As a local business, you rely on your website to drive sales—but merely writing strong SEO copy isn’t enough to get stellar results with any search engine marketing campaign. While quality content matters, higher local search engine optimization rankings come from providing fresh online content and promotions and blogging represents the simplest, most effective way to achieve top that.

Blogging as a Competitive Advantage

Many business owners separate blogging from the concept of a “serious” website, assuming it’s the work of hobbyists and amateurs. Instead, they focus on optimizing their base content and profiles, adding social media listings, and allowing customer reviews. These steps matter, of course, but everyone else is taking them too. These strategies may fix your position in Google’s rankings and search results, but they won’t lift you above the pack in your search engine optimization efforts.

Adding a blog creates a competitive advantage by publishing fresh content on a regular basis. Goggle’s search algorithms favor sites with frequent new writing. Whether you write your own content or outsource it to a search engine optimization company, placing regular blog posts has several benefits:

• Boosts Google search ratings with fresh content
• Promotes audience interaction, raising Google’s scores on that level as well
• Enables cross-scoring by ranking your site in Google’s blog score
• Builds a larger audience when you network with other bloggers
• Creates a mechanism for responding quickly to news or other emerging information
• Ensures that your voice is heard, helping to personalize your site
• Facilitates marketing from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms, expanding your reach and promoting your business through several channels simultaneously

Creating an Effective Blog for Local SEO

The most important way to create an effective blog, of course, is to write strong content. Beyond that, though, here are some tips for maximizing the impact of your blog:

• Post regularly to your blog, ideally at least once a week, to maintain the fresh content that keeps Google ratings high.
• Vary your content to keep it interesting. You can rely on anecdotes from your business or stories you hear from friends that help demonstrate the value of your products or service.
• Use WordPress, which has many built-in SEO options.
• Integrate your blog into your site, as this maximizes the combined impact for your business.
• Include a page identifying your blog author(s), as this helps humanize your staff and adds content for searches.
• Use author markup tags to give your blog entries a more personal, trustworthy feel.
• Research the best SEO keywords and combinations to use for blogs within your focus area. This will provide inspiration for new posts, while cluing you into what will drive traffic to your website and your business.
• Use related post links to redirect readers to other pages on your site, which builds your page views from within.

Blogging Just Makes Sense

As a local business owner, your company is always changing. You can use the blog to track your growth, showcase your offerings, connect with customers, and show the human faces behind your company—all contributing to unprecedented success well deserved kudos to your favorite local search engine marketing company.