Blog Post Ideas for Small Businesses

One of the SEO services we offer our clients is blog writing. Yes, we will write your blogs for you, and no, the world won’t know that you hired us to do it. We do what’s called “ghostwriting” so effectively you pay us to write, and you get the credit. Nice, huh?

You’ve heard us speak before about why blogging is so important. But few small businesses have the time, the energy, the skill, or the topics to write about. That’s where we come in. We can research blog post ideas for your small business that will help boost your google rankings, AND we can write the blogs for you.

But before we talk a little bit about the process, let’s do a quick refresher on why blogging is so crucial for small business owners and why it is essential to have the right topics.

Blogging for Small Businesses: Why It’s So Important

Let’s say you live in a small city and have a bakery. There are tons of other bakeries in your city. Some do regular stuff, some are just pastries, some are just donuts, and some are vegan. But your bakery is 100% gluten-free. In fact, you are one of a dozen gluten-free bakeries in the city. But the front page of google’s search results (called the SERP – search engine results page) only has space for ten businesses. So how do you get your business to be on the first page? Enter blogging. Blogging helps small businesses create additional web content that will help them rank higher in search engine results.

Blogging for Small Businesses: How it works

So you start blogging for your bakery’s website once a week. You write about things your customers would look for if they wanted to find a gluten-free bakery. So sure you write about gluten-free products, being sure to use words like “gluten-free bakery” and the name of your city. But you also may want to write about foodie events happening in your city to help boost your local ranking. And you may write about other aspects of living a gluten-free lifestyle.

Over time (sometimes weeks, sometimes months), Google starts to realize that your website is being updated often (✔️), providing relevant information that people are searching for (✔️) and consistently writing about things that are “gluten-free” and “your city name here” (✔️ and ✔️). So Google starts putting things together and realizing that you are a resource for gluten-free things in your city. All of this helps to boost your ranking. Now there’s a little more to SEO than this, but blogging alone gives you a great start!

Blogging for Small Businesses: How To Find Topics and Blog Post Ideas

There are all kinds of tools out there to help you find topics to write about, and we will share some of those below. But the best tool you can use is your noggin! Think about what “ecosphere” your business sits in and write about things people in that ecosphere care about. So our little gluten-free bakery is in the food and gluten-free business, so they should be writing about topics and things gluten-free folks would be interested in AND also about baking, foodie, or local things. Consider other topics that are going on with you or your business. We have some ideas here on current events that make good small business blog post topics.

Blogging for Small Businesses: How To Find Blog Post Ideas Through Keyword Research

Okay, so you used your noggin and are still lost. Never fear. There’s an app for that! Okay, not really an app (but there probably are some), but a bunch of websites can help you do keyword research. Some of the most popular tools for doing keyword research include:

• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Ubersuggest
• Google Keyword Planner
• SECockpit
• Keywords Everywhere
• Moz
• KeywordTool.io
• KWFinder

I also like looking at Answer The Public, Google’s Autocomplete, and the bottom of Google’s SERP page to see other related topics folks are searching for. Keywords help you find topics that people are interested in that are related to your business or service. You then use those as blog post ideas that help you rank in search engine results. It’s as simple as that!

We have another great post on how to structure your blog posts so that Google can find your blog and rank your small business. You can check that out here.

Blogging for Small Businesses: An Example

But here’s a quick example of how that works:

I’m interested in making curry chicken for dinner, so I type “curry chicken” into Google. The first page that pops up for me (it might be different for you based on your search history, but that’s another lesson for another day) is www.cookingclassy.com/chicken-curry.

Why is this page ranked 1st on Google? Well, again, there is a bunch of stuff that goes into search engine optimization, especially for small businesses, but here are a couple of quick things I can tell you:

• The page URL has the words “curry” and “chicken”
• The word “curry” shows up on that page 23 times
• The word “chicken” shows up on that page 39 times

That’s a lot of talk about curry and chicken on one page! But wait, there’s more! The page that shows up in the #2 spot on Google is www.wellplated.com/jamaican-curry-chicken/

• The page URL has the words “curry” and “chicken”
• The word “curry” shows up on that page 70 times
• The word “chicken” shows up on that page 60 times

So as you can see, Well Plated mentions curry and chicken a lot more times than Cooking Classy and is ranked 2nd. So “keyword stuffing” isn’t the most important thing for search engine optimization. But both pages mention those words A LOT which helps Google know what the page is about, and thus they rank highly for curry chicken. Do you smell what I’m cooking here? (And it’s not just curried chicken!)

Now again, there’s a lot more to SEO than just blog writing, but it’s a great start and one you can do easily on your own if you have someone who doesn’t mind writing and doing a little research. But if all this sounds like too much work, and you don’t have time for it because you have a business to run, let us do it for you. Give us a shout by emailing us at hello@newwhyweb.com or filling out our contact form, and we can tell you more about how our SEO services work and get you started towards better rankings!