By: Karli Willden
Want to increase your sales online? Want to increase product awareness or website traffic? How about increase your ranking on the search engine? Well, here’s a trick to help get you going: start an active blog for your website. Now wait, before you shrug your shoulders and click to another page, hear me out! A blog is a great investment for businesses for many reasons, and can be the key to your business’ success. So, hold on, and see why every business should have a blog.
Content Marketing:
Increases ROI
Websites with an active blog are more likely to have a positive ROI than those without a blog or content strategy. ROI, return on investment, is a measurement of the value of an investment and its effectiveness. The majority of businesses are incorporating content marketing into their business plans, because of its effectiveness and efficiency. According to research done by HubSpot, “Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x’s more likely to enjoy ROI, than those who do not.” Some companies may believe they do not have enough time to dedicate to a company blog. If this is the case with your business, read on and reconsider. Every time a new blog article is written for your website, you strengthen your website’s presence and add to the website’s value. ROI is one of the many advantages to business blogging, and with many more to follow.
Increases Website Traffic
Blogs give your visitors a reason to return to your website. The more blog posts produced, the more visible and valuable your website becomes. A website without a blog will quickly become old and stale to visitor traffic without fresh content. Think of a visitor who comes to your website, reads every website page, and then returns the next day only to realize there is nothing new to read or learn from. The visitor will likely not return again. Blog posts bridge a constant flow of traffic to your website. If bridges are built, traffic is bound to cross and explore. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites are also great bridges to connect directly with your target audience and share content. Facebook alone has 800 million plus users world wide. As you start your company’s blog, remember to produce unique, quality content.
Establishes Authority
As you regularly post quality content on your blog, readers begin to identify you as an authority on the subject. Establishing yourself as an authority with your target audience is important as you seek to gain and retain your website traffic. Valuable content is the reason visitors come to websites. If your website does not have the valuable content visitors are looking for, their next resort is your competitors. Do not fill your blog posts with merely sales pitches, but with valuable content that will make customer’s lives better. Customers return to websites they trust and which continually provide quality, fresh content. With fresh content you can count on gaining and retaining your website traffic. Quality content drives interaction and engagement between businesses and customers, thus deepening a valuable, business relationship.
Increases Product Awareness
Blogging is an inexpensive way to increase product awareness. Your website blog is an opportunity to educate your prospective customers about your business or products. There are limitless opportunities to increase product awareness through a blog like infographics, statics, ‘how to’ articles, etc. If you have a product, or brand, which needs more exposure, share it on your blog. Blog posts give you the opportunity to go in depth about all aspects of the product. Give customers all the information they need to make their own decision. With greater product awareness and understanding, customers will be more likely to seek out your company’s products or recommend it to others.
SEO:
Blogs increase opportunities for SEO and help your website gain more exposure by ranking higher on the search engine. Listed below are a few specific ways which will help improve your website’s SEO through a blog.
- Keyword Placement
- Internal linking
- Meta Descriptions
- Title Tags
- Alt Tags
- Headlines/Headers
Opportunities for Internal Linking
An active blog creates more page opportunities for internal linking, which helps to increase your ranking on the search engine and drive traffic to your website. Internal linking is used to keep visitors on a website longer, by providing links to navigate to other pages of the website. For example, a local bakery may use a blog for internal linking to increase traffic to his or her website. A bakery may post a recipe for a German Chocolate cake on their blog, containing an internal link to the bakery’s cake page. Those looking up German Chocolate cake recipes online will find the bakery’s recipe, and may click on the internal link to the bakery’s cake page. Viewers may then view the bakery’s cakes and decide to place an order for one of the cakes, instead of making it themselves, thus increasing online sales. Internal linking is great to extend the time visitors spend on a given website, and increase website conversions. Every company can benefit from internal linking through limitless blog posts.
Keyword Placement Opportunities
A blog increases opportunities for keyword placement. Keywords drive the search engine, and are used by Google to index and systematically rank websites by topic. The more targeted keywords used in the website content, the higher your website will be ranked on the search engine for those keywords; this makes it easier for those searching for those keywords to find your website. Websites may have a limited number of pages on the website in which they have exhausted keyword usage. Blog posts unlock unlimited pages to incorporate keywords to rank higher on the search engine, so you can avoid keyword stuffing on your limited website pages.
Google Rewards Fresh, Unique Content
Websites with active blogs rank higher on Google’s search engine than those without. Why? Google rewards websites which produce fresh, unique content. The higher a website is ranked on the search engine, the more website traffic, the more website conversions, and the more sales for your company. This is why everyone, especially business owners, should want to rank higher on the search engine. Google determines a website's ranking based on a complex algorithm, which determines the website’s quality and usefulness to readers. This algorithm could be the fate of a website’s success. Websites with old, out-of-date content are less useful to readers and are pushed lower on the search engine. Websites with fresh, new content, with proper grammar and spelling, are boosted higher on the search engine.
As a business it would be well worth the investment to start a blog for your business. If your website has old, stale content, with poor traffic flow, poor online sales, etc., it is time to turn over a new leaf with content marketing. For more information on how content marketing could benefit your business, contact Barton Consulting today at 888.379.1357.