So you own or manage a local business, you’ve just met with an SEO expert and he told you that to increase website traffic and rank you should write a Blog, but is this really the right choice for you and your business?

A Blog when it comes to Local SEO can be a great benefit to your business.  Ongoing and timely business information can have a positive effect on Google’s freshness algorithm.  It also can attract an audience that will interact with you and through interaction bring you a larger audience.  It allows your site to rank in Blog Search as well as regular key work search results and local / map search results.  Some people also see it as providing the bedrock for all social media developmental for a company.

So for a business who is ready to jump into the blogging, local SEO can definitely benefit from a Blog.

But then we find the other side of the coin… We all know that saying about Good Intentions.  So you have great ambition to add a Blog to your site, but then the plan never comes to fruition.  The Blog section is all setup on your redesigned site and then…

Or calling it a Blog rather than just making the information an article section or other kind of updated section of your website.  A blog is defined as “A web site on which an individual or group of users record opinions, information, etc on a regular basis.”  Here’s an example of a less than regular basis that might do well to be an update to the website other than a “blog” post.  The most recent post is nearly 4 months ago and the next post down is 6 months before that.

This is not an isolated incident, how often do you find a website with only old Blog posts or sporadic Blog posts at best?  Good intentions don’t always translate into workable marketing.

So for a small business here in lies the question.  Do you have the time and desire to keep us with a business blog?  For many small companies the answer is no and not doing a blog is probably a better choice than doing it half way.

For those who have just said no to a business Blog you still have a wide variety of opportunities for online marketing, from making sure you’ve claimed your place pages like on Google Places, to running Ads on Bing and Google and making sure you regularly update your site.

And try not to judge too harshly those that said yes to a business Blog, but discovered it was more work than it was worth.