Consistent blogging helps your business. Not only does it offer relevant, fresh content on your website for search engines to crawl and index, it also provides another touchpoint to attract leads. If you’re new to blogging, you may be wondering how a blog can help your business and how to justify the time or cost of maintaining a blog. Here’s what businesses should know about blogging:
1. A Blog Helps Your Business Build Credibility and Authority
Think about the top businesses in any industry. These businesses tend to be successful because they are viewed as credible authorities in their industry. They have a lot of brand awareness, brand recognition, and a good reputation as well.
Blogging is not the only thing that goes into a brand, but it can help increase brand awareness, build authority, and add credibility to your brand. Plus, you can allow and respond to comments and feature social share stats on posts as ways to use social proof on your website.
Potential customers have questions and problems for which they’re trying to find answers and solutions. By sharing industry insights, answering customer questions, and providing solutions to their problems on your blog, you can position your business as a valuable resource in your industry for both potential customers and other sources within the same industry.
Building an informative and useful blog with your customers in mind provides evidence that your business is knowledgeable. This adds credibility to your business, helps build your overall authority, and is just one of the ways to use your blog for business.
2. Blogging Can Help With Online Reputation Management
There are a lot of factors that go into building a brand’s reputation and managing it online. Monitoring brand mentions and knowing how to respond to online reviews are a big part of it. Another part of a good reputation management strategy is publishing information about your business.
Developing relationships with journalists and top bloggers in your industry can be time-intensive, but also provides a solid connection for press opportunities in publications in your industry that are outside of your control. If you’re using Twitter, you can use Twitter Lists to organize and interact with these accounts to help connect and build those relationships.
The blog on your website is a platform that you control. This means that you control the information published there, so you can ensure that it is representative of your brand and helpful to your customers. Plus, blogging increases the size of your website and the sheer number of pages that are available to be ranked in search engines.
When someone is searching queries related to your business name, your website pages and other branded web properties, like social media profiles and directory listings, should show up. When you add valuable blog posts into the mix, it only expands the amount of branded pages and items that are associated with your business name in the search results.
3. Blogging is an Integral Part of a Successful SEO Strategy
Following SEO best practices can improve the overall performance of your website in search engines over time and benefit your business. But, SEO is not a once and done type of thing – you have to have an ongoing SEO strategy first to help inform updates and continue progressing.
Content should be a standard part of any ongoing SEO strategy because it is so essential to how people and search engines experience your website and process what it’s about. In addition to supplementing your SEO efforts, blogging also provides a ton of benefits to your website and business.
An Active Blog Increases Website Traffic
Consistently publishing blog posts to your website increases the traffic to your website over time. The average company that blogs regularly receives approximately 55% more website visits and has 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t blog. Larger websites tend to receive more website traffic, so the more relevant indexed pages your site has, the better.
The more website pages that are crawled and indexed, the more opportunities your business has to show up when people are searching for relevant queries. This, in addition to building brand awareness and website authority, leads to more website traffic over time. Paired with other activities to help drive traffic to your website, blogging can contribute to some serious growth for your business.
Businesses That Blog Receive More Leads
A blog can also increase the number of leads your business receives. Companies that blog receive 126% more leads than companies that don’t blog at all. Granted, companies who take blogging seriously also tend to invest more in several marketing channels than companies who don’t.
However, this does not discount the connection between blogging and leads. A lot of various factors may go into lead generation and strong lead growth, but blogging does increase website traffic, brand awareness, and more over time, which all contribute to overall lead growth. Plus, blog posts give potential customers another avenue to connect with you. 70% of people prefer learning about products and companies through articles instead of ads.
Publishing blog posts with useful information that answers questions, solves problems, or helps someone with their research will help you connect with potential customers in a way they prefer. It allows them to find the information they need, learn more about your company, and walk away with a positive experience that may help them choose you over a competitor when they’re ready to buy.
A Blog Helps Your Website Earn Backlinks
Backlinks or inbound links are links from other websites that point back to yours. They are like recommendations for your website.
Essentially, the more authoritative websites that link back to your website, the more authoritative and “recommended” search engines perceive your website to be. Although the overall weight of backlinks has decreased from where they were several years ago, your link profile is still important.
An added benefit of a well-maintained blog is that it can earn backlinks to your website from other blogs and websites that find the information you publish useful. This, in turn, helps people find your website in new ways and sends signals to search engines that your website is relevant and authoritative. Inbound links can help you with inbound marketing, which is something to consider for your small business.
4. Quality Makes a Big Difference in Blogging
The more blog posts you publish over time, the bigger the impact it has on your site. However, it takes more than just throwing some words on the page and hitting publish to create a good blog post. One of the common mistakes business blogging mistakes people make is focusing on quantity instead of quality in their blog posts.
Yes, quantity makes a difference, but only if the posts are high-quality and relevant. If you’re publishing a bunch of low-quality posts, it can hurt you instead of help you. This type of low-quality content is one of the SEO mistakes to avoid. If you can’t dedicate a lot of time to blogging, it’s better to focus your efforts into one high-quality blog post weekly or monthly than to publish just for the sake of hitting a set number of posts.
Quality is Important for Blogging and so is Consistency
Publishing blog posts consistently is also important, but you have to find a blogging schedule that works for you. Before you jump into blogging and start hitting “publish”, take some time to think about the resources you have available. What time can you dedicate to writing and promoting blog posts?
If you don’t have time, what budget can you allocate to content marketing as part of an ongoing SEO strategy? The answers to these questions will help you determine how many blog posts you can commit to publishing a month while maintaining a quality standard. Once you have a realistic publishing goal in mind, creating an editorial calendar can help you plan out blog posts and keep you on track.
5. Blogging Efforts Compound Over Time
An important thing businesses should know about blogging is that blogging efforts compound over time. In most cases, you’re not going to publish a blog post and then suddenly receive tons of traffic and leads because of it.
There is always the chance something can “go viral” and get a ton of attention, but that is not standard. In fact, less than 1% of online content goes viral. So, you don’t want to go in expecting or planning on that.
At the same time, the blog posts you’ve published previously don’t disappear into the void; they continue to work for you and benefit your business. Much like SEO, blogging is an ongoing process that shows results over time.
If they are well-written, kept updated, and follow SEO best practices, older blog posts will continue to work for you and attract traffic and leads as you publish new posts. The more blog posts you’ve built up over time, the more traffic they generate for you, and the more opportunities you have to convert leads from them.
A solid ongoing SEO strategy that includes blogging can help grow your business and keep you competitive. If your website isn’t up to par or your blog needs some help, contact us for a meeting of the MINDs to see how we can help your business grow!