Am I writing blogs for search engines, potential customers or existing customers?

The answer is D, all of the above. A business blog is a great way to express your ideas, company philosophy and explore some trends and aspects of your industry, its also a great tool to influence potential customers, inform existing customers and to grow your organic search engine rankings .

Lets explore each of the target audiences more.

Potential customers - Using your business blog to influence website visits who aren’t yet customers about your company knowledge and expertise within your industry is a great way to use the blog. Coming to a site full with new blogs about different product, advise and tips, industry commentary would influence a potential customer much more than a company who simply has a catalogue of products online.

Existing Customers - A great way to use a blog is provide advice on tips on a range of your products and services as well as providing industry commentary to help your customers stay informed. Publishing blogs to your website and then sending them out in a monthly eNewsletter is a great way to keep top of mind with existing customers and reinforce to them that your company is the best at what you do, offering information that is useful to them.

Search Engine Rankings - a blog is a powerful tool to grow your Organic search ranking. Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines are more likely to revisit and continually categorise your site in organic listings if it is being constantly updated with new information. If you have identified specific key words you want to rank highly for, use these are headings and topics for your next blogs. Or, you can use Google Analytics to see the most popular content that is being viewed on your website and use this an indicator as what people want to read, therefore create more content - blogs, videos, how to’s - on these topics.

TIP - How to identify top Content that visitors are viewing on your website

STEP 1 - Log in to your Google Analytics account

STEP 2 - Go into standard reporting in the top toolbar

STEP 3 - Choose TRAFFIC SOURCES from the left menu

STEP 4 - Open the SOURCES section

STEP 5 - Open the Search section then highlight Organic

This will show you search terms that people are searching to get to your site. These could be a great starting point for keyword topics for your blogging efforts.