Regardless of whether you’re a small business or a multinational company, blogging should be an integral part of your online content marketing strategy. A blog drives traffic to your website, increases your SEO, positions your brand as an industry leader and helps you develop better customer relationships. 

How often you blog is up to you (here at Smart Foundations, we blog once a week), as long as you blog on a more or less regularly scheduled basis. More important than how often you blog is what you write and how you write it. To cash in on increasing your SEO and driving traffic to your website, you need to understand the power of Google so that the blog post you toiled over doesn’t simply fall into an online black hole.  

Google’s search engine algorithm is contextual; which means it doesn’t just look at your blog, it looks at what other items relate to your blog when determining how to rank it.   

For starters, a blog post needs to be keyword rich with words that also appear on your website. Google then associates those keywords with your brand and your messaging and understands that they belong together. Of course, you have to be strategic in this tactic, because Google’s algorithms long ago learned to avoid websites that appeared to be stuffed with keywords. 

But including keywords in your blog post is just the tip of what’s needed to get it noticed. Blogging needs to be a part of an integrated online content marketing plan. This means using the same keywords on your website, on your blog, in your tweets, in your Facebook posts, on your LinkedIn profile, in your e-newsletters, etc. Not only does that develop brand recognition amongst your customers and potential customers, but it also raises your credibility with Google. When Google’s algorithm discovers that specific keywords take multiple routes to the same destination page (your blog post) it ranks that page higher in its search rankings than pages that only have a single route. 

Once you publish and promote that keyword-rich blog post, it will forever be ranked. For days, weeks, months and even years after being posted, Google will continue to direct traffic to it – which will lead to increased business opportunities.