SEO (as we’ve discussed), comes from a core of good, frequently updated content—otherwise, search engine crawlers as well as your customers) may think that your business isn’t active. That means fewer appearances in search results, fewer website visitors, and fewer sales. You need to be refreshing your website on a regular basis with new photos, videos, and written copy.
To many people, “fresh content” brings blogging to mind. Depending on your offer, your brand, and a number of personal factors, that may or may not be true.
How a Blog Can Help Your Website
If keeping a blog sounds fun to you, and you’re able to generate the topics needed to update a couple times a month or more: fantastic. It’s an excellent way to keep your search engine optimization in tip-top shape—a way to use SEO keywords that meet the needs of your audience. And that’s the crux of it. The purpose of the blog is to be useful to your website visitors.
When people come to your website, they have questions. They might be looking to buy your offer, or they might be looking into who you are as a business. They also might just be looking up an answer to a general question they have related to your field.
- A fitness instructor might write about how to supplement marathon training with strength exercises.
- A tailor might write about simple sewing tricks like how to replace a button that’s popped off your sweater.
- Someone who works for a website design company might write about deciding whether to blog or not (OMG that’s what is happening right now).
That’s right: you are a subject matter expert! What do you know that your customer might not? While it’s important to keep your content high-level and concise on top-level pages of your website, blogging lets you get into finer detail about things your audience might be curious about.
What Your Blog Shouldn’t Be
At the risk of dating myself, I come from a time where the reason one needed a blog was so they could share their inside thoughts with the capital-I Internet. Blogs were synonymous with pouring your heart out to strangers, and dare I say being a bit…emo. (Yes I had a Livejournal, a Xanga account, and asymmetrical bangs with a side part.)
That honor is now reserved for one’s social media accounts. Blogging is now largely the domain of thought leaders and businesses. Sharing on your business blog shouldn’t be about keeping a public online diary.
Am I saying you should keep it sterile and impersonal? Not if you want people to read it. In fact, if you’re unable to muster the enthusiasm to keep up regular blogging, or if writing in general fills you with existential dread, just don’t do it! There are other options.
Refresh Your Content without Blogging
There’s more than one way to refresh the content on your website. Here are a few other ideas:
Update your products or offer information regularly.
If you’re like most businesses, you don’t have one single offer that stays exactly the same year after year after year. Even if the offer is the same, there are still elements about it that are different. Going into detail about your offer gives you more opportunities to display how they change. Maybe you added an additional service to your package, or a new flavor of kombucha, or you changed the design of your bicycle frames. Tell folks about it on your website.
Outsource the content to your customers.
Your customers can do work on your website for you, although you will have to do a little legwork to get them to do so. Frequently asking for reviews, then posting snippets of them on your site, can provide the social proof to folks that you are out there killin’ it on the regular. And it reminds the website crawlers that your page should continue to be indexed and prioritized.
Show off a little bit.
Did you just finish up a cool new project? Are the photos currently on your website looking a little stale? Get yourself some new photo or video and get them online. Updates that include visual content can be effective in getting positive attention—and keeping it.
Do What Feels Right
If you like writing, and you feel that you can share something with your customers that they’ll get value out of—get clickety-clacking on that keyboard. If that doesn’t seem like the best use of your time and energy, keep working on the things that are. It’s that simple.
And no, I am totally not listening to Fall Out Boy right now. Well, not right now anyway.
