We’ve posted quite a bit about different ways to organically boost your SEO. And the one marketing tool that always checks the most boxes is a business blog.

Without a blog, your website has one link to your site, your URL. But if you posted a blog once a week for a year, you would have 52 links pointing back to your website. Fifty-two! That’s fifty-one additional ways that a potential customer could find your site. That’s huge.

In addition to the links back to your site, business blogs are great for a few more reasons. Here’s why.

SEO

Your website is constantly being crawled by search engines to analyze and categorize your site. The easier it is for a crawler to do this, the better chances your site will get returned when someone searches for a related topic. Google uses over 200 factors to analyze and then rank your site, including freshness of content, magnitude of updated information, and quality of content, especially grammar and punctuation. Blogs check off a lot of these Google Ranking Factors, making it an absolute must to include on your site.

Images

Speaking of SEO, having great images in your blogs not only boosts your SEO but it’s also an opportunity for you to share and add new images without having to redesign your website – meaning the images posted in your blog change often without having to update the main images on your site. Keeping a consistent feel across your site is important, but so is displaying new and exciting graphics. A blog is the perfect spot to keep your customers and readers up-to-date on what’s happening while maintaining the look and feel of your site.

Micro Content

Blog topics are a perfect way to feed your micro content (i.e. social media). Blogs are macro content because they are longer, more detailed posts. But those detailed posts can be broken down into bite-sized pieces and used to feed your micro content. For example, this post could be broken down by headings (images, SEO, links) and used for one to 3+ social media posts. The result is a consistent social media presence and cohesive message for your marketing.

How Hammersmith Support Can Help

Do you have a blog tab set up on your site? Let’s talk. 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.

For web designers, the word schema makes sense. But for the rest of the world, schema may be a mystery. So first, let’s define some terms; according to Search Engine Journal, in terms of search marketing, schema is code markup that you add to your site’s pages to help search engines create more detailed descriptions of your content or data. Put more simply, it’s language that search engines understand. And if your site is easier for a search engine to read and understand, it will be able to better index your site.

So! Now that we understand schema, let’s dig in to local schema and why it’s helpful for your business.

What Is Local Schema?

Local schema is schema code that is specific to your local business. It codes things such as the hours your business is open, currency accepted, department information and so on. When potential customers come to your website, they see the standard information. But with local schema, a search engine will see not only that information but the background code as well. The easier the code is to read, the higher ranking a search engine can give your site.

Why Is Local Schema Helpful?

Just like any form of SEO, making your site easier for search engines to understand, index, and return results to a searcher is paramount. We have blogged quite a bit about organic ways to boost your SEO. Being able to add coded information to boost your SEO is just another tool to improve your site’s Google ranking.

In addition, improving the indexing of your site by search engines can improve the click rate to your website. And local schema, just like other types of organic SEO, is free. Unlike paid advertising, your website will be indexed faster and more easily, resulting in a higher search ranking.

Where to Go for Resources

While schema is purely code, there are several websites that can help you generate the correct local schema. Moreover, you can find helpful resources for testing your code:

Generate schema: https://technicalseo.com/tools/schema-markup-generator/

Test your results: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

We Can Help

While Hammersmith Support is great at building websites, we’re also amazing at maintaining them! Contact us to talk through how we can help you and your site, including adding local schema to help clients find your business.