You’ve probably heard reports that search engine marketing and online advertising is expected to grow in the next five years. This data comes directly on the heels of other reports that a record number of consumers are searching more frequently than ever. So how do you improve your company’s search marketing to ensure you’re positioned at the forefront of organic search engine results? Establishing a corporate web log (blog) is a simple, cost-effective way to drive organic traffic to your site, which creates opportunities to grow your sales conversions and, ultimately, a bigger customer base. If you haven’t yet set up a company blog, consider that 70 to 80 percent of blog traffic comes from new visitors — a major increase in your sales leads.

Setting up a blog for your company is easy and can be done independently. Most online programs offer templates for free, although these blogs are typically off site. For more customizable, add-on options, minimal fees may be incurred. Even your agency of choice can help you establish and monitor a blog as part of its interactive services. When deciding which blog program to use, be sure to factor in its ability to support different media platforms such as audio and video. Also, be wary of pop-up or banner ads that you may not be able to control with a free account, and consider the available features that can enhance your search engine optimization efforts.

Perhaps the biggest impact of setting up a business blog is SEO so you get found in search. The fact that a blog will help you rank higher organically is good news because most clicks occur in organic search results. Search engines feed on fresh content, which your blog will provide with frequent posts. Also, a major part of SEO is linking, so on-site blogs are ideal. By hosting an on-site blog, you can link posts internally to past entries or product landing pages as well as externally to partner sites, thus increasing traffic to and sales potential on your company’s official website.

And if your blog format features post excerpts (on the home page) that click through to full blog posts on separate landing pages, you are essentially building depth and SEO-friendly content on your site, complete with crawlable URLs for search engines. Building depth to your site also improves your linking potential. Furthermore, each blog post title and body content should contain SEO-friendly keywords you are trying to target since blog posts serve as microcontent; in fact, your blog management system may treat post titles/headlines as part of the URL following the forward slash. For example, you see that the title of this blog post (“Corporate Blogging Benefits”) also corresponds with the URL of this landing page (www.searchperspective.com/2009/10/28/corporate-blogging-benefits), and both are crawlable by search engines.

Your company blog “humanizes” your marketing efforts by attaching a personal voice or personality to your outgoing communications. For this reason, it is important to find a few good candidates to represent your company. Multiple writers create more perspectives, and add unique personalities to your corporate writing. But be sure your writers establish themselves as experts on the respective subject matter.

Establish a direct, friendly tone for each writer. This personal style of writing helps establish engagement and dialogue with consumers, who will be more encouraged to respond to your posts once they feel a sense of “welcome” (you have to enable the option to allow reader comments, which you can either approve for publication or delete before the public reads them). As readers post comments, you’re basically building an online community, where you can monitor your brand perception, build brand awareness, correct inaccurate reports about your company, and keep your customers up to date about news and product releases. (I cannot stress enough the importance of responding to your customers’ comments.)

Once you have blog writers in place, establish a writing or editorial calendar. Daily updates are ideal (remember, fresh content boosts SEO), but pick a schedule that works for you and your staffing limitations because readers are counting on you to be there once you start. Frequent posts promote a positive user experience because your readers will know when to expect your next entry, which will encourage them to subscribe to your RSS feeds. Regular posts also show you’re engaged and actively involved in the interests of your customers, who will be more likely to serve as advocates for your brand through word-of-mouth marketing.

Stay tuned to tomorrow’s blog post about blog guidelines for usability, content and design.