Boost Your Small Business: Why a Blog is Key to Your Digital Footprint
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Blogging* is a powerful strategy to grow your digital footprint through your website, making it easier for the right people to find you. In this article we answer common questions about how creating and maintaining a blog expands your digital footprint, and why it’s important.
*Don’t love the word ‘blogging’ for your business? Keep reading! We offer alternative terms you can use.
What is a digital footprint, and how does a blog contribute to it?
I love the term ‘digital footprint’ to describe the content you create that appears in online searches. It’s a helpful way for small business owners to visualize how their original content takes up space online around keywords and topic areas that will attract and ultimately help their ideal audience. Committing to creating and posting fresh, relevant content to your website on a regular basis will expand your digital footprint and increase your chances of showing up in user searches over time.
How can blogging attract more clients and improve my online presence?
When you build out a blog, you do four important things - two relate to your business overall and two of them relate specifically to SEO.
Business Overall
1. Thought leadership. Creating content around your areas of expertise and experience allows your brand’s unique voice to stand out in the marketplace. It positions you as a leader and active contributor to the ongoing conversations in your field. So when potential clients are looking for solutions you can provide, your content can show up in the mix as a valuable resource, building trust and putting your business on their radar for consideration.
2. Client assistance. You actually help your clients solve problems and make it easier to do business with you. With a range of content - from how-to’s, to deep dives on specialty areas, to resource advice, to upcoming events - you have the opportunity to meet your clients’ needs as well as guide their next steps with your business. For service-based businesses with a consultative sales process, blog articles can be a powerful tool to educate prospects about your approach, answer common questions upfront, and reduce the need for follow-ups via email or phone - ultimately helping to shorten your sales cycle. Keep in mind that the goal of your content is always to provide helpful, trustworthy information for actual humans.
SEO
3. Relevance. You increase the likelihood of showing up in searches related to your target keywords and topics. If you don’t add fresh content, all that search engines have to work with is the existing set of pages on your website (or videos uploaded to sites like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia, if you are creating them, as they also show up in search). If you want to attract visitors to your website, creating a blog that covers topics of interest to your potential clients is a great strategy.
4. Trust. You build trust with Google’s search engines by demonstrating E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Consistently publishing content on your key topics establishes you as a credible and authoritative source, especially if you include authorship notation and links to the author’s credentials or LinkedIn bio. By optimizing your content for E-E-A-T, you increase the chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
When is the right time to start a blog for my business & how often should I publish posts to stay relevant and consistent?
My advice regarding timing is to start ASAP. The sooner you add to your digital footprint, the sooner you will be in a position to reap the blogging benefits outlined above.
Frequency is informed by four things:
How much you have to invest in your ongoing marketing efforts
How eager you are to drive traffic to your website
What bandwidth you have available to contribute to the content creation
How dynamic your industry and business are
How often you publish posts really boils down to your budget & time available. If you’re here reading this blog, you are likely a small business owner, independent professional or solo entrepreneur, and you have your hands full running your business and serving your clients. If so, then it makes a lot of sense to outsource your blogging efforts to a marketing professional.
Here at Rinehart Marketing, we have very flexible starter retainer packages that include a combination of content planning, consulting, reputation management services and what we call ‘marketing units.’ These units are made up of blog articles we write, social media posts we create, and/or emails we craft on a client’s behalf. Clients decide how many marketing units they can afford at the outset.
When you first start a blog, we recommend launching with at least three articles at once to get a bit of critical mass out there. The subsequent rhythm for posting is dictated by your budget. We have some clients who post every other month and some that post four articles a month.
Why a marketing professional should help you with blogging:
They can help ensure that the messaging and visuals are integrated into your overall marketing editorial calendar and the blog articles get shared across your marketing channels (social media, email marketing, etc.).
They can create a process of creating content with you that is streamlined and fits how you work.
They can help you ensure that there is an appropriate balance and variety of content to hit your prioritized topics and keywords.
They can edit the copy to ensure it’s written with a voice that aligns with your brand.
They can optimize the content for SEO when placed on your website.
They can ensure it is posted correctly to your website with properly sized images that blend with your site’s aesthetic.
What topics should I write about to engage my audience and grow my business?
To begin, we recommend that your blog content fit into your overall editorial calendar, so whatever approach you choose to identify your topic areas, you use them to guide all of your content creation efforts. Ultimately, we suggest you land on 5-6 topic areas or content pillars that give a general direction for your overall content. These pillars will help you stay focused on your core messaging and help you repeat them regularly.
There are several ways to get at your content pillars. It can sometimes be helpful to start this effort off with a mind map exercise. I love this approach because it opens up brainstorming and eliminates linear thinking. Start with the key topics you have expertise in and where you have advice to offer as branches off of a circle representing your content. Or you can start with your key selling points, main differentiators from your competition, or your primary service areas. Then build out variations on those topics as branches off of each one. Add questions your target audience may have as additional branches, and so on. Give yourself about 10-15 minutes. Then look over what you developed and you should see logical groupings emerge that could guide you to your primary content buckets. (Tip: use the details generated to start your list of blog article ideas!)
Another way to get at your content pillars is to think about search intent (also called user intent), and then line up your content that way. There are 4 basic types of search intent:
Informational: The user is asking questions like “How to…?” or “What is…?”
Commercial: These are searches where the user is in the research phase, asking comparison questions (X vs Y), or ‘best category XYZ’, and looking up reviews.
Transactional: The user is in shopping mode so asking ‘purchase’ questions like ‘XYZ product near me’, as well as very specific product/service details
Navigational: These are branded searches where the user simply types in a company name to get to their website, or could actually be looking for geographical info like ‘where is Company A headquartered?’
Search Intent + Buyer Journey funnel
For another approach, think about your client’s journey through the traditional marketing funnel. The search intent funnel maps fairly well to the marketing funnel (see above), and your blog content could align with these various stages. Blogging often focuses on content that addresses informational intent, so is designed to attract new visitors to the top of the funnel. But as referenced earlier, content that answers questions about how clients engage with your business, or showcases client successes or upcoming events, can attract users lower in the funnel.
In our engagements, in addition to the 5-6 main pillars, we also track where in the funnel the content in mind is aimed, striving for an even distribution across all of them over time. Keep in mind that it’s also helpful to create varied types of content. Blog articles can come in lots of different forms. This article from Optinmonster does a great job of summarizing the top types that can generate engagement.
Quick Writing Tip
Once you have a topic you want to write about, use ChatGPT to help generate the questions you should answer in the article!
The word 'blog' sounds too casual and personal. What's an alternative I could use in my business?
Some business owners may associate the word ‘blog’ with individuals sharing their personal experiences and journal entries online. While that is certainly how blogging started, the term has expanded to encompass the general process of sharing periodic updates in article form on a website.
Some businesses may find it preferable to label their blog area with one of these alternate terms:
Insights – Implies helpful information or expertise (e.g., “Marketing Insights”)
Articles – Feels professional and accessible (e.g., “Latest Articles”)
Updates – Suggests timely content and news (e.g., “News & Updates”)
Resources – Appeals to value-seeking business owners (e.g., “Business Resources”)
You may also want to read more about how blogging fits into your overall marketing plans.
If you’re ready to start, we’d love to get your blogging strategy underway! Reach out.
