21 Aug A Complete Guide to Blogging for Local Businesses
Blogging remains one of the more powerful, but under-used, tools available for local businesses. Local business blogging can increase your brand visibility, generate more visits for your website, and even build more trust among potential customers.
Despite these benefits, blogging for small businesses can be an underutilised marketing tool. A lot of this is because many new entrepreneurs aren’t sure of how it can help them succeed.
At Paul Barrs Web Design, we’ve got 25 years under our belt helping local businesses transform themselves with blogging and other digital marketing strategies. We’ve seen firsthand how much of an impact local business blogging can have. It’s one of the more cost-effective and successful strategies to utilise.
In this guide, you’ll find out exactly what it can offer your company, as well as how blogging – even for beginners – doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Let’s take a look at everything you need to know about starting off and capitalising on a blog.
Why Local Businesses Should Blog: Benefits of Local Business Blogging
Many business owners believe that blogging is just for larger companies or social media influencers; they’re the ones who often have large budgets to dedicate solely to content production, after all. But that doesn’t mean that blogging doesn’t have ample benefits for local businesses. You’ll see more than a few of these.
Some of the more notable include:
- Attract ‘Near Me’ Traffic – Blog posts with local keywords help you drive ‘near me’ traffic related to your business. If you’re a local plumber, for example, you could drive visibility with ‘plumber near me’ content among potential local customers.
- Build Trust – The right kind of blog content, like useful tips and guides related to your type of business, helps build trust with potential customers. It positions you as an authority in your area at what you do.
- Drive Engagement and Conversions – With increased traffic and trust levels, you’ll see more engagement with your business, as well as more conversions. This should lead to greater revenues and overall profits as time goes on.
These benefits make blogging for local businesses more and more appealing. You can even reuse a lot of your blog content across multiple platforms.
At Paul Barrs Web Design, we integrate blogging with SEO, email marketing, and social media, alongside our web design services. With quality repurposing of your blog content, we make sure it’s not wasted and that you get the best return on investment possible from your blog.
Choosing the Right Website Platform
When you’re creating a website – either with or without a blog – you’ll need a platform to host it on. There are plenty of options you can go for with this. But that doesn’t mean all of them are actually recommended. Some are noticeably better than their alternatives.
The best option for this is (self-hosted) WordPress. It offers more than a few benefits for website owners, with some of the more notable being:
- Flexibility – WordPress supports all types of content, from blog posts and videos to e-commerce integrations. It’s flexible enough to do everything you want.
- SEO-Ready – The countless plugins and integrations WordPress has make it easy to work with SEO in mind. It even offers SEO blogging tips to help, too.
- Ownership – Unlike many of its alternatives, you completely own your domain and content when you self-host with WordPress. This can be vital.
- Resources – WordPress offers more than a few resources, even free ones, to website owners. These span everything from guides to plugins you can use.
Each of these benefits helps to make the WordPress CMS the best option on the market. It makes setting up your blog and publishing your content as easy as possible.
At Paul Barrs Web Design, we offer managed WordPress hosting for businesses. We take care of the technical and security sides, so you can focus on running your business and making sure your blog works for you. We’re here to get you started on WordPress and blogging for your businesses.
What to Blog About: Getting Started With Blogging for Beginners
One of the biggest challenges in blogging for beginners is figuring out what you should write about. There are some key factors to keep in mind for this. The first is to make sure it’s relevant to your type of business. Then there’s having a mix of evergreen and topical content.
These keep potential customers engaged while growing your business. There are multiple content ideas you can go for with this, like:
- FAQs
- Case Studies
- Local News
- How-to Guides
- Checklists
Using a combination of these makes sure you can keep bringing in attention, while also helping to keep your content ideas fresh and interesting. Mix up your content as much as you can.
It’s also worth making sure you always relate these back to your local area. That way, you’re much more likely to turn up for local search terms, which then helps to fuel your blog success.
Blogging for SEO: SEO Blogging Tips to Use
Getting noticed online is vital for local businesses, even when they’re just targeting a relatively small geographic area. This means ranking well on search engines so your brand gets noticed for local search terms related to your business.
That’s where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes in. It’s the process of optimising your content to rank as well as possible on search engines like Google. While it takes time, a few SEO blogging tips can make it more straightforward.
Some of the most notable of these to pay attention to include:
- Use Local Keywords – To see success in local SEO, you need to focus on local keywords. Including the city you’re based in across your blog is vital.
- Optimise Meta Titles and Descriptions – These help search engines, and even potential customers, properly understand what a blog is about.
- Structure With Headings – These make blogs easier to scan through and read, making them much more likely to rank on SERPs.
- Add Internal Links – These connect your blog posts to service pages and other key content, helping to increase their visibility.
- Use Image Alt Texts – Image alt texts let search engines understand what’s in an image, making them more accessible and improving your rankings.
Consistently putting the time into SEO – as well as blog creation as a whole – is vital for seeing long-term success. Don’t just try it every once in a while; you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Repurposing Content to Increase Impact
Blogging shouldn’t just be a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. There isn’t much of a point in publishing a blog and then completely forgetting about it. While you’ll see some decent results because of them at the start, this usually fades away.
By repurposing your content – especially long-term – you can get more and more results from it in time. It adds to the immediate results while maximising the impact it can have later on. The key to this is making sure you do it right.
Following a content repurposing checklist is a great start with this:
- Break blogs down into social media snippets.
- Adapt them into email newsletters.
- Turn them into short videos or reels.
- Expand a series of blogs into an ebook or guide.
When you’re repurposing content, it’s worth having a local lens in mind. If your blog post is about being a mechanic in Brisbane, for example, then make sure your repurposed content mentions that local element.
Measuring the Success of Local Business Blogging
There’s no point in blogging just for the sake of blogging. You’ll need to measure the success of your efforts, too. This means tracking the results of your efforts and making sure they actually pay off.
While this seems a little overwhelming and difficult, it doesn’t need to be. It’s a relatively straightforward process:
- Track Visits With Google Analytics – This shows you exactly how much traffic is coming in and where it’s coming from.
- Monitor Rankings With Google Search Console – This shows you how well your SEO efforts are paying off and where you’re landing on search engines.
- Measure the Enquiries You Get – Check if blogs are leading to a bump in form submissions, calls, and even sales.
- Review Quarterly – Identify exactly what’s working and double down on these efforts as much as possible.
- Update Older Blog Posts – Over time, blog posts become outdated. By updating them, you make them relevant again, fueling more results in time.
Based on these results, you can make sure your local business blog/article content is actually paying off. Depending on the results, you could need to make changes and refine your approach going forward.
Get Started With Blogging as a Small Business
Blogging remains one of the most cost-effective ways for businesses to bring in visibility, build trust, and more. It even fuels your social media and email marketing strategies, too. Even local business blogging can be an effective way to fuel your growth.
The key to this success is being consistent, properly implementing SEO, and integrating with your other marketing strategies. When blogging for small businesses is done right, this leads to consistent growth, more sales, and greater revenues.
At Paul Barrs Web Design, we’ve been helping small businesses for 25 years. Let’s make blogging work for you.
Need some help? Get in touch today.
