Businesses operate in a dynamic landscape of consumer demands and technology. To stay on top of the protean marketing landscape, many businesses are creating websites to build an online presence. Well, while an optimized website is a critical element for any business, the bad news is that it doesn’t always offer enough information, personality, or authority to help your site stand out from the crowd.
The global economy’s ever-changing environment requires businesses to go further. That’s why your website should have a blog.
Blogging is a superior marketing tool that offers small businesses a cost-effective way to enhance marketing efforts while attracting more prospective customers to their website. In this post, you will find the top reasons why your website needs a blog. Read on!
Table of Contents
1. Drive Traffic to your website
Are you looking for a way to attract more visitors to your website? Blogging is one of the most cost-effective strategies for increasing your website’s traffic as long as you post relevant content.
Check out our Free Step By Step Guide To Start A Blog.
So, how does blogging drive all this additional traffic? This is simple. Blogging gives you the opportunity to create relevant content for your target audience. When you publish more blogs, search engines will have more content to crawl and index from your website. If your content is useful, search engines will recognize your site as a source of information for people to access, meaning you will show up on the search engine results page (SERP) and eventually get more traffic to your website.
Along with adding fresh content, you should also consider optimizing your site for search engines. Some SEO strategies that make blogging a powerful tool include keywords, titles, and meta descriptions. All in all, all major search engines love fresh content, meaning every blog you post adds a page to your website. This helps increase SEO because it gives Google and other search engines a reason to re-crawl your website to index the newly published content.
In a nutshell, blogging triggers search engines to crawl and index your site, which increases your visibility, ultimately driving organic traffic to your website. With more traffic, you will have a better opportunity to convert the traffic into leads and finally into actual customers. Sounds great? That’s how powerful blogging can be.
2. People Stay Longer On Your Website
The importance of blogging in fostering and maintaining good relationships with potential customers is indispensable. Interestingly, it is as natural as driving organic traffic.
If you consistently create and post valuable content for your audience, it will establish you as an industry leader in their eyes. And, the more you show prospects that you’re well-versed in your industry, the more they are likely to stay longer because they can find answers to their everyday questions.
The other exciting part is that when you offer value through blogs, your readers are more likely to come into the sales funnel because you have already helped them.
Apart from seeking answers to their daily questions, your website visitors will also stay longer to learn more about your place in the industry and the products or services you offer.
3. Start A Conversation And Get Feedback From The Audience Through Comments
Great websites do an excellent job of giving customers the information they might need. Unfortunately, this is done in a one-way manner – there is no room for customers to ask questions, genuinely comment on the content, or even start a conversation.
On the flip side, blogs allow for a two-way conversation with industry peers, leads, and customers, which makes them more powerful. So, how? Most blogs usually have a comment section, and that’s precisely where many businesses start a direct conversation with their audience.
To initiate a conversation, you can encourage feedback and discussion in the comment section of your blogs using a more relatable tone. After all, having an extensive conversation with your customers allows you to examine your business from your audience’s point of view while building trust and authority in your brand and industry.
4. Blog Posts Keep Your Site Relevant
If your website has a blog, you will apparently find opportunities to write blogs around the best industry practices, how-to’s, and industry trends that directly relate to the products or services your business offers. This helps keep your website relevant as long as you write valuable content.
Unlike the website itself, blog posts allow for better incorporation of long-tail keywords than any other page of your site. When done rightly, this helps to solve a burning question that your site visitors might have.
Although it can take your time and money to create high-quality and relevant content, the efforts will help you stand out in the highly competitive business environment and pay off in many ways.
5. Builds And Increases Credibility/Authority
In business, nothing can beat a solid reputation. Thankfully, a blog that is constantly updated with helpful content shows your audience and customers that you’re a trusted source.
Blogging shows you expertise in the field, builds trust, and ultimately establishes your business as an industry leader. What’s more, if potential customers view your blog as one that can provide helpful expert-level information about relevant topics, they will be more likely to do business with you than with your competitors.
To make this work for you, all you need is to publish interesting and unique content that resonates with your market.
6. Blogging Helps Create Brand Voice And Identity
If you want your business’s personality to shine, it is time to move away from your website’s professionalism to start connecting with your customers through a blog. Blogging provides a simple, inexpensive, and effective way to establish a voice for your brand. It allows your unique voice to come through in a perfect way that readers find helpful.
Whether you are an industry expert with an impressive vocabulary or a blogger trying to add humor to a complicated topic, having a blog on your website will help you define your brand, build rapport, and help your audience understand you and how you can help them.
Make sure to share business announcements, discuss industry and market trends, and talk about new products or services.
7. Generate Leads
Now that you have visitors coming to your website through your blog, you have the opportunity to convert that traffic into leads. Interestingly, each blog post you write is indexed separately by search engines. This means each post presents a new opportunity to generate leads as long as you have added a lead-generating call-to-action to your posts.
In most cases, calls-to-action leads to simple offers like free ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, fact sheets, trials, templates, or other types of content that site visitors would trade for their credentials.
If you’re unfamiliar with traffic-to-lead conversions, this is how it works:
- A visitor comes to your website
- They see the call-to-action for a free offer
- When visitors click call-to-action, they are directed to a landing page with a form for them to fill with their information.
- Upon filling the form and submitting it, the site visitor receives the free offer. At long last, you will have built an email database from where you can follow up with the leads.
For this strategy to work effectively and bring you the desired success, ensure that the free offer has enough value that your prospects will find worth trading their information for.
8. Social Media Engagement
Social media has become an integral part of digital marketing strategies. Thankfully, every blog you create gives you great content to share across social media platforms. It also helps you keep your social media presence active without necessarily creating new content.
Unlike posting curated content on your social media account, content shared from your blog will point directly to your website. This helps expose your business to a new audience that might not have known you yet.
If you create original content that is valuable, interesting, and entertaining, you can potentially turn your readers into promoters. All you need is to provide quality and add social sharing buttons to your blog so visitors can easily share your content with their friends.
9. Blogging Alows You To Add Unique Content Through Images, Videos And Infographics
This is relatively straightforward. Unlike general pages, blogs can be structured in many ways with different types of content like images, videos, and infographics to create a better visual impression and convey information more clearly.
Depending on your target demographic, you can customize fonts, images, and aspect ratios to keep readers engaged and tailor content to their needs. Infographics keep your blog engaging and education without sacrificing your website personality and passion for the industry.
10. Content Marketing
Along with every benefit of having a blog for your website, blog content gives an opportunity to showcase your expertise through content marketing. An added benefit: content marketing is an effective method of growing an audience. To make the most out of content marketing, you can create groups where you will be posting content as you interact with your audience.
Conclusion
From a practical point of view, adding a blog to your website is well worth it. It is an enjoyable way to express your passion for the industry while creating brand awareness. If you’re considering adding a blog to your website, the good news is that it is not one of the most difficult things you can do.