So obviously it’s very important to write valuable content. But how frequently you blog is gonna be valuable in terms of generating leads, brand awareness, and just overall indexing your website via Google. So when you blog also you’re gonna become an industry expert.

If you can create valuable content and you can really, really engage the user in a way that keeps them on your site. You answer their questions. They’re gonna continue to come back to you the more content you can create and be seen as the industry expert.

They’re gonna pass your information on to other people, the online word-of-mouth, Google is gonna like you, other websites are gonna mention you because of your expertise and it’s just going to help your business stand out.

It’s easier to make sales that way because people are coming to your business. Most of them don’t know who you are and if you can answer their questions and provide that information for free, that’s gonna really help you stand out. So just to give you an example.

We have a brewery client. And what we did for them, we created a blog post there in Raleigh. So we created a blog post about the ultimate list of things to do in Raleigh North Carolina which you can see currently here on this image and what we wanted to do was really just to add value to the community in the Raleigh area and say, “Hey here are all… If you’re a newcomer or you’ve been here for a while, here are all the things that you can do in Raleigh”.

And obviously at some point in that article we do mention their brewery tour as something to you know… an event to participate in that would be fun to do in the Raleigh area. And that just adds a lot of value. We try to create better and more valuable content than the articles that are already currently online for that same topic.

And if you look at their traffic to all their pages and this is over time, that page is the seventh most visited page. And there’s a blog post on the site. It’s not in the main navigation. I could click on blog and then it’s buried down into the blog post.

But Google gives this page a lot of traffic and it’s also… if you look at average time on the page here at the end this last column, it’s the second most visited page behind the home page. So that shows you they’ve added some value. We’ve added some value here and really to help them drive new customers and more visibility online.

So what to blog about?

The biggest thing I could tell you here is just to add value. Like be accessible in a sense to give them the free information they’re looking for. That’s the point of blogging; to give out free information. Answer questions you know there’s ways to do that and we’ll discuss that at the end.

But answer questions that your customers are having and that will generate content. Some of the best things to do in your city you and then even if you include yourself or don’t include yourself in that list; be a resource to the community with valuable content through a blog post. That’ll be helpful for your industry and also help you rank in Google for certain targeted keywords.

Relevant events, you can interview someone  that’s an industry expert that can provide valuable insights that people don’t have access to. Discuss news in your industry or city. As a local business, you do want to localize like your content so that Google knows okay their content is based around this location around this topic and it helps them to rank other pages on your website from a local standpoint.

And when people are searching for specific topics in their city and Google understands or knows that they’re in that city because Google knows what city you’re in based on your search history and your IP address; all that stuff. So when Google knows that information, they can serve your content because it’s localized for that topic. It’s not generalized in a sense. So just adding value, writing about some of these things, and just finding ways to be a resource for your audience is key. Not looking to necessarily drive sales within your content, but they’ll naturally happen.

Need help with blogging. A lot of businesses don’t blog. They don’t even understand why they need to blog. And a lot of that is there’s some SEO marketing strategies behind that and some of the stars for keyword research we have tools that will tell us, “Here’s a topic that your customers are asking questions about”. And we will look at those keywords and figure out how to create content based on that topic and the subtopics under it to really add value to your content and turn that into a blog post to show you as the industry expert.

You don’t wanna just always be blogging about general topics and not location specific if your a local business. Google will pinpoint and know where you are in a sense of the industry and the location area and then that helps rank other pages. Then ranking at the top of Google you know is the key. If you could localize it, that would be better because Google knows where people are.

There’s SEO strategies behind what was just mentioned that is not just keyword research and writing content. There’s getting other people to mention this content on their website. If it’s valuable, it will naturally attract that. But if you can create content that you can say hey to other you know, say like you’re a local Chamber or one of your local news websites that hey here’s some valuable content, there’s nowhere else online, we’ll love for you to share. These are opportunities for you to be connected with your community essentially. But it also… like it says here it will rank you. It’ll help you rank in the top parts of Google.

So, just really quick here’s a business that we work with. They had zero monthly visits and we obviously did a lot of the SEO on their main pages. But we really focused on blogging as a long-term strategy and now that in 2016 they’re roughly about 15,000 monthly sessions and that was just being consistent blogging on a daily basis and really just adding value to the community. And now their business is booming and their sales are out the roof just because we stay consistent with the blogging aspect.

So if you’re interested you know a free SEO audit or just want to learn more, you can contact us via the website or phone. But don’t hesitate. I’m here to help. I love to help businesses to grow their business online and that starts with the blogging aspect of it.

We can definitely help you stand out as an industry expert, drive more leads, and create a brand that allows you to eventually say hey, this is a well-oiled machine that works well for you and not you working always in the business. I’m a small business owner. So I definitely, definitely understand what that means. But anyways, hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Thank you for listening and I will see you guys next week.

Video Transcript End

If you are looking for a content marketing company in Charlotte that can help with your blogging, don’t hesitate to contact us at https://organiclicks.com/contact/ or call 704-288-4645!

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