
The Most Important Things Blogs Can Accomplish
Blogs are everywhere. They’re featured on websites across industries, written about niche interests of all kinds, offer advice and recipes, case studies and step by step instructions… Business gurus tout the importance of having a blog on your company’s site, but what do they really accomplish?
Particularly for businesses, blogging can seem like wasted effort or expense if you don’t understand just what they’re doing for your company. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at what blogs can accomplish for marketing your company and why they’re worth investing in.
SEO Value
On a purely nuts and bolts level, blogs are a great way to add new pages to your website. That means more links, more keywords, more URLs on your domain, and so on. All of this stuff, including the fresh content included in the blog itself, are excellent fodder for the algorithms that determine your search rankings. Not only are you building up the backend of your site with metadata, internal links, and tags, you’re also adding fresh content (which shows the crawlers that your site is active) and creating deeper context for what your site is all about!
Drive Traffic
Blogs are a great way to get people to visit your website! You can share them on social media, of course, and link directly to your site, and anyone searching for the things you cover in your blogs may stumble upon your company as they scour the internet for answers. With the right content, other sites in your industry may also link to your articles, boosting both SEO and helping people find your business as they click through relevant links to find more information.
Education and Expertise
Informative, well written articles are an excellent source of education for site visitors. Such blogs can serve to teach readers about your products and services, but they can (and should) go well beyond offers and sales pitches to truly inform people. Depending on your niche, your blogs could be guides, explanations of dense topics, industry news, and so on.
By providing valuable information, you draw people to your site who are looking for answers – who may then further explore your site to see what your business offers! At the same time, you’re establishing your company as an expert in the field, which serves to build trust, foster relationships, and positively influence buying decisions.
In fact, this is probably the most important part. It’s great to appease the robots, of course, since algorithms, organic searches, and paid traffic are all important parts of marketing… But creating and posting highly relevant, informative blogs is the essence of “content marketing.” It’s less about driving sales, and more about establishing yourself as the obvious choice through expertise.
When prospective buyers are doing research and keep seeing your articles (and find them helpful each time), you’re creating trust, building brand recognition, and positioning your business as a valuable source of help. In the age of limitless choice and fierce competition, this kind of relationship building is more valuable than ever.
In short, blogs accomplish an awful lot for your online presence, both with real people and the algorithms/systems that make the internet function as it does. If you aren’t posting blogs to your company website, now is a great time to start. You don’t have to post every day or publish entire research studies – you can start small by addressing common questions or sharing things your prospective customers might now know. Even one post a month is much better than zero.
Remember that the goal is to educate and establish expertise, and use that compass to shape your content. As you go, you can fine tune your voice, make sure you’re formatting in a way that boosts SEO, and explore topic ideas. If you focus your blogs on things your customers want to know, you’ll be on the right track.
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