A friend of mine owns All Pro Painting , which is a commercial painting business in Seattle. You might think that his main goal is to rank number one in Google for the phrase “Seattle Painters”.  After all  “Seattle Painters” is a relatively competitive keyword phrase.  However, the fact is that there are not a lot of people that search for commercial painting companies in Seattle this way. Unfortunately the keyword phrase  “Seattle Painters” is pretty vague. “Seattle Painters could refer to artists, commercial painters, residential home painters, or anything related to painting in the greater Seattle area.

So what is the solution for this painting business to get internet traffic from their website? You guessed it. They need a blog. Blogs do several things for a website. Blogs increase the total number of pages on a website, which means that there are more pages in Google with the potential to rank for any given keyword phrase. Blogs also allow small business to write about what they are actually doing. In this case All Pro Painting isn’t going to want to stuff every blog post with the term “Seattle Painters”. Instead, they should be writing about the various projects that they are working on. For instance, they could be painting the exterior of a home in Fremont. Maybe there were some interesting challenges that they were able to over come on this painting project, or maybe the before an after pictures were so amazing that they really wanted to share them with potential customers. If All Pro Painting continued writing these blog posts on a bi-weekly basis, they would have over 100 blog posts within 12 months. That would mean that All Pro Painting would have over 100 pages in Google that ranked for various search terms related to their business.

You can see in this example how important blogs have become for small businesses to thrive on the internet in their local markets. The days of getting by with a static website have dissolved. Now, you might be thinking of going to WordPress or Blogger to go sign up for a free blog to get started, but your should hold that thought. You are going to be spending a lot of time and effort on your blog and there is no reason that you should be giving this value to someone else. You want to keep your blog on your own businesses website. Keeping your blog within your website will make the blog an extension of your existing website. Your blog URL should look like the following. http://YourBussiness.com/blog. There are also several other factors and tweaks that you are going to want to do to maximize the potential of your blog and overall internet presence, but we can talk about that when you call HDR Web Designs.

Ryan Martin ~ HDR Web Designs