Your business blog can be one of the most effective tools in your marketing plan—an economical way to build authority, generate leads, and boost your site’s search engine visibility. Keyword-rich, evergreen blog content provides value and engages first-time visitors looking for specific information or solutions and having a blog search tool on your website can help users find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. WordPress users can choose from a number of WordPress blog search plugins to add blog-specific search functionality to any site.
There are many ways to add value to your business blog whether you are creating targeted or general content for your readers. Here are a few examples of how content can be written and used with the WordPress blog search plugins to drive the most traffic to your website.
Blogs Offer Both Timely and Evergreen Content
A blog is a flexible tool for publishing content of all kinds entirely under a user’s control. It’s a place to publish timely, dynamic messages about current issues and events as well as “evergreen” content that stays relevant over time. Both kinds of content can help build engagement and boost rankings with relevant keywords—and content that stays relevant for the long term can be an important tool to build authority and generate searches well after publication.
Evergreen marketing is great for first time users seeking to know additional information about your business and services offered. This type of content isn’t specific to current news and events so it can remain for an extended period of time on your site. Examples of evergreen marketing are: product reviews, videos, and how-to tutorials.
Blogging Boosts SEO
Adding a blog to a business or professional website—along with a responsive design—opens a powerful marketing channel. Along with email marketing, social media, paid ads, and other tools in a site’s content marketing strategy, a business blog, properly maintained and optimized, can be an effective way to reach potential visitors who may not even know your site’s name.
WordPress websites are designed to support blogging with an array of text editing and publishing features that make it easy to create engaging content and put it to work spreading the word about your brand. Because a blog is a built-in feature on most WordPress themes, it can be turned into a way to help the site rank higher with Google and to provide users with a library of relevant and useful information that can be accessed long after its original posting.
Each new post that’s published on any blog is indexed by search engines as a unique page, which also helps with rankings. Another way to maximize your writing is to embed an internal link between blog posts. When posts are skillfully optimized with relevant keywords in meaningful content, they boost organic search results and bring new visitors to the site.
Blogging Generates Leads
When writing a business blog you want to engage your audience by generating leads with a specific call to action. Blog posts can be useful tools for generating leads with an opt-in offer or another kind of call to action placed on every new entry. These posts can be instantly shareable across social media channels of all kinds, which spreads brand awareness and generates more interest and engagement.
Unlike the static pages that provide general information about the site, a blog can be a dynamic tool for two-way engagement with readers. Providing your audience with relevant information can raise a site’s profile as an authority in its niche. But, in order for all these functions to work at top capacity, a blog needs to be easily searchable so that any reader—from regular subscribers to casual visitors—can find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily.
Blog Search Tools Increase Engagement
With a regular and consistent publishing schedule, a working business blog is constantly being populated with new content and, as each new post is produced, older ones are archived. But the sequential nature of blog posts can make it hard for visitors to find the information they’re looking for without scrolling down a long list of previously published posts.
General site search tools, menus, and tags can help users find the content they want, but these tools search the entire site, including pages and other kinds of specialized information. As a successful WordPress blog grows and more posts are archived, a blog specific search tool becomes a necessity—a way to keep older content available to new users and keep all users engaged with the content they’re interested in. If users can’t quickly find what they’re looking for, they may leave the site and never return.
WordPress Blog Search Plugins
WordPress comes with a built-in search engine function that helps users locate content across all parts of a WordPress site. But dedicated search tools are among the many WordPress plugins available for adding special functionality and a better user experience for a WordPress site. A variety of free and premium search plugins are able to add selective search functions to make it easier for site visitors to find the high-quality content they want without sifting from post to post.
Depending on the kind of functionality a user needs, dedicated WordPress blog search plugins can provide a wide range of search tools for finding specific content. For example, WordPress blog entries are usually archived by date so that a user would need to know the precise date of publication in order to find a particular post. But a dedicated search plugin such as Relevanssi can search results based on relevance, not date, which makes it far easier for visitors to use specific keywords to search for evergreen content contained in older posts.
Blog search plugins come with other useful tools, too. Users can refine the parameters of searches so that particular kinds of content can be searched. For example, users can include not only keywords in a post itself but also relevant keywords in post comments, tags, or even custom fields.
WordPress blog search plugins can be as simple or as complex as a user needs. Some, like BetterSearch, also integrate with other plugin types, such as plugins for caching or analytics. It’s also possible to put a Google-style search engine on the site itself.
Blogging has been around for so long that it’s easy to take it for granted. This website staple can be one of the most effective tools in a content marketer’s toolbox—a low cost and a very efficient way to accomplish a number of marketing goals. With features designed to boost engagement and provide the best user experience, a dedicated blog search plugin can help a business or professional blog function at its best.
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