Starting or maintaining a blog can have drastic, positive effects on your business’s online presence and reputation. From increasing the traffic your website attracts, to building trust from your clients, blogging is a simple way to keep your website up to date, and standing out from your competitors.
Whether you’re just launching a new website or have an existing site, here are 8 reasons why running an up-to-date blog can help you beat your competitors.
1. Driving Traffic to Your Website
Everyone wants to attract more visitors to their website, and building up your website content with blog posts can help – why’d you think we started a blog!
Obviously, there are many ways that potential clients can reach your website, but they aren’t always effective enough without input from you. If someone searches your website on Google they’ll find your site easily, but this only works if they are aware of your company in the first place. This means you won’t be gaining additional traffic from people who don’t know about your company.
Most websites don’t feature that many pages and the content on them also isn’t updated regularly. This means the indexed content remains the same in search engines. How can this be helped? You guessed it – blog posts! Every time a new post is created and published, that’s one extra page indexed and an extra chance of appearing in search results.
2. Converting traffic into leads
So, your blog is gaining traction and your traffic is rising, time to start converting that traffic into sales leads. As blog posts are indexed pages, just like standard web pages, you can add targeted call-to-actions at the end to generate leads. This could be as simple as offering a free trial or a discount to get the ball rolling with potential customers.
You won’t be able to convert every single one of your readers into a lead. But that’s no problem as the more traffic you generate through blogging, the more chance you have of generating leads.
3. Building Trust with Clients/Customers
A regularly updated blog lets your customers and audience find out more about you, your company, and your products. The information that you are able to share is basically endless and by doing so you can prove your knowledge of your industry – a great trust signal for potential clients!
You can also show your personality with your writing style, allowing you to relate further to your target audience.
4. Encouraging Engagement
Building a connection or relationship with your audience should be one of your main focuses when creating blog posts for your business. This aspect of blogging’s benefits helps you to encourage returning customers, and can also help you expand your sales reach.
From writing articles targeting regularly searched keywords to announcing special promotions, you should aim for shareability from your audience. This shareability will enable your loyal audience to help encourage potential customers by sending them your posts.
5. Drives long-term results
You may think that once your blog post is published you only have the first day to benefit from it driving traffic to your website. But thankfully this isn’t the case! It’s actually almost the opposite, as the post will now be ranking in search engines. Thanks to this ranking, the post can help you drive traffic for not only days and weeks, but even months and years to come!
So, the next time you think about postponing your blog post or you feel down that you aren’t seeing immediate results, just consider the fact that putting in some time to your blog posts now could benefit you greatly in the long run.
6. Link building
As one of the Google algorithm’s 200 factors considered when ranking a site on the search results pages, backlinks (inbound links) are a crucial part of your SEO. When writing blog posts it’s important to ensure they are not only useful for your audience but also for other companies and websites that can help you gain relevant links.
These backlinks prove to Google that your site is trustworthy, as other websites are letting them know that they recommend you, almost acting as a vote of confidence. This can also reinforce your domain authority, helping to boost your visibility in search engines, and thus driving traffic and potential leads to your website.
7. Reinforces your brand
Not only can blogging drive traffic to your website, help convert that traffic into leads, and boost your business’ engagement. It can also help to reinforce your brand with brand awareness.
You can use your blog to portray the voice of your brand, as well as emphasising your niche and services. This allows your audience to get familiar with your brand and what you do, helping to build lasting relationships.
8. Sharing company news
People often forget that blogs don’t have to be used exclusively for articles. They can also become a platform for sharing news and stories about your company. From previous case studies to helping build attention for upcoming events. These types of post help to humanise your brand, and shows your audience that you aren’t constantly focused on sales.
