We are excited to show you this client highlight for BW Concepts! It’s the perfect example of a small business that created its own website, and then came to Hammersmith Support when ready for something bigger and better. Beth Wand of BW Concepts specializes in creating organic digital content for her clients. Her services range from blog posts, to website content, biographies, and social media content creation and management – which is a lot to explain clearly and succinctly. We were able to accomplish this with the use of icons and visual breaks using color too.

Before

Beth built her previous site herself on WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org). At the time, her goal was to have a place to house links to her publications, contact information, and a contact form. The previous site was not only visually very simple, but it was also lacking in SEO. The entire site laid out more like a blog than a professional’s website.

After

We really love the look and feel of the site now. Not only is it visually pleasing, but the functionality has increased dramatically. Beth provided content updates as well as new photography, and the layout was updated to make BW Concepts services easy to understand. Calls to action, as well as an updated blog layout and services page, were added. The color scheme was updated to visually elevate the site, too.

BW Concepts is also now a Hammersmith Support maintenance client! Beth shared that while she knows she can do a lot of this on her own, it’s so nice to know that maintenance is now one less thing on her to do list.

We’re Here to Help Your Business Too

If you’re thinking it’s time to upgrade your current site, or if you are starting from scratch, we can help. Book a free 30-minute consultation through our Calendly link and let’s talk about your business website needs.

Your business blog posts are great at adding value for your site visitor, and they are essential to your website’s SEO. That SEO is based on several factors including the blog structure, which is why your titles and subheadings are crucial parts of your blog. Not to mention being attention grabbers for your readers. We’ve got the breakdown of how to create and use titles and headers that will draw in your readers and increase your SEO advantage.

Don’t Get Cut Short

Titles

The ideal length for the title of a blog is 60-70 characters. After 70, it’s likely to be cut off in the search engine returned results. While this probably isn’t the end of the world in most cases, if your title reads much differently when a few words are cut off, searchers may be confused and possibly even offended by the part that is displayed!

Subheadings

Subheadings are all the headings within your content (“Don’t Get Cut Short” for example). They are important for a few reasons. First, they allow a reader to quickly scan your post. If they can’t get enough information in a few seconds to make a decision about whether or not they want to read the post, they’ll likely skip it and move on. Second, subheadings should pique a reader’s interest. Keeping a subheading snappy and interesting is key.

Keywords and Numbers and Brackets, Oh My

Titles

Using numbers is a great way to grab attention to your post. Think “3 Ways a Great Title Can Make a Big Difference.” In addition, always making sure that your keywords are part of the title is vital for good SEO – this will also ensure that your title isn’t vague or misleading. Lastly, consider using brackets in order to clarify and add details to the title (such as “Blog Titles Really Are That Important [new statistics]”).

Subheadings

The post subheadings are also a great place to put your keywords for the post. If you’re using a number in your title, be sure that your subheadings are following the same format so readers are not confused.

Formatting Matters

Title

In the Hammersmith Support post “How to Structure Your Blog for the Best SEO,” we talked about how formatting your blog boosts your SEO. For titles, WordPress will automatically make your title an H1 tag. But if you have to do so manually, be sure that only your title has the H1 tag. It will make it easier for readers, as well as search engines, to understand.

Subheadings

This post is a good example of formatting that employs several subheadings. You’ll notice that our main subheadings are formatted as H2, and the additional subheadings are H3. That is not only visually pleasing for readers but also helps search engines more readily crawl and rank the content.

Want More?

Click over to our blog to read more about blogging, website maintenance, and women in tech.

We’re here to help! If you have questions about your website or the design process, we’d love to talk with you. Book a free 30-minute consultation.

Simply having a blog on your business website is good for providing value for your clients and boosting your site’s SEO. But you can get even more bang for your SEO buck by physically structuring the blog with some of these layout tips:

Headers

Headers are great for both readers and web crawlers. Visually, they break up large blocks of content. But they also make it easy for readers to scan for information, making it more likely that they will stick around and read the post. In addition, web crawlers love using headers to analyze and rank information. Happy web crawlers = good SEO.

Signal Words

Much like headers, signal words such as first, second, last, in addition, etc. are good for both readers and ranking. When drafting your post, think of signal words as how you can lead readers through the content. Use signal words in chronological order to make the flow clear.

Content Length

Blog posts with a minimum of 300 words are ideal. Posts with 1000+ words are a plus! Posts of that length are considered cornerstone content, or the best content on your site – also the posts you would want to be ranked highest on your site. Cornerstone content should include keywords that most relate to your site.

Title Length

This one may be surprising to some, but the length of your blog title matters. Depending on the length of your post, you may lose a potential reader if it’s not descriptive enough – on the flip side, if the title is too long, it will likely get cut off in the title tag displayed in search engine results. Keeping titles 50-60 characters is the sweet spot between descriptive and fully displayed.

Categories + Tags

Much like headers, sorting blog posts into categories and then tagging each one is good for readers and search engine ranking. Tags are basically keywords for that post. They should be no longer than 3 words, and 1 word is ideal. For example, some of the tags for this post are; blog, blogging, how to, SEO, web crawler, ranking, etc. The better your post is organized, the easier it is to be found.

Images and Their Descriptions

Images in a blog post are great for several reasons; they visually illustrate your post, and they also provide a break in the written content that is pleasing to the eye. But images are also important because they are a sneaky way of boosting SEO. When you upload an image to your post, be sure to fill out ALL of the information including Title, Description, Caption, and Alt Text. Learn more about each of these in our post “Image Information, What’s Important for SEO.”

Want More Blogging Tips?

Click over to our blog page and read “BW Concepts Guest Post: Blogging 101“. Also, catch up on “52 Reasons to Start a Blog.”

Have questions about how your website works? Hammersmith Support is offering free training sessions that include tips on how to maintain and understand your WordPress website.

Book your free WordPress training session today!

We are so excited to bring you a guest post this week from Beth Wand of BW Concepts. Beth specializes in planning and creating blogging content along with social media strategy and management for her clients. In this post, she will share with us some ideas about how to structure our own business blogs and why a business blog is important.

Hello! My name is Beth and I am the BW of BW Concepts. I create unique and creative content for my clients that helps build their online presence through a distinctive visual and written strategy. Is starting a business blog on your to do list but you’re just not sure where to start? It can feel like an overwhelming process! I have some ideas that can help you get your blog off the ground.

First, Why Blog?

As Hammersmith Support has shared a few times in a few ways, blogging has a huge return on investment. Not only does fresh content boost your SEO, but free content is a huge value add for clients. In addition, macro content from blogs can be diced up in to bite-sized micro content for social media posts, creating a cohesive look and sound to your business.

Where to Start?

When it comes to your business blog, creating a calendar of topics is the perfect place to start. Things to map out:

  • What are your busy times of year? When is it slow?
  • Do you offer any promotions, specials, or deals at any time? If so, when?
  • Are there any holidays that directly affect your business? Or are there any holidays that tie in nicely with your business?

Use these answers as topics, or as places to fill in topics. If your product is a big hit at Christmas, you’ll want to post more often in the weeks leading up to Christmas. If you have vacation time planned in the summer, then plan your posts accordingly. This is also a great time to identify when your slow times are and plug in topics that might entice new customers at a normally down time.

Brainstorming Topics

Once you have the topics that correspond to the calendar, brainstorm a list of topics that are more tailored to your business. If you’re stumped, answer these questions:

  • What question do your potential clients or clients always ask you?
  • What do you wish people knew about your business?
  • How did you get started? What is your business’ story?
  • What is your “why”?
  • What problem does your product solve?
  • Who are your employees and what are their stories?

Once you have answers to these questions, start looking for topics. Answer the questions your clients always ask. Tell them why you started your business and what your favorite part is about it. Take those same topics and plug them into your calendar from above.

Get Writing

Not sure where to start on a topic? Who cares! Just start writing. So many times I have a topic, but I’m not 100% sure how all of the information is going to lay out. So I start with whatever section makes sense to me. Then I build from there. Sometimes I have to pivot and rework what I’ve already written, but often I end up leaving it as is and being able to create the rest of the post from that one section.

Things to remember:

  • Break it up. Use headers to visually break up the words on the page and give context to your post.
  • Know your audience. Be sure to write your posts for the person who is reading them. If you’re explaining your product to potential clients, be sure and start from the beginning and write like no one knows what your business is. Details details details.
  • Keep posts to about 350 words. If it’s longer, you’ll likely lose readers. Too short leaves them feeling ripped off.
  • Use images and name them appropriately. Readers love a good image and using the right naming system will help with SEO.
  • Edit your work. Read, reread, and ask a friend to take a quick look for grammatical errors too.

Want to know more? Click and follow Beth on social media and on her business blog as well:

beth@bw-concepts.com

www.bw-concepts.com

@bw_concepts1

Blogs have one of the highest ROI’s when it comes to your business. Why is that? There are several reasons, all of which we’ll detail below…but if you need to be convinced to keep reading, consider this; on average, companies with blogs produce 67% more leads a month than those that don’t. Read on to find out more.

Blogs = Links

Blogging gives an opportunity to post both internal links to other parts of your website, along with links to outside sites. This is important for a few reasons. First, internal linking gets visitors to stay on your site longer to explore as well as introduce more information to them. External links provide validity to your posts and most importantly, both types of links boost SEO. Google Ranking factors evaluate and reward posts with credible and accurate links.

The other side of linking is that every blog posted is a link. That link is shared on all social media platforms, LinkedIn, etc. If you post once a week for a year, that’s 52 links to your site floating around waiting to be discovered!

Blogs Boost SEO

Speaking of Google Rankings, blogs help to fill a few of the factors that Google evaluates. Google takes the freshness of websites content so seriously that the date of the last major content update appears in the search results. Note the word major! That’s another Ranking factor; magnitude. The amount changed for the content makes a big difference too.

Customer Value

Setting aside all the technical reasons why blogging is a good thing for your site, blogs are a big win with current and potential customers. Why? Because providing free information for them is a value add for your business / product. In a world where everything comes with a price, having free content for visitors to learn about your company, product, industry or even just gives tips and tricks for every day life is a win. It builds not only value, but trust with your visitors.

Feed Social Media

If the concept of keeping up with your social media content, blog content, website updates, etc is overwhelming, think of it this way; you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to your content. We talked about micro verses macro content and how each concept can feed the other. Think about using your social media posts to create one large, detailed post. Or start with your large, detailed blog post and break it down into smaller bites for your social media. The two areas do not have to be independent thoughts. In fact, having your social media topics and your blog topics all tie together makes your message more memorable because it’s exposed in more than once place. It’s repeating, without beating your visitors over the head.

How Hammersmith Support Can Help

Do you have a blog tab set up on your site? Schedule 30 minute consultation to discuss all of your website needs. Hammersmith Support’s comprehensive monthly maintenance can help get your blog set up, get your site on track, and keep it there with monthly check ups.