Help, I don't know how & what to write on my company blog!

What should you write on your blog?

If you have been in business for a while and you have a company website, you may have wondered and probably struggled about blogging - meaning - what to put on your website blog. You may have added a few "news" items about the company, you had an event and raised some money for charity or you launched a new product and wrote a 300-word blog post about it. Or someone dressed up for someone's 40th birthday party and you post some mobile phone photos about it on your company blog. And the last time you did that was in August 2016. While all these things are OK to be put on a blog, they should not make the bulk of your company blog.

Everyone talks about blogging, but what should you put on your blog?

What is a blog and what does blogging mean?

The word "blog" is short for "weblog". According to Google, a blog is an online journal or informational website displaying information that has been added to the blog in the form of blog posts and they are displayed in reverse chronological order, i.e. newest blog post first. Blogs can be run by an individual or small group of people where they provide blog posts in an informal and conversational style. 

Now forget you ever read that!

That's the definition that Google displays first. So many companies think that this is what a blog is - a list of chronological events that happened and you blog about on your company website.

Blogging - for business - is not a list of events your potential buyers don't care about!

For a business, this is not the case, and this aspect of blogging should only be a very tiny part of your company website blog. 

The first thing to note is: The blog is not about you or your company, and the blog is not a news outlet for your company events nor products.

The blog should be the vehicle that carries your company's and industry specialist knowledge that you are happy to share with the world without your readers having to pay for it. The company blog should hold the information that helps your customers decide to buy a product or service like yours - or not.

The blog is THE most important part of a website nowadays, the one you should update and add to most often (and that means weekly, if not more often!). 

However, unfortunately, most people spend most of their budget on the actual website. They have the blog functionality added, but it's soon forgotten about, or no-one really takes ownership of the blog, so it will be added to half-heartedly every now and then when the MD realises it needs an update. 

The usual website process (the one I've seen a lot!)

Many businesses have a well-designed website. They might even spend money on SEO - search engine optimisation - so that the website can be found in Google.

The website might have 5-10 pages explaining the company's services, products, the mission statement. It might also provide information about the staff, the directors and owners and the company history.

While all this is important, this is only a small element that potential buyers require for their purchasing decision. For someone to buy or send a message through the contact form or lift the phone, they will want to learn about the product or service they are about to spend money on and how this will benefit them in their life or business. They need to be convinced with more than the mission statement that you are a trustworthy company who cares about their clients' needs. The more information you provide to your clients before they buy, the more you engage with your customers, the more likely they are to buy from you.

If your website only provides them with 5 minutes of reading time, you have no chance to even be considered as a contender. So this is where the blog comes in!

But... before we get to the blog...

Let's have a quick look at search engine optimisation and homepage design

Many companies (and design agencies) spend a HUGE amount of effort on the perfect homepage design and optimise this page to death. While this is important, and the homepage is usually in the top ten landing pages (a landing page is the page a visitor accesses first when visiting your website before hopefully clicking through to other pages), there will be a significant percentage of your visitors who arrive at your website through a page other than the homepage. They might "land" on the about page first, or on a blog post. And this is a good thing!

For example, on my photography website - in October 2019, only 4% of all my website visitors arrived on my website and visited the homepage as the first page they visited. 4%! I just checked with another client of mine and their stats look very similar: 6% of all their website visitors in October 2019 arrived on the homepage first before accessing the other content. Another client's website is different - 34% arrived on the homepage before visiting the other website content. That's still 66% that arrived on other pages before they even looked at the homepage (if they did at all!).

As you can see in this image from my photography website, almost 27% of visitors were pulled in through one blog post alone! The homepage is on position 5 and rather insignificant in comparison to the blog pages that make up the other spots.

So what should you write on the blog? 

A well structured blog contains a few different categories or tags by which the blog posts can be searched or categorised. It should contain well-written long blog posts that include images, infographics and videos that support the topic you are writing about.

Website visitors coming to your website are at different stages in their buying journey. They might just look for some information as they realised they want to solve a problem (Stage 1 - Research). Or they know they have a problem, and they are now comparing alternatives (Stage 2 - Comparing Alternatives). Ultimately, when they are ready to buy and they know what product or service to purchase, they make a buying decision (Stage 3 - Decision). Your blog should provide content for the different stages of the buying process. Each blog post then needs to be optimised for the search phrase you are targeting so that the page can be found in Google for the relevant key phrase.

You also need to know WHO you are writing for. 

I have had many interviews with with companies before I started designing and implementing their website. I asked them who they want to sell to, and I usually get the answer "anybody who wants to buy our stuff". In web terms - anybody means nobody. Have a look at your existing clients and create a list with your 10 favourite clients. Now look at them in more depth and figure out what these people have in common. They might all be men, in their late 40s, who drive a BMW and play golf at the weekends. 

And why is that even important? What you are looking for is your ideal buyer persona. This is a fictional description of your ideal client, and with this ideal client in mind, you can start writing blog posts. It's best to give this person a descriptive name, for example Busy Steve. 

Busy Steve has worked as a manager in a restaurant for a long time and he has dreamt of running his own place for years, and he is about to open a new restaurant. He has got bags of industry experience, but he needs to learn a lot of things very fast.

So what does that have to do with our blog? 

The research phase in the buying journey (i.e. he is not ready to buy yet!), Busy Steve is simply researching.

Let's take the example of a company selling commercial cleaning chemicals. Busy Steve needs to buy cleaning chemicals for his kitchen and for his restaurant area as well as his guest toilets. So he heads over to Google, and he enters "essential cleaning products for restaurant toilets" (click here to see what that search looks like).

He scans the first page in google (let's face it, no-one ever goes to page 2!) and there is an article that says "Top 5 essential cleaning products for restaurant toilets". After he clicks on this link, he will see a comprehensive blog post answering exactly that question.

This blog post gives him a list of cleaning products he needs to buy for his restaurant toilets. He now knows which products to buy. The blog posts also contains an additional link to another blog post with the headline "The top 7 cleaning products for your restaurant kitchen". Busy Steve needs to buy cleaning products for his kitchen too and he then reads the blog posts about the kitchen products. So without leaving the website which has provided the answers to his first question (AND a second question he didn't even search about in the first place), he now learnt about what's important for him to know and he learnt about the company that provided the information.

He also learnt that the company who provided the blog post can supply all the products he needs. Busy Steve never looked for a company name on Google nor did he enter key phrases like "cleaning chemicals Edinburgh". Luckily, the company who answered his question is not far from Edinburgh, but let's get to that later.

He entered a question into Google. What has happened now is that the company is now on Steve's RADAR. He's not ready to buy, but he's seen the name of the company and he spent maybe 20 minutes reading blog posts on their website, learning about what he needs for his business. 

Stage two of the buying journey - Steve knows what products he needs and he's now ready to compare alternatives.

He opens Google and - as he likes to work with local companies - he enters "cleaning chemicals supplier in Scotland". And after a look on the first page in google, he sees the same name of the company whose website provided him with the initial information in the blog posts. The Google search is re-affirming his knowledge about the company. He also sees a few other companies and he checks them out.

He now gets a good idea of how much cleaning chemicals cost, but he finds it hard to compare prices. So he enters in Google "price comparison restaurant cleaning chemicals". And guess what - the company he has seen before and has read the articles about the essential cleaning products on - provide an article about price comparison. He then sees that they also have a cost calculator on their website where you can enter the price of a competitor and you can check if it would be cheaper or more expensive to buy from this company. 

By now, Steve has spent a considerable amount of time on the supplier's website and their name is familiar to him by now. He knows where they are located, and he has built a picture about this company and also learnt that they really care about his needs. He finds out that they can deliver the products for free by the next working day, and he can also try out their products before committing to a contract. 

By this time, the likelihood that Steve fills in the contact form of said supplier is very high - and all that because they spent time on providing answers to questions that their customers ask at different times during their buying journey, by providing helpful information about the products in general (incl. their competitors products), without ever being pushy and trying to sell Steve anything.

The company have demonstrated knowledge and transparency about their products and their pricing. Steve is impressed and he has now got enough information to make a buying decision and can provide his information to the company and try out their products.

So where do you get your blog content ideas from?

You will probably have done the same thing!

Many people now use Google as an answering search machine to their questions and they look for key phrases much less frequently. People want answers to their questions, they do not want to be sold to.

The way we search has changed dramatically in the past few years and as a business, we can make use of this for our blog.

There are websites and tools available which provide you with the questions the people ask online about your product or service.

However, a great place to start is your own business: What are the questions that your customers keep asking over and over again? You could do a brain storm session with your staff and write down all the questions your customers ask. Every single question can be the topic of a blog post.

There are tools available - paid and unpaid - that can provide you with number of searches people make in Google (and other search engines such as Bing) for a certain key phrase. This will give you a good indicator on what to optimise your blog for.

Another example - imagine a bride and groom are looking for a wedding photographer in Edinburgh. There is so much competition! There are literally hundreds of wedding photographers in Scotland. How do you even get to be on the first page in google? You can optimise your website for the phrase "Wedding photographer Edinburgh" until the cows come home, you might never get to the first page! But what if you wrote content related to your service or weddings in general?

Your competition is unlikely to do this. Why not? Because it's time consuming, scary and new, unproven (hell no!), and takes ages to take affect (hell no, again!). But let's not get the secret out!

So if 3000 people a month look for "wedding photographer Edinburgh", and 500 people look for "Best Wedding photographer Edinburgh" and another 300 search for "how much are wedding photographers in Edinburgh" - you can provide good content on your website to answer these questions and you are VERY likely to be on the first page in google for these more specific searches. Whereas if you are trying to compete for a very generic search phrase, that's a much harder game!

How long should my blog post be?

Brace yourself! 2000+ words! You've read this far, you've read more than 2000 words now. 2000+ word articles are the ones that search engines really like. It shows the search engine you have researched the subject thoroughly and provided a well-informed answer to a question or information about a certain subject.

Yes, writing blog posts is VERY time-consuming!!

Writing a blog post is time consuming. If you do this in-house, you can easily plan to spend 4-8 hours to get a blog post right. You can outsource this service, or work on the articles internally. And cutting corners doesn't work unfortunately. Writing a blog post with only 300 words or 500 words will not do anything for you in the search results. A well written blog post is an asset that keeps on giving. This asset can start pulling in website visitors within a very small number of weeks. And it keeps on doing that going forward.

Still need proof? Look at my stats!

I have been developing websites since 2000! So I have my 20-year anniversary next year. I have always struggled to get content from my clients, they always found it hard to write about themselves and provide helpful content about their products and services.

I was introduced to an online community based in Scotland which sadly no longer exists and all my years of trying to convince clients to give me words about their services were not wasted. The community members all shared the same idea about creating helpful content to their potential and existing clients.

With this group, I started a content experiment on my photography website on 1st June 2017. I started writing blog posts - 1 per week. Gradually, they got longer and longer. I wrote one blog post per week for 6 months. Then I didn't touch my website for about 6 months - and guess what, the visitor numbers kept increasing month by month.

My photography website had around 350 unique visitors per month in June 2017. Now, there are on average 4000+ unique visitors per month to my photography website, 11 x as many as in June 2017! The ONLY thing I have changed is writing content. I never paid for PPC (pay per click) advertising, I never took out an advert in a magazine and I hardly even pushed the blog articles on Social Media.

Are you still unsure about what to write on your blog?

I can help you get started! I can provide you with 3 blog post ideas for your website! 

Just post your website into the comment section and I will give you three headlines!

Happy Blogging everyone!

Nadin Thomson

Content Marketing | Digital Marketing | 07834 826 500