We’ve all heard that, when it comes to SEO, content is key. However, there are still countless businesses that aren’t utilising blogging as an avenue for traffic and leads. In today’s digital age, blogging has become an essential tool for businesses to connect with their customers, establish themselves as industry leaders, and drive traffic to their website.
The benefits of blogging are endless, so keep reading to discover why you should have a business blog, and how it can help to drive more traffic to your website.
Increase Website Traffic
By posting frequent, high-quality content to your blog you are increasing the likelihood of your website being found in the search results and gaining more traffic. Whether you are a B2B or B2C business, by writing content that answers the queries potential customers may be searching for, you are leading them to your website where they may download your whitepaper, enquire about your services or purchase a product.
Gain New Customers
Part of the sales funnel for many people now includes research; looking for reviews, finding out more information about the product/service and discovering where the best place to buy is. Content is powerful, you can use your words to persuade a potential customer to shop with you instead of your competitors. Each industry will require different styles of content. A clothes retailer could regularly blog about upcoming fashion trends and mention items they sell that fit in with the trend, for example.
Build Trust
Reputation in business is everything. By dedicating time to maintaining your blog frequently, you are ensuring that you are always writing content that is going to be helpful for potential customers. The best thing about blog content is that, assuming the topic you are writing about is evergreen, you can gain traffic and enquiries for years to come from a blog post you wrote year ago! Some major websites have actually stated that 90% of their overall traffic comes from old blog posts, which shows how much blog content can stand the test of time and doesn’t only reap immediate rewards. Show potential customers that you are a valuable source of trustworthy information and they’ll keep coming back for more.
Complement your SEO
Search engines such as Google love high quality, relevant and regular content. In order for your SEO campaign to be successful you should ideally have a content strategy in place to go hand in hand with your SEO efforts. If your site doesn’t have timely, quality content then it is unlikely Google will deem your site a site where users would want to visit frequently. Keyword rich content is also a main factor to improve rankings, without content how do you expect to be ranking for your chosen terms?
Give your Company a Voice
It’s always good to put a face to a name, isn’t it? You’ve exchanged a few emails with a supplier, co-worker or client but it’s a lot easier to get your point across when you’re face to face. With everything moving online, this shouldn’t mean that communication with your customers should suffer. Whether you have someone in-house who could write blog posts on behalf of your company or you’re considering hiring an external content development agency, your blog posts should be fun and the author should create a persona especially for your brand so that the content is fun and interesting to read.
Stay Ahead of Your Competitors
Whilst blogging is becoming increasingly more popular, it’s still not an incredibly common thing. Whether your competitors are blogging regularly or not at all, you need to stay ahead in order to compete! By doing a Google search for a product or service you offer, look at the top 5 competitors that rank – do they have a blog? If yes; it is updated regularly? Is the content relevant? Are customers commenting and engaging with the content? What could you do better? If no, developing a blog would give you a very good competitive advantage.
Stay in Tune with your Audience
As a business you will have a target demographic and ‘perfect customer’ profile, blogging is a great way to help remind yourself who you are writing for and why you are blogging for them. Creating a content strategy is all about your goals. For example, what is the purpose of the article? Is it of interest to your target audience? What do you want the customer to do once they’ve read the article? All these independent factors will change how you writing, what call to actions and images to include and many other essential elements.
Advertise at Little to No Cost
Blogging for a few hours a week is a much more cost-efficient advertising method than other options such as paid ads, banner ads and email marketing. Unless you’re an ecommerce website, you probably don’t have that many pages on your site which means every time you publish an article that is one more page that can show up in the search engine! This also reminds Google that your site is active and they should crawl your new pages.
Learn more about your customers
By implementing tracking on your blog this allows you to identify topics that are popular with your customers, any shares or comments that occur, how they found your blog post and, where they go once they’ve read it. Once you know what types of content your audience like reading, whether its text heavy articles, short/long articles, infographics, or stats, you know to write more of that!
New to the world of blogging and don’t know where to start? Don’t have time to write content yourself and want to hire a trusted content development agency? Learn more about how In Front Digital can help!