writing blogs and web copy

Whenever we mention the idea of starting a blog to one of our clients here in the Upstate, their first reaction is never very positive. Well, that may be putting it a little bit too nicely. Most people hate the idea- they despise it. After all, who has time to sit back and write a bunch of meaningless stuff about their business, right?

Me personally, I was born to be a writer, and I absolutely love to write. Most people do not share my enthusiasm, however, because it feels far too much like a chore. It’s tedious for them, and I can certainly understand that. We all have our passions in life and few people strive to become a copywriter, a journalist or an email marketing expert. I completely get that.

Here’s something to think about though; what if I told you that 88% of your customer base wants to hear what you have to say? In a 2014 survey by Bright Local, they found that almost 9 out of 10 consumers will research a local Upstate retailer online before visiting their actual store. The same study showed that of the 2,000+ participants, 72% said that they would not shop at a store if they can’t find good information online.

Let’s put customers aside for a moment though. In fact, let’s pretend that you write one blog post per week for the next five years, and not a single person ever bothers to read it. Nobody. Then writing blogs would be a waste of time, right? Not by a longshot.

Let me tell you a little secret about how the Internet works, and every Upstate web developer that knows anything about SEO will tell you the exact same thing. The search engines do not understand a single syllable of the English language, and they have no idea what your website is designed to represent. They figure this out by playing a word-association game, and a virtual spider crawls through your website often to analyze every word.

Here’s what it does- let’s say that the three main words that the spider finds on your homepage is clothing, boutique and designer. It will look at every other site across the web that uses those very same words, and it eventually comes to the conclusion that you’re a designer clothing boutique. And that’s great, because it can properly place your site in the search engines for that category.

This also presents a problem though; because what if our imaginary boutique also sells luxury handbags, designer footwear and…let’s throw in a wild card here…pastrami sandwiches. While it may see those words now and then on your site, it doesn’t deem them very important because they’re not mentioned very often. So you never rank for these equally important phrases, and there’s a decent chance that potential customers go to another retailer for their needs instead.

If there was only a way to talk about just pastrami sandwiches without messing up your main content pages- oh wait, there is. We write blogs and talk about our businesses.

Take this very article, for example, and what I am trying to do here. If you scan the page for some of my biggest keywords like Upstate web development or search optimization, they’ve been sprinkled in a few times to let Google know what I’m all about. Now, I don’t have to use those words as frequently as on my core pages, because this article is merely letting the web-crawlers know that there are other things that they should rank me for besides building websites. In fact, the more blog pages a website has, the more visible they are for all of their main key-phrases, because each page is judged individually and as a part of the overall site.

Don’t think that the actual web content is not important though, because the search providers also look at things like time on site, the number of pages visited, and the amount of comments left on each page. For example, did you watch all the funny movie clips that had absolutely nothing to do with blogs and copy writing? If you did, then Google thinks this page is absolutely amazing, all because I kept you here a little bit longer.

So hopefully you laughed a little bit and learned something at the same time, because providing fresh content is the life-blood of any good website. It helps your customers learn about your brand, it appeases the search engines, and it is the only way to give your domain long-term, lasting results in the Upstate and worldwide. There are thousands of things that you can talk about as well, such as-

– Local events and gatherings
– Company promotions and discounts
– Community outreach projects
– Major business accomplishments
– “How-to” articles to inspire your readers
– Seasonal messaging, gift ideas and more

If you need any help getting a blog on your website started, then please contact us and our team will be happy to get you started. We also have the Upstate’s best bloggers and copy writers on staff to assist with any of your business writing needs as well.