Marketing is the bane of any business owner’s existence. You became an entrepreneur because you’re passionate about your vegan business idea, not to spend all your time on marketing. But the reality is that no one will buy your product or service if no one can find it. Getting millions of eyes on your business won’t happen overnight, but you can start increasing your traffic dramatically by creating an onsite blog.
Blogging is likely another task that you don’t want to add to your to-do list, but there are many benefits to adding one to your site. In fact, if you’re going to increase the traffic to your vegan business, an onsite blog is basically essential. There are two main reasons why: for SEO purposes and to create valuable, shareable content.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. These are tactics that you can use to optimize your website to increase both the quality and quantity of your web traffic. There isn’t one specific way to boost your website SEO. Instead, it is based on various factors compounded, many of which you can impact positively with an onsite blog. Businesses that have blogs generate 67% more leads per month than those that don’t.
Technical factors like UX design, page speed, how mobile-friendly it is, and the age of your domain also affect the search engine rank of your website. But there are a considerable chunk of ranking factors that you can influence with your blog. These include:
Keywords
Even if you know nothing about SEO, you’ve likely heard of the concept of keywords. Keywords are the words that your ideal customer will search for when they want to locate your product or service online. Including an optimal number of relevant keywords on your website will improve your ranking for that keyword on search engine results pages. Including keywords in your product page, about me page, and the main landing page is excellent but not enough to boost that ranking. That is where an onsite blog comes in.
An onsite blog gives you the space to include more of those valuable keywords, but you don’t want to go overboard. Part of the algorithm looks at keyword saturation, so you need to include your keywords naturally. It should still sound conversational and not like you just threw in keywords for the sake of it.
Also, choosing keywords strategically is more important than picking the most obvious option. More specific long-tail keywords with longer terms are typically much more effective since they bring in more targeted traffic. For example, if you’re a nutrition coach, instead of ranking for “nutrition coach”, you could choose to use “vegan nutrition coach for weight-lifters”.
Fresh content
Google values fresh content. Since you likely aren’t making frequent changes to your product descriptions or your onsite bio, you won’t have much fresh content. Imagine landing on a website that hasn’t had an update in 4 years. You wouldn’t trust the information you found, and neither do search engines. Search engines want to provide internet browsers with the most up-to-date information possible, which is why they rank websites with fresh content higher.
Having an onsite blog means you can consistently publish new, valuable information about your product or service, which helps boost your ranking. Without a blog, you would need to constantly update your other pages, which doesn’t make any practical sense and can even be detrimental.
Plus, an onsite blog can also incorporate information about new products you introduce and provide an incentive to become a customer.
Internal linking
A considerable portion of SEO relates to linking. Link building (having other websites link to you) is very effective but also takes time to build. But internal linking also boosts SEO, and you have total control over it. An internal link is a link from one page on your website to another page on your website. You might link from your homepage to your product page or from your about me page to your contact page.
When your audience lands on your website, they will use internal links to jump around to different parts of your website, and so will search engines. The more links that lead to a particular page, the higher your rank. An onsite blog gives you multiple opportunities to link between different pages on your website. Not only will that boost your SEO, but it also increases general traffic around your website as people click through on your links.
Creating Shareable Content
Search engine traffic is great, but it shouldn’t be your only source of traffic. People spend a lot of time searching for things on Google, but they also spend a lot of time on social media and other online platforms. Having valuable content to share will substantially increase your website traffic and give you something to post about.
If you have a Facebook business page or Instagram page, the only way to gain engagement is by actually posting. But if you have nothing to share, then your social accounts will go quiet pretty quickly.
Starting an onsite blog means that you’ll always have things to post and share online. You can link to your blogs on social media accounts like Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn or Twitter. You can also share your blog posts to answer people’s queries on forums like Quora and Reddit. Plus, if readers find value in what you share, then they will share your content as well, which will start increasing your traffic exponentially.
How to Start on Onsite Blog for Your Vegan Business
An onsite blog should be non-negotiable for your vegan business. There is so much value, not only for the technical side of search engines but also for getting your audience on your website and building their trust. Providing information and showcasing expertise through your blog will increase the shareability of your website, and internal links will direct people to your vegan product.
Starting an onsite blog can feel like a huge undertaking, but you don’t need to have a journalism degree to do so. A passion for your vegan business is all you need to get started, and working with digital marketing experts can help to streamline the process. Get in touch with us to find out how you can start an onsite blog for your vegan business.