When you start writing for a business blog, it helps to understand that the kind of writing you’re about to do is different from other types of writing you may have done in the past. It’s not an English term paper or a technical report, not as highbrow as a novel or lowbrow as a journal entry. Instead, and depending on the business you’re writing for, it’s something that tries to be all of that stuff rolled into one. The job of the business blog writer is to juggle all those disparate writing styles and combine them into the voice of a brand that can successfully communicate its messages to a receptive audience.
At Big Red SEO, Omaha’s premier search engine optimization company, our content writers come from many different backgrounds: technical writing, English literature, sales copy writing and general knowledge. Because of these differences between us, we have to know how to take what’s successful about one writing method and apply it to another to make a cohesive whole.
In this article, our content creation team at Big Red SEO in Omaha will let you in on some secrets to successful blog writing so you can start developing the kind of great content that takes your business to the next level through search engine optimization!
Business Blog Writing is a Mix of Different Styles
As we have mentioned, it takes knowledge of many writing styles to be a successful business blog writer, and you also have to know how to put those styles to work with one another. Let’s take a closer look at the elements of successful business blog writing to see how those pieces are able to fit well together.
The English Paper
You’re not writing a paper when you blog, but our content creation team at Big Red SEO in Omaha thinks there are some similarities that are worth touching on:
- Grammar and Spelling: These are more important than you’d think in the grand scheme of things. Not only do search engines like Google seem to take grammatical and spelling mistakes into account when determining your website’s authority (and its ranking!), but readers of your business blog also don’t like to see these kinds of errors and generally don’t trust sites that constantly make them.
- Thesis: Remember this word? Yes, “thesis” is a fancy word for “what’s the point?” or, as we’d say in the search engine optimization marketing world, your “value proposition.” Every successful business blog article has one of these, and it’s the only thing that can convince a reader to keep reading your content, fill out your contact forms, and buy your products and services. A blog article “thesis” states how or why what you’re selling will help your potential customers fulfill an immediate need or desire.
The Technical Article
Convincing readers (through your thesis or value proposition) that your product or service is a necessary part of their lives requires having the abilities of a technical writer:
- An Authoritative Voice: Technical writers have a knack for sounding like authorities in their given areas. Similarly, you have to know when to use an authoritative voice (rather than a conversational one) when making an argument for your product. This takes some practice (especially to smooth out the transitions from one voice to another), but this tool of technical writing can definitely help your value proposition when used correctly.
- Evidence: If you need documentation, look to a technical writer! They’re very good at using studies, statistics, and other quantitative information to arrive at conclusions, which is exactly what you need when trying to convince potential customers that you’re better than your competition. People are swayed by numbers more so than by emotion alone, so use evidence to your advantage to increase your conversions!
The Journal or Diary Entry
People say that blogging is just a public diary, and for a lot of personal bloggers we at Big Red SEO in Omaha would agree. Keeping up a business blog is very different in a number of ways we’ve already covered, but one important element that journaling brings to the business blogging table is writing with personality. You can use all the statistics and authoritative-sounding mumbo jumbo you want, but chances are your potential customers aren’t going to buy from you if you sound like a robot. They want to know that you’re a person and your company has people in mind first and foremost. Knowing when to engage with your ideal readers conversationally and how to balance that voice with your voice of authority is important when making customers out of visitors.
This next part of journal writing that helps your business blogging strategy is the idea of variety. When you look at someone’s personal journal or blog, chances are they’re not writing about the exact same thing day after day. They’re people, and every day of their lives they experience something new to write about. Personal bloggers don’t write the same thing every day, and readers of those blogs like variety. This is an important lesson for business bloggers to take to heart, as it’s easy for us to fall into focusing on the same topics again and again.
While business bloggers have to do this to some extent (because a business selling snowboards kind of has to talk about snowboards), your business probably has endless subtopics to talk about on your blog that still apply to your main business. Ultimately you’ll know whether a blog article topic will help your search engine optimization marketing if it applies to a core competency part of your business that people are interested in and you want to promote.
Remember, Anyone Can Write a Blog!
It’s important to note that anyone with knowledge of their industry can write a successful blog! In fact, you’re the one who can provide the most value to customers reading your blog, as you know your industry like the back of your hand. The old saying, “write what you know,” applies very well here; it doesn’t matter whether you have a degree in writing or not, as long as you keep the few simple ideas we’ve outlined in mind. Simply putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and getting those words out can help your business gain more authority in the field and increase its visibility to potential customers!
Blog Writing Helps Your SEO Marketing Efforts
As you can see, there are many styles of writing that you need to understand to have a successful business blog, but we haven’t covered exactly how business blogging helps your SEO marketing efforts. There are a couple main ways business blogging influences search engine optimization:
- With regularly updated content on your website, Google and other search engines come to recognize yours as an active site—this means that you can be ranked above sites that don’t update their content regularly.
- Updating your company blog with consistently valuable content improves your industry authority, which Google rewards with higher rankings (their job is to give searchers what they’re looking for, and if searchers would benefit more from your content than anyone else’s, chances are you’ll be near the top of the SERPs).
Contact Big Red SEO at (402) 522-6468
At Big Red SEO in Omaha, our SEO and content creation team knows how important having a blog that’s regularly updated with valuable content is to your SEO marketing efforts. If you have any questions about the process of search engine optimization or how to go about keeping up a successful company blog, give us a call today at (402) 522-6468 or fill out the contact form on our website. We’re always happy to talk SEO marketing strategy with you!