What are the benefits of blogging?

As blogging becomes an increasingly known phrase, we are continually getting asked whether it is something our clients should be actively participating in for their own business. The short answer is yes! To be fair the question usually arises from the smaller businesses, that either cant quite find the time to do it or those that can’t begin thinking of what to talk about.

Having built an established web design business and achieved great success, with which we have blogging and quality content publication to thank. We are a testament to the difference it can make when it comes to being found on-line, generating focused leads and helping increase sales. So as you may be able to tell we are a massive supporter of putting energy into a quality content publishing strategy, and there’s no better place to start than your own blog.

If you are still unsure about blogging for your company? We will go through what we see as the 10 major benefits of blogging for your business and hopefully you’ll see that blogging is a must do!

Before we go into it I’d like to just clear up a common question that arises-

Does my blog have to be hosted on my business website?

The answer to this question is yes! You’ll see as we cover the 10 benefits that hosting your blog away from your domain is counter intuitive to some of the list below.

Don’t get me wrong to run a blog independently is still of greater value than having no blog, although you will find that only a few of the benefits below can be achieved if you take this route.

So, lets get started, blogging on your site the top 10 benefits.

1. Search engine traffic increases

When it comes to search engine positions, we like to think of blogging as food! Treating Google and web users as hungry animals, animals which feed on well written content and information.

As you offer Google and users more food(well written useful content) you are giving Google more reason to keep coming to your site and indexing pages. This really helps with your organic search results and increases website traffic.

Publishing content then becomes an opportunity to attract more and more specific web users to your site, who are looking to feed on your delicious content. Remember the more food you offer the more keywords you will rank for.

2. Make your brand human

Professional well written web content like your homepage or about us page etc. cannot begin to compete with the power of a quality, content rich blog which really captures the personality of your company.

Blogging offers you the opportunity to answer questions and offer advice to your prospects, in a manner which is much more like just talking to someone naturally.

Once you build up confidence in your writing, you’ll soon be able to communicate to people on your blog in a similar fashion to the way you may answer a question if a friend was picking your brain about the industry you are clearly passionate about.

3. Bolster your social media

Without access to high quality unique content it can be quite difficult to achieve a consistent social media footing. Its fine sharing other peoples media and content, but that will lead to their benefit over yours.

Directing leads to your site would be key and this isn’t possible if you haven’t written it yourself. Submitting content to these kind of platforms is a fantastic way to drive the right people to your site, something that would be incredibly difficult to achieve without the information that can be found in well written blog posts.

As a side benefit to this, blogs can make great content for email newsletters also.

4. Become an authority in your industry

We now live in a world where information is at the press of a button and gone are the days where we keep our industry knowledge to our selves, in an effort to stay ahead. This has now flipped, and it makes more sense that if somebody is going to find the information they need (which they will), it may as well be you they find it out from!

So why not become an authority in your industry. This will help to gain real interest in your site and drive the exact customers you are looking for. Remember even if you tell someone exactly how to achieve what they need to do, its likely they are going to need help , in most cases they wont even try. So where will they go when they want the job doing professionally?

5. Conversion rate improvement

This one is a huge one for us. The last thing that you want when someone does arrive at your site is for them to question whether you are an active company.

A regularly updated blog really gets the message across loud and clear that not only are you an active business , but you are a business that’s there to help.

Its reported that a business that makes a priority out of blogging , takes advantage of a huge 13% increase in ROI year in year out.

6. Generates more inbound links

Without a blog it can be really difficult to gain inbound links to your site. Given the significance of in bound links from an SEO point of view, this is a serious reason to make sure you participate. The key here is regularly publishing well written useful content.

This way you will naturally start to build creditability with other bloggers, journalists, authors and contributors, leading to them publishing your content on their own platforms, with links to your site. That is, in a nutshell the essence of a inbound linking.

The benefit of this is not only that your blog will reach more people and lead more people to your site, but Google also uses these links as a signal of just how good your content is. This signal is deemed one of the most powerful ways to help Google decide on your search positions.

7. Rank better for long-tail search queries

As search engines evolve and the way people search changes, it’s becoming more and more apparent that long-tail search terms are a significant way of driving traffic to your site. Gaining results for these sorts of phrases is a difficult task with your sites static content alone. Conversely if you choose your blog titles with thought and care along with a well written and relevant blog, long-tail phrases can be achieved.

A really cool way to find the best long tail key phrases, that will work best for you is to simply start writing a question into Google, on a subject that many prospects may be needing the answer for and if Google tries to predict the question you are about to write, then use this as a signal that lots of people are asking it.

Once you have found a decent question, make that the title of your blog and proceed to offer the best possible advice with no less that 400 words. You then stand a chance of Google indexing your blog on its first pages, meaning every time that question is asked your answer is seen. If you make it a regular part of your strategy, overtime you could have no end of long tail phrases all driving targeted traffic to your site.

8. Growth of leads

It has been proven with thorough research that the more pages a site has, the more leads it gains. Hubspot claims that a website that contains between 400- 1000 pages of published content will achieve more than 5 times that of a website that has between 50-100 pages. As each blog is considered a page in your website , logically the more blogs you create the more leads you will generate.

9. Kickstart discussion

Discussion is what makes the internet go round, and a blog is a great tool to enable discussion. It suggests to your web user that you encourage comments, feedback or even criticisms. This leads you to getting a firm handle on what makes your prospect tick, enabling you to really gear your marketing strategy’s around the people which matter.

10. Gain valuable ‘freshness’

Freshness is a key factor in what Google takes into account when its deciding where to rank your site. Keeping your blog well up to date, with the latest trending questions on peoples minds, or relevant industry information, Google will reward you with better visibility.

At the same time new content on your site lends itself well to creating internal links, which helps Google crawl your site more in depth, which results in a more effective spread of page rank throughout your site.

On a final note

For keeping ahead of your competitors, blogging is a necessary tool! Offering the world wide web your nuggets of industry knowledge is a certain strategy to increase growth, traffic and conversion of leads. Blogging opens up the field of play and the smaller business’s have an opportunity to sit side by side with the big brands.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, I hope its given you a better understanding of the importance of blogging. If you have any questions feel free to call www.newpumpkinwebdesign.com on 01772 822 626 or drop us an email to info@pumpkinwebdesign.com. We are always happy to help.