A business blog remains an essential part of any content marketing strategy for 2017.
Your blog is an essential part of your inbound marketing strategy and contributes hugely to organic SEO. Many smaller businesses may still struggle to see the benefits of blogging when offset against the time it takes, but as the content hub of your business website, the SEO benefits of a regularly maintained blog are well documented.
So what are the likely trends for business blogs in 2017?
Video, Video, Video
Incorporating video into your business blog helps to boost engagement and makes your content very accessible on mobile and tablet. It is also great for SEO. The presence of a video itself is an indicator of quality content. Paying attention to the video title and ensuring that you describe your video with identifying keywords will also boost SEO. Video is extremely good at conveying information visually without overloading the viewer with too much text. According to ComScore 64% of consumers are more likely to purchase an item online after watching a video.
Information rather than promotion
Make your blog a great place to come for information, not just another puffed-up promotional page. Aim for content which will engage your current customers as well as trying to attract new ones. If you can produce good, authoritative content you will hopefully find new customers as well as offering something of value to your existing ones. Using common customer questions, and answering them, as the basis for a blog post is a great way of making your content relevant. This also enables a business to promote its services in a more informative and engaging way. Offering a solution to a common problem can also be a good basis for a blog, allowing you to show your understanding of customer’s needs and how your company or product can help.
Mix it up
Experimenting with different types of content rather than sticking to a traditional blog format is a trend which is likely to continue into 2017. From down-loadable information sheets or e-books which focus on a particular subject to Case Studies, videos, quizzes, polls and even webinars, diversification is a great way of delivering more informative content as well as offering the opportunity for data capture in the form of email addresses and new subscribers.
Get in to the detail
The days of simply churning out blog posts have gone, yes, content is king, but the sheer quantity of content out there means increasingly now you must think quality over quantity. Consider creating some longer content pieces – 2000 words or more. This long form content enables you to go into much greater detail about a subject which will get greater visibility in search, increase your website’s authority and attract more inbound links. Longer, more detailed content allows more possibilities for interlinking to other content on your site and including external links to corroborate your facts. Longer content takes more research, time and effort to produce but it is worth including in your blogging schedule. It may be worth considering outsourcing the creation of longer form content to a specialist content marketer if you lack the time, skill set or resources to do this yourself, although, do ensure that you have a clear brief and goal in mind.
Make it shareable
Make sure that your content is easy to share by adding social sharing buttons into your posts – this will increase the likelihood of the content being shared and therefore increase traffic and visibility to your blog. Getting your content shared will again increase your websites authority and build trust in your company or product.
Your business blog can be an invaluable asset to your business SEO and content strategy, for more information on why you should blog see our earlier blog post. For help with content creation and publishing, contact us.