Should your company be blogging? In a word…YES!
There are many benefits to creating a blog for your business. But in our conversations with clients, we’ve discovered that many of them are unclear on the specific benefits a business blog can bring to their company. We wanted to clear the air and confirm once and for all that YES, blogging helps your site. The benefits of managing a business blog include:
- Driving traffic to your site
- Converting traffic into leads
- Building your company’s authority
- Showcasing your company’s voice
- Delivering long-term returns
Drive Traffic to Your Website With a Business Blog
Regularly adding content to your website by creating business blog articles increases traffic in two ways. Continually updating your site improves its overall search ranking, as search engines notice your new content and index the new pages. As we all know, higher search engine rankings means more site traffic.
Creating high-value content also attracts customers looking for solutions to a problem. Quality blog articles put specific, relevant information into the world that new potential customers can discover through searching or social media. If your article is very effective, visitors will share it with friends and followers, driving even more traffic to your site.
Convert Traffic Into Leads With Effective Calls to Action
Once new visitors are on your site reading an article, it’s a terrific opportunity to convert them into leads. They’re already looking for something–business advice, step-by-step instructions, entertainment–so take it one step further and offer them an additional resource to address their needs. This could be a free ebook by your company’s founder, a webinar on the topic, a consultation, etc. By including a relevant call-to-action and linking that CTA to a lead-generating landing page, you can create leads for your sales team and move site visitors farther down the pipeline to becoming active customers.
Build Authority With Expert Blog Content
People use search engines to research just about every planned purchase or decision. If you maintain a business blog that answers someone’s question easily and effectively, they are more likely to consider you an expert in the field. By regularly adding consistently high-value content to your blog, you set your company up as a trustworthy, valuable resource. As an added bonus, a thorough business blog is a great internal sales tool–when clients come to your team with a question, you can refer them to your very own expert blog articles, reinforcing their trust in your expert authority.
When you write articles for your business blog, you’ll notice very quickly that it’s a different experience than writing content for your website. Blogs are more conversational, which makes them a great way to highlight your company’s specific style and ethos. Reading blogs allows customers to get a sense of who you are as a business and what working with you will be like. Plus, in addition to the educational content, your blog can function as a portfolio, showcasing past projects. Potential customers visiting your blog can feel like they’ve already been in conversation with your team.
Continue to Build Long Term Returns
There’s a reason business blogging is often included under SEO. Like SEO, maintaining a blog involves an upfront investment, and the benefits of managing that business blog continue to drive results long after the initial publication date. If your article addresses a commonly searched question, it will continue to show up in search engine results, months or even years after you first post it. As more visitors find your article, its ranking and authority will snowball, generating increasing traffic and leads. Hubspot notes that a whopping 70% of their monthly blog traffic and 90% of their monthly blog-generated leads come from articles posted in previous months or years. Regularly adding to your business blog is an investment in the future that will continue to reap returns.
If it’s not clear by now, we love blogs. Managing a business blog is an essential part of any modern website, and it provides benefits well above and beyond the effort required to maintain and update the blog. If you’re looking for the next steps to create a polished, effective blog for your business website, contact us for a free consultation today.
Sources: Search Engine Journal, Hubspot
