Business Blogging for Accountants – part 1

This is the first part in a series: Business Blogging for Accountants, Lawyers and Other Business Owners and Practice Managers.

We are hearing a lot of talk these days: “The end of business blogging…,” The death of business blogging…,” yada yada. And truly, blogging stats are going down a bit from previous all time highs. What with the many other channels of reader engagement, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, among others, it might not seem worthwhile to start or maintain a blog at your practice website.

See also – Blogging Made Easy 101

And who will read your business blog? What would you business blog about, your products or services? As a business owner why blog? The answer: more website visitors, some of whom may become your business clients or customers.

Here’s the not-so inside scoop on small business blogging for accountants – SEO (search engine optimization) and social media-driven content can increase the number of targeted visitors to your business website, not necessarily because of all the great content you will produce (well great content does help), but because the helpful and/or insightful content that you do produce will be indexed by search engines. Post fresh blogs with unique content regularly and they will be found and visited by increasing numbers of people looking for the types of information, services, or products that you provide.

Take for instance the typical small business accounting practice website of 12 pages. Add a blog and post fresh articles twice weekly and your website will have added 100 additional pages in a year’s time for search engines to pull up. And each new post can be cross posted to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media accounts that you may have. And that possibly means more interesting and engaging conversation that the typically banal: “I’m headed to the office poker game,” or “I’m taking tomorrow off to deal with personal errands,” and other uninteresting babble.

Not only does each new blog post potentially increase business website traffic by 50%, according to some experts, but also it stimulates the search engines to crawl and index your site more often, and consistent fresh content also increases your website ‘search authority.’ Because the all so secret algorithms that drive the search engines are biased towards websites that provide such fodder (or food) –

That’s why you should always make your blog a central and integral part of your company Web site, rather than a separate, standalone site that links back to your main one. “Search engines are like animals looking for food,” says Marcus Keith at MSN’s Business on Main. “You can train them to keep coming back for fresh content, if they know they can depend on it.” Keith also recommends that within the content you are producing you include many of the keywords that you know customers will be searching for. “Remember that you are writing for both humans and machines,” says Keith. “You have to be a little double-minded.”

… to be continued soon with Blogging for Accountants part 2.

Image credit: Stuart Miles / Free Digital

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D. Marcus Keith is a partner in ADMAX, a local and national; “Internet Marketing Optimization” agency that has been performing SEO-related services for Cloud9 Real Time since 2009.