Blogs originally started as personal journals that people shared online, but as companies also seized the opportunity of blogging to improve their personal brand, BLOG has made its way and became an integral part of our online lives.
For businesses, having a blog is the best way to connect to their visitors or followers. On a technical side, it is a website page that gets updated regularly with fresh content on specific topics.
Business blog enables you not only to showcase your work but also to let your audience know more about your products/services — it will help you to carry your message loud and clear to your visitors. Blog gives answers about your values, and in general, improves your business visibility.
Let’s see some benefits of your business having a blog:
Builds Trust with Customers
Having a blog on specific industry-related topics will provide necessary information to your visitors, no matter if you educate them on a certain topic or address the common concerns.
You can try to touch on multiple topics within your industry or choose the ones that you know your audience is interested in the most.
Make sure your content is fresh and valuable to your users and you can start building your supply for your business social media and trigger your followers to click for more.
You can set your blog as an addition to your customer support by answering frequent questions from your customers. Writing about things that are important to them shows that you care about their issues and will provide solutions with your expertise.
Such approach will make your customers trust you and be more willing to enter a cooperation with you.
Builds Credibility
Any professional company, whether big, mid or small sized, should run a blog.
If your content is insightful and reader-friendly, it will boost your company’s reputation. Sharing information helpful to your visitors can go a long way in developing credibility.
A well written, insightful and frequently updated blog, addressing important issues in your industry, will show your customers that you are an expert in your field and ready to use share your knowledge to solve their problems.
Such method assures customers that you will respond to their needs and provide a good quality service.
‘Credibility is a basic survival tool’. Rebecca Solnit
Drives Traffic to Your Website
As per Hubspot report, 55% of businesses that blog have more site traffic than those that don’t.
Not only is it good for your existing customers, but blogging is a great way to acquire new audience as well. If a customer finds one of your blog posts in Google search under a specific topic, you will earn yourself a reader who might have never heard of you otherwise.
Another way is via social media — post your blog links to your social sites and give your followers a reason to visit your website. Whenever you post an article, your visitors can share it on social networks (Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.) which is a great help to present your business to a brand new audience. Blog content can help your social presence as you can guide your blog to act as a content ‘store room’ for your social channels.
Every time you post a blog, it is a direct addition to your website’s indexed pages giving you a chance to rank higher in search engines and drive more traffic in organic search.
Your blog can work many ways so try and experiment how it can help promote your business value.
Turns Traffic into Leads
Once you acquire a potential customer with an interesting blog post, you can drive them further down the ‘sales funnel’ and ask for their contact details in exchange for a free downloadable that can help them with a specific problem.
A great way to make a blog serve its purpose is to add a lead-generating call-to-action (CTA) to every blog. Usually, these CTAs lead to free eBooks, whitepapers, free webinars or free trials etc. – any content which a customer will find valuable to subscribe to.
For example, when a visitor comes to your website and clearly sees and clicks on your call-to-action, you can guide him to a landing page with the form to fill in their information. If willing, visitors will submit their information to receive your free offer.
No matter what you wish to achieve (a sign up for your newsletter or email details for your free eBook), having a blog is a great way to increase conversions on your website.
Helps to Engage Your Existing Customers
Once someone uses your services, you should make sure to stay connected to that customer in the future.
Your blog can represent a connection to your customers to keep them interested in your brand by offering assorted content — not only articles, but also tutorials, case studies, helpful tips or company news, so to give them insight into your company culture.
You can also use blogs to enable customers to express their opinion about your content — set your blog posts for comments or questions and a two-way communication will help build your social imprint.
Some users will search for information on social media — you can try to brand yourself as an information hub and provide value to your visitors and customers. This way, they will keep following your work and coming back to check new posts.
Helps to Build Better SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a process of improving your website to increase its traffic in organic search results.
For a start, use keywords in your site blogs — make a list of keywords and categories you want your company to be found with. Use these words and related expressions when writing your posts but be careful as Google penalizes sites for keyword stuffing so you will not have that many words you could use.
However, your blog offers unlimited opportunities to create keyword rich content that will be insightful and engaging to your followers. If your blog is consistent and frequent, it will increase your visibility in ranking results.
Using good keywords in your posts can double the chances of customers finding you high in organic search results. A regularly updated and original blog is rated high in Google’s eyes and will boost your SEO definitely.
Generates More Inbound Links
As per Google, one of three most important ranking factors are backlinks. There are different types of link building but when it comes to backlinks, quality is what matters.
Some good ways to create backlinks is to create interesting content that others will want to link to and to link your content to high-quality domains (.edu, .gov etc.). Pay attention that it is much better to have more links from diverse authority domains than to have many links from a single source, no matter its credibility.
If you put the right links on your website, it will improve your search ranking, build authority of your site and improve your user experience.
Additionally, check for bad links on your site and try to remove them — check your links on your website with Google Search Console and if you see any low-quality links, you should remove them.
There are some different tools that you can also use to identify the links that you want to discard like Open Site Explorer (SEOMoz), Google Webmaster Tools, Cognitive SEO or you can hire an agency to do the work.
Addition: Guest Blogs
Guest blogging offers you a chance to spread your word to more people with the same interests. Guest blogging, whether you write for others or others for you, allows you to create content that drives traffic to your site, (embedding links to your articles, creating call-to-actions etc.), and network with others in the business world within your industry.
Guest blogging helps you to build your brand and credibility on your niche topics. You can build credible authority within your market and present your business to brand new audiences.
Featuring guest posts on your own blog will help you to offer different perspectives and fresh content to your visitors — we all get bored with the routine so featuring a guest post is a perfect way to keep your readers interested.
Your guest blog authors can be a great source of promotion as they can also share their blog posts on their personal networks giving your company access to a much wider audience.
The key is to be consistent and write about the topics that relate to your business and the ROI will support the time you spent on building your blog.
Final Word
Your blog is your business asset — use it wisely as it can help you become more visible to your audience.
Blog can separate you from your competition by making your visitors aware of your business thus it is important to create content that is valuable to them.
If your content is interesting and insightful to your visitors, it will build your credibility, rank you as an expert and ultimately improve your business results.
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Originally published on Medium, on November 27th, 2020