A blog is a great way to share your thoughts, promote your business and increase your SEO. The search engines favor active sites that have new and unique content. Writing informative relevant blog posts is a great way to share information and get regular followers visiting your website. Also, the more relatable content that you have on your website the more likely your search results will improve. It also helps to create an area of expertise and an interest in your brand and get back and forth traffic between your site and the outside world.

A custom blog does add a few hundred dollars to the price of a website, as it is intricately programmed so as to allow posts to be searchable by categories, tags, dates, etc. and in a way, it’s your own channel, and not controlled by a social media company. As great as all of that is, a blog is an activity that takes time and effort, and it’s very important that you enjoy writing in it, and do it consistently. Maybe dedicate a few hours a week to writing on topics relating to your line of work and finding royalty free images online or taking photos to share along with it. Optimizing the images and putting them into the Featured Image section of the blog post can help to automatically generate a thumbnail image when shared on social media.

As far as content, you can write blog posts off-topic, but it’s always best for SEO to use relative content. The more you write in your blog, the more you’ll want to, and you’ll have more engagement with followers and better reach. Since blogging gives the website more searchable text to increase your rankings, it’s usually a good idea to include about 800 words or more in each post. Your blog can be even more effective for SEO by adding backlinks. We’ve known many clients who have used their blog as a way to interview others in their field and generate searchable text in Google, as well as create backlinking that helps both parties in the rankings. Once you are comfortable with the ins and outs of creating an effective blog post while talking about what you’d like to talk about, this will be a great stepping stone in building a community.