Blogging has a lot of benefits for businesses.
It works to draw organic traffic, engage customers, build brand awareness, differentiate you from your competitors, convert customers; and it will keep doing all these things long after publishing.
That’s a lot of value for something that’s relatively simple to set up and doesn’t cost you anything (if you’re using an in-house copywriter).
But you shouldn’t just be publishing any old kind of content. As with any kind of online marketing, your blog content needs to be strategic and be written with the customer in mind.
In other words, you need high quality, information-rich content that people will read, share and comment on. Keywords are important to have in your content too, but posting irrelevant keyword stuffed, filler content can hurt your site’s ranking.
If you’re still sitting on the fence, check out these five major reasons why you need to be blogging for your business.
1. Blogging gives Google fresh content
Google prides itself on being able to give searchers the most relevant and useful information it can.
So by posting relevant and useful content on your blog, you’re essentially giving Google what it loves the most – fresh content that it can crawl and add to its database.
With relevant keywords and search terms inserted into this content you have an extra chance to boost organic traffic to your site.
Add a call to action at the bottom of the post and you have the perfect medium for attracting consumers searching for the exact products or services that your business offers.
2. Blogging builds trust
Consumers are research savvy these days. Many people don’t buy online unless they’ve thoroughly done their homework, and checked out if a company is who they say they are.
A regularly updated company blog, allows potential customers to learn more about you and what you do. An active comment section allows you to engage with your target audience and receive feedback in real time, which in turn helps to build trust.
You don’t need to be Hemingway to write a blog post, but you do need to be able to write in a conversational manner that connects with your audience.
This can take a certain knack, but practice makes perfect. One of the best ways to communicate with customers through blogs is to write content that sparks up curiosity or an interaction.
3. Blogging establishes you as an industry expert
Your business’ blog is one of the best ways to establish industry authority. Even if your business is small, you can build up your reputation via your blog as an expert in your field.
Posting relevant, insightful and valuable information on a regular basis that’s commented on, liked and shared around the internet can do more to raise your company’s profile and increase leads than any kind of paid marketing.
The important thing to remember when writing content for your business blog is to be as credible as possible. Some ways you can strive to increase credibility can include:
- backing up facts with statistics and sources,
- providing case studies to illustrate your points,
- making sure headlines accurately describe the content,
- not making exaggerated claims.
If you’re not being credible people will pick up on it, and be skeptical about anything you say.
4. Blogging increases your organic traffic
The number one thing that most businesses want is to increase leads, because leads mean potential customers, and paying customers mean profit.
Blogging regularly with fresh, engaging content can increase your leads exponentially. The more blogs you post, the more organic traffic you can expect to your site.
But exactly how much do you need to blog? Research undertaken by HubSpot shows some interesting results. They found that businesses that regularly published quality content to their blogs reaped big rewards in driving organic traffic and leads:
“Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got about 4.5X more leads than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.”
5. Blogging keeps on giving
Though it’s important to continue to create fresh, new content, don’t discount old blog posts that have gained good authority and ranking over time.
Even years after a blog post is published, it can continue to attract new leads and customers. In fact, you may find that some older posts have such great content, relevancy and optimization that they collect most of the traffic and leads on their own.
The takeaway from this is that great content remains useful to your readers for a long time, and this is perhaps the most important benefit of why blogging is critical for your business.
About the Author — Matt Ramage has been marketing websites for over 20 years. He loves helping businesses improve their user experience and searchability on the Internet. Matt now heads Emarketed which is located in Los Angeles, California. They specialize in SEO, social media marketing and web development.