A successful business blog requires website owners to be committed to creating valuable content that people actually want to read. It is important to firstly understand that blogging takes time, but with consistency comes results. Secondly, you should always plan ahead and have a long-term content creation strategy in place to help prevent your business blog from becoming stagnant.
If you can commit to taking these two points on board you’ll go a long way to achieving the following 3 business blog benefits.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Benefits
Integrating a blog into your website offers valuable SEO benefits including:
- Increased traffic to your website/blog from both new and returning visitors.
- Keeps the search engines coming back to your site to crawl your new content and increases your chances of appearing for search queries related to your business blog. As hot topics make the news scene in your industry, having timely blog posts will help your content get seen by more people – think of the Google Freshness update launched late last year which focuses on delivering users with the most current and up to date results, relative to their search query.
- Attracting long-tail keyword visits to your site from people who have searched on Google using more than three or four words specifying the product or service that you offer. Often these keyword phrases have significantly less competition and have been shown to convert at a higher rate than one or two word keyword phrases.
- Attract natural backlinks, blog subscribers and social media mentions as a result of writing and publishing engaging and sharable content.
- Become An Authority In Your Industry
Think of all the how, why and what questions that consumers/clients regularly ask regarding your businesses products, services and/or industry. A business blog enables you to share your knowledge and answers to these questions with a large audience from one central place. With time and commitment to writing quality content, your business blog can become a valuable resource. Valuable resources on the internet are easily shared – just think of the power of social media i.e. Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
Businesses can also share their expertise with other complementary blogs by providing guest posts – blog posts that you get published on another blogger’s website which contain a link back to your site. Guest posts offer a fantastic opportunity to drive more traffic to your website and blog, whist enhancing your credibility as a blog writer and also delivering real SEO benefits.
- Direct Communication / Engagement
Once you start blogging regularly you can begin to build up a readership base of people who are interested in your business/industry. Blogging offers a great way to promote your business to people who have already shown an interest in what you write by discussing upcoming specials, introducing new products and services, sharing topical news events, publishing your thoughts on a particular subject or product and so on.
All blogs should also include the facility for commenting too – this encourages interaction with your readers and allows for valuable feedback, while also bringing your blog to life. Check out the useful tips in this article about how to increase comments on your blog posts.
If you would like to improve your business blog’s performance and reap the 3 benefits above, contact our team of experienced SEO and Blog Marketing experts today.