Blogging for your business can be an effective way to bring traffic to your website and convert visitors into customers.  Not many business owners are aware of SEO and write prolifically for their business blogs but don't take into account the SEO ramifications, or lack thereof, when crafting blog posts. This amounts to a colossal waste of time and energy on the writer's part. Before you write another article for your business take these 3 SEO Tips for Business Blogging into account and create blog posts that work harder to gain free search engine traffic for your business.


Top 3 SEO Tips for Business Blogs

SEO Tip 1 - Who are you targeting? Before you even type a word into your business blog you'll have to understand who you are writing for. A lot of business owners can give a broad description of their customer but to write with SEO in mind you'll have to whittle that description down a bit. 

Bob owns an Ice Cream Shop in Racine. He writes his posts for locals looking for an ice cream shop in the area. He has no interest in writing for ice cream aficionados elsewhere. All his posts are about new flavors and occasionally some sales promotions. His blog gets little traffic.

After learning about SEO Bob knows he needs to write for a particular customer. He has noticed in his business that mothers between 30 and 40 years old tend to visit his shop with their children. They seem, as far as he can tell, to be married, middle class, home owners with 2 children. Bob begins to target his posts to this demographic and sees an increase in social sharing of his posts and visits to his site. He has also noticed an increase in the use of a coupon he has made available exclusively through his website which indicates that this increased site traffic is converting. 

SEO Tip 3- Placement within the post. Knowing what to write about for the greatest SEO impact is one thing but you also have to know how to place keywords within the article. Content is king, especially with Google; other search engines like Bing and Yahoo use older SEO signals as part of their ranking algorithm. Blog posts all contain H tags. H1 Tag is your blog title and the strongest signal to search engines about what type of content your article or blog post contains. Use your key word in the title (H1 Tag), always. H2 and H3 tags are important as well. They are usually sub-headers in your blog post. (See our sub-header in red above? It has a variation of our Keyword phrase and is our H2 tag) Be sure to use your keyword in a few different incarnations within the post. Don't Keyword load. Keyword loading is using all the keywords you find within one post. Focus on one keyword, with a few logical variations,  per blog post.


​Business Blog SEO Wrap-Up

Blogging for your business is a great way to bring in traffic from search engines that can convert to paying customers. If your business is a small, mom and pop ice cream shop in Racine, or a chain of department stores, knowing SEO for Business Blogging can help you achieve your business goals with a tiny budget. While these aren't the be all end all tips for SEO, if you haven't been utilizing SEO in your business blogging this far, it's a good place to start. Remember, blog often, blog with SEO in mind and blog for your ideal customer to achieve greater, real world, results from your business blog.

No time to blog for your business? Contact What She Writes for assistance in crafting blogs that get results. 

Reading web copy, for a professional writer at least, can be a painful chore.  It falls into a few basic categories: written by a 5th grader, written by a mad genius (emphasis on mad), or written for a Search Engine. You are, I'm sure, fabulous at whatever you choose to do, but I can guarantee that you are no writer. I only need to read what you wrote to confirm that. 

Writing is a skill, and if you are writing because someone told you that you had to- they are right and you are wrong. At least, you are the wrong person for the job. It takes more than 10 minutes, begrudgingly, pounding away at the keyboard to craft web copy that someone is going to want to read, someone is going to want to share and Google is going to index.  Sure, you can open a can of Chef Boyardee and make your stomach stop growling, but no one is going to mistake you for Mario Batali. When you write out of obligation, and not dedication to the craft of writing, those are the results you get. 

Please, don't take my opinions (observations- I mean- I have, actually, read these things you have passed off for writing on the WWW) as an insult to your writing abilities.  If you worked at it, you could be pretty great. You, however, don't want to or don't have the time to work at writing web copy. You want it well written and you want it now.  

OK.

Here's how to improve your web copy fast and learn to doctor your Chef Boyardee prose to fool, at least a few people, into thinking you are Mario Batali. Who are we kidding; that's never going to happen. 

Tips to Fix your Web Copy 

​Get a grammar check program for the love of all that is holy. And not just any grammar check, but an AP style grammar check. Why AP style? Because everyone recognizes AP style as a professional standard. Fall below the standard and you look like an amateur - take your pick.  Get automated style, spelling and grammar checking at APStylebook.com 

To answer you next question, no, your spell check alone will not cut it! 

Write first, ask questions later. A professional writer, at least this one, writes first and then goes back to make some tweaks. Then, we let it stew a day or two, and then we line-edit. Last, but not least, we go in and edit for readability. So, pound away at those keys for 10 minutes and then save your file. Don't look at it again for at least 24 hours, 2 days is better. Why? After time has passed, you can look at something you wrote with fresh eyes and red pen at the ready. You won't notice half of the errors, redundancies, misplaced thoughts etc... immediately.

No matter what you write, it will always sound better to you right after you wrote it. It will sound not so great in 2 days and in 2 years you will struggle to remember the name of the 5th grader you hired to write it for you. Because - and you will swear- a fully grown adult could not have possibly written this garbage. 

SeO what? Search engine optimization, sounds a lot harder than it really is. The basics are that you pick one or two keywords you need to target (not 30, I repeat not 30) to gently mold your web copy around.

GENTLY. MOLD. 

You will not attempt to beat Google into submission by keyword stuffing a 300 word article with 299 different keywords or 299 different words for pasta (you're Mario Batalli, remember).

You, tell me.  Is this a pasta article you would want to read?

         "Homemade Pasta - Pasta, Spaghetti, Rigatoni, Cavatappi, Lasagna, Ravioli, Gnocchi, Angel Hair, Thin Spaghetti, Farfalle, Ditalini, Elbow Macaroni, Shells, Large Shells, Pastina can all be made at home. You can make Homemade Pasta at home in any shape you like. Homemade Pasta is more  delicious than other dry pastas. Homemade Pasta is pasta that is fresh and delicious. Homemade pasta is very popular in Italy and homemade pasta is served with many meals. The most popular Homemade Pastas in Italy can be Homemade by hand and do not necessitate any special homemade  pasta making equipment. 

Or, would you rather read this:

       Homemade pasta is traditionally served in Italy. There seems to be no limit to the variety of shapes  in which homemade pasta can be formed. From tiny pastina shaped pastas to the stuffed ravioli and long thin angel hair varieties; homemade pasta is fresh and delicious and far superior to the dry variety found on store shelves. Most Italians prefer to make the simpler shapes of homemade pasta for every-day eating, which require no special pasta-making equipment; like gnocchi and cavatappi

Focus your article on just a few words and place them naturally within the text. When you go back for your first editing session, see if there are any opportunities to add your keywords. For your last session, see where you have added too much. A good goal is around 5% keyword density for your web copy. 
Why? Over 5% keyword density and your web copy starts to sound like a mad man or a robot wrote it. Neither of those options will encourage your reader to read to the end or share your poorly written, whatever, with other people on the WWW.

That's the goal, after all - social sharing. The more eyes on your content the more opportunity for someone to take the action, via your content, that you want. Use the tips above to improve your writing or hire someone, like me, to do it for you. Whatever you do, don't ever attempt to pass-off Chef Boyardee for Mario Batali.

That's just wrong.