The Definitive Guide To Blogging For Business
- Emily Bingham
- Mar 5
- 16 min read
Updated: Apr 17
Table Of Contents
Do you want to create a business blog, but you’re not sure if it’s worth it? Are your website’s traffic levels at an all-time low?
I’ll put it to you this way– if you DON’T already have a blog for your business, you’re missing out on so many opportunities to show up for your target audience and stay on their minds. I’m talking about a 55% increase in traffic (at least) and a foundation of trust that helps people go from readers to paying customers or clients.
So, if you want to really start seeing some online visibility, you’ve got to start blogging for your business. And today, you’re going to learn how. I’ll show you how to start a blog and start writing posts that will bring real value to your bottom line.
Let’s get into it!
What Is A Business Blog?
A business blog is where a business posts articles about either the business, the industry, or other related topics. Engaging with your audience like this not only attracts potential customers and clients but can also help you retain current ones and even win back old ones.
It’s a place for a business to engage with its target audience, but unlike social media, it’s on a little bit more of a professional basis, and you won’t be lost in an algorithm that changes like the wind.
Is Blogging For Business Still A Thing In 2025?
Blogging is still one of the leading content marketing strategies for small businesses, with unlimited benefits to your brand and, more importantly, your bottom line. In fact, 89% of content marketers recommend prioritizing blogging (Siege Media).
Blogging for your business is even more effective. Writing blog posts provides you with endless opportunities to show up for people already looking for you. Half of all consumers read blog posts to help them make purchases (HubSpot).
Do You Need A Blog For Your Small Business?
While business blogging isn’t necessary, it’s a highly recommended content marketing technique. In my opinion, there are too many blogging benefits for any business to pass it up.
Not only can they help bring your brand to light, but they can also help bring in more traffic for your business and even drive sales. Let’s talk about some of the biggest reasons you need to start blogging for your small business.
Blogging Creates Online Visibility
Blogging for your small business gives you all the opportunities in the world to get in front of your target audience. Even if you have a steady social following, a popular YouTube channel, or a podcast, blogging is still a huge opportunity to gain organic online visibility. Websites with blogs have a larger index rate by 434% (BKA), meaning it’s much easier for search engines to find and categorize your site, and if your site is well-indexed and categorized, you’re set up to rank better (depending on other SEO practices).
Business Blogging = Free Business Promotion
One of the biggest perks of business blogging is the ROI (return on investment), and that’s because, typically, content creation costs a lot less than search and social ads or other promotional techniques. You can write your own blogs, get a high ranking, and rake in traffic for a fraction of what your competitors are paying in ad spend. Even professional content writing services are more budget-friendly.
A Business Blog Creates A Competitive Edge
When it comes to local businesses, chances are, your competition isn’t producing a lot of content. But their loss is your gain! By producing high-quality content, you can compete with your local competitors by offering more informational and engaging content for readers. Plus, SEO makes competing with bigger businesses easier than other marketing.
Blog Posts Bring In Organic Traffic
Because of all of the present ranking opportunities blogging presents, this also means bringing in a lot more traffic. Blogging can increase your website’s traffic by up to 55% (HubSpot)! And it can help you navigate people to other pages on your site!
Blogging For Your Business Generates Leads
Business blogging can get you up to 67% more leads (Demand Metric), not only because of the increase in traffic or the fact that it’s the perfect place to host a lead magnet, but also because writing informative content a real relationship with would-be clients or customers. No matter the industry or the product or service, consumers need to trust that their money is being spent well, and a blog is a great way to prove that.
Good Blog Content Drives Conversions
Beyond attracting and educating readers and creating leads, blogs can also be a huge sales tool, allowing you to lead readers down the sales funnel. Writing content about your business or what you offer, or even showing your expertise in your industry, can make a huge impact on a lead's decision to convert, growing your conversion rates up to 6 times the size (Content Marketing Institute).
Valuable Content Improves User Experience
Above all SEO and sales benefits, one of the biggest upsides to blogging is improving user experience. People don’t want to waste their time as much as they don’t want to waste their money, so having content that answers every question and really provides value is crucial. Having great content to offer can also encourage visitors to stick around a little longer, boosting bounce rates.
A Small Business Blog Builds Brand Awareness
One of the biggest uses of blog content is for brand awareness. A lot of marketers say it is the most effective way to build brand awareness before a launch and when going online. So, if you want to create some buzz around your brand or start getting some real visibility in your industry, a blog is the way to do it!
Blog Content Forges Brand Trust
When you answer questions and demonstrate your knowledge and expertise with your business’s blog posts, you’re building trust with your audience that will ultimately go a long way in sales and customer loyalty.
Blogs Allow You To Influence & Engage Your Own Audience
If you think about it, you have no real status on a social platform. If the platform decides to delete you, block your content, or put you lower on the algorithm, there’s nothing you can do about it. While search engines are subject to their own updates, it’s not nearly as finicky as a social media algorithm. This allows for much easier ways to target your ideal audience organically and bring them to a platform that belongs to you, not Meta or even Google.
Does Blogging Help SEO?
Blogging goes a long way in increasing your SEO rankings. Google typically prioritizes pages from websites that have a lot of high-quality content, but that certainly isn’t the only perk of blogging for SEO.
Let’s take a look at some other ways writing blog posts for your business can help with search engine optimization.
More Content Means More Ranking Opportunities
The more content you produce, the more opportunities your website has to rank for keywords and search queries related to your business.
Longer Content Usually Ranks Higher
According to a study done by Backlinko, the highest-ranking content is usually longer, in most cases 1500 words or more. This is because Google prioritizes in-depth content that can assert topical knowledge, experience, and other important authority-determining factors.
High-Quality Content Makes Link-Building Easier
Writing good, optimized content is the leading link-building strategy. So, having well-written content is essential to getting backlinks for your blog. Bonus points if you add infographics and other visual content.
Blog Content Improves Site Structure
Blog content gives you endless opportunities to reach your target audience, and internal links are the perfect way to direct them to where to go for what they need or where you want them to go.
Where Should You Start A Business Blog?
While you can share on social media, it’s always best to host a business blog on your website. If you don’t already have a website or if you’ve been operating on a third-party platform, a blog is the perfect reason to make the jump and finally get one with a good CMS (content management system).
Best Platforms For Small Business Blogs
There are a lot of CMS (content management system) platforms and website builders out there. If you have a website, you likely already have access to a well-designed and easy-to-use CMS. But just in case you’re in the market for a good place to build your small business blogs, here are my top 3 CMS platforms for small businesses.
WordPress (.org)
WordPress is one of the largest blogging and website-building platforms across the globe. It’s easy to use, highly customizable, and comes with a long list of plugins that can help you optimize your site and even run your business.
Top Features:
Woo-Commerce E-commerce Platform Plugin
Yoast SEO Plugin
Business Email
Pricing Plans:
Wordpress.org can be downloaded for free, but you will have to purchase a domain to download it on, which will cost a separate fee. Wordpress-partnered domain hosting fees vary subject to the domain hosting service and website needs.
Squarespace
Top Features:
Simple Design Process
Easy SEO & Mobile Optimization
Tons of Content Creation and Business Tools
Pricing Plans:
Squarespace offers a free trial for 14 days. After that, you’ll have to choose a monthly or annual Squarespace plan. Note that Squarespace's annual plans offer a year of free domain hosting. But if you choose a monthly plan, you’ll need to purchase a domain separately. Also, you save a lot more money by purchasing a yearly plan, like one of the following:
Basic: $232/year ($21/month)
Business: $384/year ($32/month)
Commerce (Basic): $432/year ($36/month)
Commerce (Advanced): $792/year ($66/month)
Wix
Wix is a terrific platform for all things small business. While it may not have the plugins that Wordpress does, it’s easy to optimize and create a customized site from a template. There are also a lot of easy-to-use marketing and business tools that make running your business that much easier. The blog CMS is very beginner-friendly. This very website is through Wix.
Features
Marketing Tools
Easy Design & Optimization
Responsive & Customizable Designs
Pricing Plans
Wix offers free domain hosting for a year; after that, it’s around $10-$45 per year, depending on your domain name. Aside from that, here are some of the pricing plans for Wix:
Lite: $16/month
Core: $27/month
Business: $39/month
Business Elite: $149/month
Designing A Reader-Friendly Business Blog
I’d love to tell you that looks aren’t everything, but that’s just not the case in the marketing world. Your webpage design plays a HUGE part in how people will perceive your blogs and your business. So, you don’t just want to go picking a website theme for your business just because YOU think it’s pretty.
Here are some things you need to remember when choosing a website theme or designing one yourself:
Clean, Aesthetically Pleasing Design Layout
Simple, not cluttered with a bunch of different features or decorative elements. This is also extremely important for page loading speed, which is a weighted ranking factor for SEO, conversion rates, and user experience. Also, consider your fonts and how easy they are to read.
Branding
A website theme should either already align with your brand, meaning colors and overall aesthetic, or be easy to customize. Make sure you choose a brand that you can customize or that already assimilates with your brand.
Easy Navigation
Part of the user experience web of SEO and conversion factors is easy navigation, meaning how easy it is for people to find their way around your site to what they need. Make sure your website theme is easy to navigate and that you can find everything.
Mobile Friendliness
Now, one of the biggest things to consider about your theme is how it looks on different devices. Now, most themes and templates will be responsive to all devices, but if you add or customize certain elements, you’ll want to check out how it looks on all devices before launching.
Page Design Consistency
Every page on your website should look similar. Of course, there will be different content and some different elements, but the foundational layout should be the same. Especially for service or product pages. For your blogs, things can look a bit different, but you want to keep the same sort of structure. If you start a blog post with a picture or your headings are a certain color, make sure that all the rest of your business’s blog posts replicate that style.
Things To Do Before You Start A Business Blog
Now, before you start blogging for your business, there are a few things you need to do so you can produce consistently high-quality content you can be proud of. Here are some things I recommend doing before you start a business blog.
Get Clear On Your Blog’s Purpose & Set Clear Goals
The first thing you want to do is define what you want from your business blog. What do you want to gain? Brand awareness? More organic traffic? Sales? It could be multiple things, but you’ll want to identify them and set some goals around them to guide your content strategy.
Know Your Target Audience
While your target demographic may change from post to post, it helps to have at least some basic knowledge of who you’re trying to attract. Use your business's target audience, but think of it in terms of searching for services online. How are they searching? How are they deciding? What do they want to know? You can get some great ideas by finding blogs or social media accounts for competitors or other related businesses in your industry and reading the comments section.
Set Your Brand’s Voice
Consistency is key when it comes to content and engaging with your audience as a brand. Using your general brand persona, set some guidelines surrounding your brand’s voice, meaning how you want to sound to your readers. (i.e., conversational, insightful, professional, etc).
Create A Blog Content Strategy
You can’t just start posting willy-nilly. For you to be competitive, you have to have a game plan to get you there. Having a strategy makes the content creation process and achieving your marketing goals so much easier, and it keeps you focused on the results.
A content strategy for a blog includes:
A Keyword List: a spreadsheet that includes keywords you’ll optimize your blog posts for.
Competitive Analysis: some notes on your top three content competitors, notably their content coverage, keywords, backlinks, and opportunities.
Topic Idea Bank: a list of blog post topics (for each content pillar)
Roadmap: a step-by-step plan on how to execute your content strategy.
Content Calendar: a calendar or spreadsheet that shows progress in content production and all relevant details for each piece (or a link to that information).
How To Create A Blog Content Strategy
A blog content strategy will help you manage the content creation process for your business blog. It’s also the most effective way to make sure your blog posts are actually making an impact. Let’s talk about the steps of creating a blog content strategy.
Keyword Research
Your business’s blog posts NEED to be optimized for search engines, or else they’re just not going to get the ranking or traffic they deserve. Finding the right keywords for your small business is a huge part of getting those ranking opportunities.
Now, when you’re choosing keywords, relevance is typically the most important factor, but there are a few others that will greatly impact how you’ll rank, even if your content is fully optimized:
Search Volume: how many searches the keyword gets per month.
Keyword Difficulty: a point system (1-100) that represents how difficult it will be for you to rank for that keyword.
Search Intent: the reason why people are searching this keyword (informational, commercial, transactional, navigational).
Best Keyword Research For Blogs:
Semrush: The Semrush Keyword Magic Tool gives you all of the listed data above, including SERP features, suggestions, and a keyword gap finder for competitors.
Moz: Moz’s Keyword Research feature is one of my favourites for really in-depth research, showing a SERP analysis with the top listing, SERP features, suggestions, and more.
Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest’s keyword research tool is great for finding all the data you need to know, and it’ll even tell you your competitors' top-performing keywords.
Competitor Research
Competitor research is imperative to making sure that your content gets seen and offers something unique and truly valuable to your readers. While you’re creating your content strategy, examine the following for each of your closest competitors.
Content
Content Gaps: A comparison of your content and your competitors' content. What are they talking about? What content is getting the most engagement (shares, comments)?
Content Opportunities: How can you cover the same topics BETTER? Are there any topics they’ve neglected to cover that you CAN? Also, look at their calls to action. How are they linking their business to their content, and how can you do it better?
Design Layout & Formating
Take a look at how their website is laid out, design-wise. Of course, branding is a huge factor, but take note of what elements their blog page designs have. Also, check out how they’re formatting their posts. Are they longer or shorter? Do they have lots of visual aids like images and infographics? Are they using video?
Keywords
Using Ubersuggest or Semrush’s Competitor Research Tool, take a look at the keywords your competitors are using. Look for:
Keyword Gaps: The comparison of keywords and rankings between you and your competitors. What keywords are your competitors using? What are their highest and lowest-performing keywords?
Keyword Opportunities: What are the keywords your competitors AREN’T using? How can you outrank your competitors for their keywords (work with the lowest ranking first)?
Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the heaviest ranking factors, so if you can find opportunities, you’re setting yourself up for success. Run a backlink audit on your website before using Semrush’s Competitor research tool to run a backlink gap check on your competitors.
Backlink Gaps: Your competitor’s backlink profile compared to yours. Who are your top competitors getting links from? Where are the linked pages? How can you produce content that competes and excels it?
Backlink Opportunities: Where are some places you could get backlinks from that your competitors haven’t gotten yet? How can you do that?
Determine Your Content Pillars
Content pillars are your blog or business’s main topics or the overarching themes of your content. You’ll use these not only to map out your content but also to help you with your internal linking structure.
I’ve seen a lot of wheel and spoke analogies, flow charts, and spider maps (remember those from grade school?). HOWEVER, I find it much more relevant to see it as a big, tall oak tree.
The tree’s base or trunk represents your business, the source it all grows from and connects to. Branching out from that tree trunk, you have the main limbs, or your content pillars. And, growing out of each of those limbs, there are branches or topic clusters, which play host to tons of leaves, aka your keywords or search queries.
How To Determine Content Pillars
A quick brainstorming session can help you determine your main content pillars. Many businesses will choose to base their content pillars on their services or product categories. For example, a painting business could have content pillars that include interior painting, exterior painting, commercial painting, and residential painting, covering the different areas of your target audience.
Create Topic Clusters
Using your continent pillars, try to come up with some main topics within them. Keeping with the same example, some topic clusters under interior painting would be: interior decor and paint, home decorating trends, interior painting tips, etc. You can use these topic clusters to further your keyword research, creating an idea bank of topics with long-tail keywords for each of them.
Create A Blog Content Calendar
A blog content calendar, also called an editorial calendar, is a project management and content creation tool that you’ll need to keep all of your blog posts (and other content marketing) organized. It usually includes details, like:
Content Topic or Title (with link to brief/outline)
Who It's Assigned To
Blog Category And Tags Attached [Optional]
Publishing & Promo Materials Needed (images, infographic creation, social media images, etc)
Publishing Date
Progress/Status Update
Using the ideas you’ve compiled for each of your topics, create a blog content calendar, outlining the blog posts you want to write and the other details related to each of them.
Where To Create A Content Calendar:
It’s really simple to create a spreadsheet or progress tracker in Google Sheets to use as a content calendar, but you can also use other platforms made for project management, like:
Grab my content calendar template, which is made to make these as easy as possible for you. Edit it on Google Sheets and start filling it!
Plan Your Individual Posts
There are two ways you can plan out your business blog posts:
1. Blog Content Briefing
A brief is a simple start to a good blog post that lists what you need to know before starting it. A brief will include the blog’s:
Blog Name (H1/Header Tag)
Ideal Word Count
SEO Information
Title Tag
Meta Description
Url Slug
Keywords To Use
SERP Competitors
Sources To Use For The Article
Any Internal Links You Want To Add
2. Blog Content Outlining
If you want to set yourself up even further, I highly suggest making outlines instead of briefs. It takes a little longer, but it also makes blog writing so much easier because everything is already laid out.
You’ll create the briefs, but you’ll take it a step further by perusing some of the sources you’ve listed, as well as your competitors, so you can list some headings and subheadings (H2s, H3s). You can also write some notes about what to put under each.
Writing Your Small Business Blog Posts
Once you’ve got your blogs outlined, it’s time to start writing blog posts for your small business. \
Open With A Wicked Headline
Your headline is what reels in readers. It's the first spark of interest that determines whether or not they click your article or someone else's. Make a headline that captures your ideal reader at first glance. Something that will make them say, "This one's for me."
Follow Up With A Mouthwatering Intro
When you write a blog, you're into the most important piece. That's what gets people to read your blog post. Get your reader to read all the way through by having a solid intro.
Fill Your Post With"Triple I" Blog Content
Don't follow up a powerful intro with bland body text. The rest of the blog post has to be just as entertaining or educational. Plus, you'll need to prove what you say. Use data and numbers to create authority with your readers. When I write blog posts, I use my "Triple I" formula. It basically means AAA (like really, really good), but I focus on three things. It needs to be:
Informative
In-depth
Interesting
Organize Your Headings And Subheads
Nobody likes being hit by a wall of words. You need to break up your blog post into headings and subheads, covering the different subtopics. This is also important for SEO and user experience.
Finish With A Killer Call To Action
When you're writing a blog, end with a conclusion. It's always necessary, but it's a good way to upsell your brand, product, or services. You can't drop off and leave your readers hanging.
Optimizing Your Posts
If you’ve been following this guide, you probably have already gotten your keyword in your blog, but it’s vital to give it a final check as part of your proofreading process. Make sure you optimize your blog post for your focus keyword and its variations. Your keyword should show up in your blog post’s:
URL
Title Tag
Meta Description
When Relevant In Body Text (Don’t Overuse)
Some Headings and Subheadings
Image File Names and Alt-Text
Promoting Your Blog Posts
You can’t rely on SEO alone. Get traffic coming to your blog by creating a promotional strategy for each post. Make a checklist of where and how you’ll promote your blog posts. Here are some of my favourite ways to promote blog posts:
Social Media
Email Marketing & Newsletters
Link Building Campaign
Promote On Your Home Page
Links On Your Other Posts
Get Help With A Kickass Content Strategy And Writing For Your Business Blog
I get it. Running your business is hard enough without having to worry about creating a content strategy or writing business blog posts. Well, luckily for you, you don’t have to!
With my help, your business’s blog can become your marketing MVP! I can help you create a kickass content strategy and help write blogs that your readers will love you for. Contact me or take a look at my Content Services to learn more!
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