Why your business website needs a blog
Having a blog for your business or company is one of the most effective ways when it comes to building brand awareness and gaining credibility in your field of work.
A blog can help you ‘humanize’ your brand, showing potential customers that you are not only a professional, but also just as human as they are. Additionally, it gives you the opportunity to create interesting and intriguing content that you visitors and clients can indulge in.
From a search engine point of view, a blog can also help you rank better and faster, but you will need to produce really exciting, innovative and user-focused content.
Even though creating and maintaining a good blog can take a lot of time and dedication, your efforts will be rewarded in the end.
Keeping that in mind, here is a more detailed view of the reasons why you should consider setting up a blog for your website, business, project or company.
Blogging as a form of content marketing
You might have heard the phrase ‘Content is King’. Even though this might sound cliche, it is the truth.
Content marketing is an acquisition strategy based on creating and distributing meaningful and relevant content with regards to a certain field or topic.
As an example, if you are a travel agency, you could consider producing content (blog articles, advertising materials, videos, even social media posts) on the topic of travel destinations, cuisine and top-rated accommodation to inspire your readers and potentially make a conversion down the line.
Blogging in itself is a form of content marketing that is primarily used to grab and retain your potential customers and readers’ attention.
If executed appropriately, it can be quite useful as certain content types like evergreen content can be continuously updated and shared by others on the Web, gaining you extra exposure and maybe even some more customers down the line.
A blog can help humanize your brand
On the other hand, a personal or company blog can also help you express your business views and opinions.
This shows your readers that you have a philosophy and a stance on some issues and how you are taking action to address them. It can also act as a one-way communication channel, but you might even consider allowing readers to leave comments, ultimately making each post a discussion between users and your business.
Expressing your professional and knowledgeable opinion on different products, services and global events can positively impact your company, showing your users that you value human rights and values.
Additionally, having a blog, where you can openly discuss such company values, aims and goals is a great way to also gain the trust and support of your readers.
However, it is important to iterate that you shouldn’t directly sell your products or services through your blog. It should rather be a place where you can educate the general public and provide useful information for those new to your business or to your field of work in general.
You should also consider providing useful advice alongside the industry-related topics, which you will be covering.
Remember to keep it real. Your readers and potential customers will appreciate your honesty. Show them the true face of the company by talking about upcoming projects, changes, updates and any struggles or problems that you have encountered on the way.
Showcase your studies, your success and your failures - admit when you are wrong and remain honest. Staying true to your business and brand is important - there are really good and really tough periods for each and every company or business.
Good blog content gives you credibility
Credibility is something that has slowly begun to become a luxury that most businesses can’t afford due to the exceptional amount of fake news and false claims that are being spread online on a daily basis.
This is why gaining credibility in your industry field is of the utmost importance - it will show your readers and potential customers that you know what you are talking about, which will also reflect in your products or services.
Before anyone takes a chance on your business, you will need to persuade them that you are a professional, highlighting why your business would be helpful to them as well as what differentiates you from your competitors on the market.
To gain this credibility, you will need to spend countless hours on crafting the perfect content pieces for your blog. You should consider using your experience as a point of reference as readers generally enjoy reading content that is personal. You can even use data that you have analyzed from your business to support your topics.
However, once created, a blog post shouldn’t just be forgotten about. As a matter of fact, you should manually reach out to other websites in your industry and see whether they would be interested in linking back to your content. This is what is known as link-building and it will help your content build trust and reputation, which will ultimately result in better credibility for your brand.
Being able to collaborate with or be acknowledged by professionals, experts and well-known people in your industry will also give your content credibility.
Having a blog means better SEO and search visibility
In general, creating high-quality, linkable and shareable content will ultimately result in better search visibility in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Search engine algorithms naturally promote relative, timely and authoritative, trustworthy content, meaning that if you produce high-quality, optimized blog posts, chances are that you will start ranking for a lot more keywords and search terms.
This will, consequently, gain you more exposure, allowing you to expand your reach and increase your credibility as well.
However, as we already mentioned, you need to optimize your content appropriately in order to be able to reap the benefits of your work. Overall, producing diverse content is one of the most influential factors when it comes to keeping your blog fresh.
Not only that but it will also help you bring in people from different fields with varying levels of experience, which will gain you more search presence and better exposure.
Types of blog content
There are a number of different blog post types that you can create.
Pillar content for example involves having one high-volume article that you will build supporting content around. It usually serves as the foundation for a given topic and it introduces a topic or concept and answers many questions that a reader might potentially have.
Evergreen content, on the other hand, is a type of content that will more or less remain the same over time. It is very factual in nature and is again used to describe concepts and terms while also giving some context to a certain topic in the grand scheme of things.
Tutorials and answers to popular or niche questions are also a very useful type of content to implement into your blog and support its diversity.
Don’t forget about using appropriate keywords
Keywords are the ones that Web crawlers will use as signals to determine what your blog post is about. Because of this, it is absolutely crucial to carefully and meticulously optimize your content to make it as easy as possible for them to gauge and evaluate it.
Make sure you give your blog post an appropriate title and a well-structured URL. Ensure that the headings on the page are also hierarchical and follow a certain pattern. However, don’t forget that you shouldn’t stuff your blog post with numerous keywords as that will be punished by crawlers and ranking algorithms. A good benchmark to aim for is having no more than 2-3% keyword presence in a given article.
Use structured data to feature for rich results
Structured data is something that has slowly been gaining popularity when it comes to search engines.
It is essentially additional metadata that provides Web crawlers with additional information to help them understand what the page is about.
Structured data needs to follow a particular pattern called a schema. This might sound challenging for some companies that are looking into starting a blog, however, it is nothing to worry about - there are plenty of online generators and descriptive documentation available that can make the process substantially easier.
Using structured data allows your articles to display rich results - the interactive results in the results pages such as maps, locations, products, quick question answers and step-by-step tutorials, which all appear in the SERPs directly.
For example, implementing ‘HowTo’ structured data to your tutorial blog post will make it eligible to appear in the search engine results pages as a rich result.
An engaging blog will increases your sales
As we mentioned previously, directly using your blog to advertise or sell services is not a good move and will most likely result in driving traffic away rather than boosting your conversions.
Instead, create meaningful and useful blog posts and incorporate call-to-action segments, buttons or paragraphs, where applicable. Remember, however, to only use them in a relevant context that can result in the reader being interested in what you offer as a business.
Don’t forget about the newsletter
In addition to creating a blog and useful content, make sure to also get yourself a newsletter subscription form and incorporate it in your articles.
It is crucial to remember that the newsletter is a powerful tool that you can use to further increase engagement for your readers with your brand. Allow readers to subscribe if they enjoy your content and notify them when you post a new article that they might be interested in.
You can also think about creating newsletter-subscriber exclusive content as appreciation for their interest in your content.
Having a blog WILL benefit your business
Although blogging definitely requires a lot of time, effort and dedication, starting one for your business will benefit you greatly in the long run.
It will give you exposure, credibility and a better reputation in your field of work. As a result you will see an overall increase in traffic to your website, which can result in more conversions.
Just remember to produce relative, timely and authoritative content, share it where possible to gain reputation and make sure to incorporate structured data.
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