Why Blog? The Top 5 Blogging Benefits for Small Businesses
The humble blog, everyone does it. Even my Mum did it for a while. What once was simply a hobby, for those who wanted to share their views online, has now become big business. Nearly two decades after it was first introduced to the world the blog is still going strong and continues to adapt to modern technology, there are even AI services available to help you write your blogs.
Content Marketing is key to a successful marketing campaign. We live in a world where people want easy to read content with 80% of people learning about a company through their custom content. Blogging fulfils a vital part of this strategy, to the extent where a company with a blog will generate 67% more leads than a company that doesn’t blog.
Regardless of what industry you are in an active blog makes sense, as consumers we have learnt to buy into a brand, we follow them on social media, we look for their opinions of social issues. A blog is a tool for your business to do this, plus more. It is your chance to prove that you are an expert. If you sell retail products you can do reviews, or highlight key seasonal products, if you are a service you can give advice to prospective customers, this could be an insight into the budget if you are an accountant, or it could be so exercise and stretching tips if you are a physiotherapist. Whatever your business you can add benefit to your customers and potential customers with blogging.
If you are still unsure check out these statistics:
- Business blogging attracts 55% more website visitors than businesses without a blog. (Source: Hubspot)
- According to WordPress, 409 million people a month read blogs. (Source: Forbes)
- Reports show 6 out of 10 shoppers have purchased due to a blog recommendation. (Source: Huffington Post)
If you still need convincing, then read our 5 Reasons Why Your Small Business Should Keep a Blog:
Boost Your Google Ranking
Bill Gates gave us the phrase content is king over 20 years ago and this still holds true today and Google knows it. There are several factors that will boost your Google ranking:
- Backlinks
- Internal links
- Regular content
- More indexed pages
- Pages dedicated to specific keywords
A blog helps with all of these, so let’s look at them individually.
Backlinks
Backlinks are Google’s reputation tool. Their search engine spiders sieve through the internet by crawling backlinks, and having your site virtually connected to a trustworthy website is how you’ll pass that reputation to your own website. So why are blogs so useful for backlinks?
Let’s think about this logically, no-one is likely to reference my page on Copywriting for their own use. It gives them no benefit; the page is a sales page to encourage people to buy my copywriting service. However, my blog about content vs copywriters could be useful. Someone else might be writing a blog or an article and find something I have written on that page useful, they will therefore, if following good practice reference it on their website add a link to my page. If enough people do this, then Google will start to see my website as a credible source on copywriting.
When applying this to your website, think about the topics that your customers and your industry is going to be interested in and make sure that you write content to match.
Step two is to then do link outreach to people that have linked to their content.
You can see that one of the websites that has already discussed this topic is FarReach.
To gain some backlinks, one of the link building tactics I can use is to reach out to people that linked to FarReach’s blog.
By using a backlink tool, I was able to see that the blog below linked to it.
Noobpreneur
Link outreach is an important step in crafting a great blog post, and it’s often overlooked. The Link Builder’s Guide to Email Outreach breaks down how to effectively go about reaching out to people.
Internal links
Internal links are a key component of a websites search engine marketing strategy, building this structure is an important first step. Without a sturdy link foundation, Google’s bots will not understand how to index and rank your website properly. Google bots reward websites that make their lives easy. If you make it easy for them to get around your website the better, it is going to be for your search engine ranking.
Once you have good links throughout your main pages you then need to maintain this with your blogs. Blogging allows you to single out particular keywords and topics to talk about it but then link back to your sales page. This is going to make it easier for people and the Google bots to link topics and pages together on your website.
Regular content
The Google bots will regularly come to your website to see if there have been any updates or any changes. Google wants to know that you are an active website. However, good copy can take a long time to write and copywriters can be an expensive (but worthwhile) outlay. This means that you are unlikely to be changing the copy on your website that regularly.
The best way to regularly update your website is to write blogs. It adds new content for Google to read and it also increased the internal links as discussed above.
More indexed pages
Search engines want a website to be credible and trustworthy. They want to offer reliable information to website visitors, and one of the ways they’re able to measure this is by seeing how many indexed pages a website has.
Generally, having a larger website correlates with being a better source for information. But search engines recognize that this doesn’t always hold true, which is why is smaller sites are still able to outrank larger ones.
But your company has a consistent blogging strategy, then you can work to index more pages over time.
Pages for specific keywords
Simply put, Google has a library of information, and when a user asks a question – such as, ‘How to write a blog’ – Google uses this library to find them the answer. Those pages that contain the most relevant keywords (the words that the searchers used) are classed as more likely to answer the user’s question and are therefore ranked higher.
The easiest way to get your blog as SEO-friendly as possible is by incorporating the necessary keywords throughout your content. Through your keyword research, you can uncover what your desired audience searches on Google when looking for certain products, services, or businesses. This way, you can structure your blog around these queries and give your content the relevancy and authority it needs to improve its SEO ranking.
Through solid, strategic SEO practices such as keyword research and link-building, your blog will be rising up the Google ranks, driving traffic to your site, and boosting conversions in no time at all!
Boost your lead generation
Your business needs leads to grow and to do that you need a pipeline. Emails, social media, cold calling, networking can all generate leads but one of the top sources of leads is content marketing – especially blogging. Here are three reasons why:
- It helps drive more traffic to your website
- Blogging gives visitors a reason to convert
- It is one of the most effective long-term strategies.
Let’s break this down and set realistic expectations. It is very rare that someone is going to read your blog and decide that they are going to call you straight away and immediately start using your services. (If you want to prove me wrong then please call 01706 548 220). You therefore need to give your followers a low-risk call to action. These can include encouraging them to search your website further, inviting them to an event you might be running or alternatively you could invite them to join your mailing list. Once you have people on your mailing list you can regularly contact them via email with a mixture of value added content and subtle sales pitches. Some of you reading this might have come here from my email that I sent out.
Adding people to a mailing list can be a useful strategy because it means that you are regularly in contact and you keep your brand and your services regularly in the mind of your target audience.
Boost your lead generation
Your business needs leads to grow and to do that you need a pipeline. Emails, social media, cold calling, networking can all generate leads but one of the top sources of leads is content marketing – especially blogging. Here are three reasons why:
- It helps drive more traffic to your website
- Blogging gives visitors a reason to convert
- It is one of the most effective long-term strategies.
Let’s break this down and set realistic expectations. It is very rare that someone is going to read your blog and decide that they are going to call you straight away and immediately start using your services. (If you want to prove me wrong then please call 01706 548 220). You therefore need to give your followers a low-risk call to action. These can include encouraging them to search your website further, inviting them to an event you might be running or alternatively you could invite them to join your mailing list. Once you have people on your mailing list you can regularly contact them via email with a mixture of value added content and subtle sales pitches. Some of you reading this might have come here from my email that I sent out.
Adding people to a mailing list can be a useful strategy because it means that you are regularly in contact and you keep your brand and your services regularly in the mind of your target audience.
Aid Your Social Media Strategy
I run social media accounts for several customers. My philosophy is that those channels need to be engaging, relevant and informative. The content that I produce varies, sometimes it may well be a sales post, on other occasions it might announcing attendance at an event or something to highlight the companies CSR but a lot of the time it is knowledge share. For the majority of the time, I have to link to external resources, blogs, publications, news stories that help put my clients position across. But when a client uses my services for written blogs or if they can write the blogs themselves, I am able to put out valuable information that is a lot more personal and effective. My customer can then lead the conversation and that is highly valuable to them. As an aside I also find that their blogs statistically get more clicks than the others posts that I share.
The other not often spoken about benefit of blogging is that you can recycle them. You can quickly update old blogs and then put them out on your social platforms long after the first edition has been used. This means that if you are ever suffering from writer’s block then you are able to dip into your archive of blogs and put out useful information to your followers.
Position yourself as the expert
I have been to several conferences and seminars from PR professionals, they encourage you to become an expert. The seminars give advice on how to get on to radio, how to get into publications and how to be seen. I have seen this work wonders for one of my clients – Saul Hay Art Gallery – they have seen their sales increase because of the reputation and exposure we have been getting them into magazines.
There are two routes for this type of exposure the first is a lot of hard work on your part, the second is to use a PR agency. Both involve an investment, one of time and the second of finance, not all of us have the time or money to make that investment. But blogging doesn’t have to be either of these things. This blog is the longest and most detailed I have done and it is probably going to work out as 5 – 6 hours work. I often write shorter 500 word blogs and these can done in a couple of hours.
Blogging allows you to give your views of industry issues, it allows you to share your knowledge. It positions you as the expert. It also gives you the added bonus of getting to research the topic you are blogging about which will increase your own knowledge base as well.
Increase Brand Awareness
Did you know that most consumers forget about the content they see from a brand after just three days? Working as a marketing professional I find this statistic disheartening – does this mean that I am redundant and that you should forget everything that you have just read and never talk to me or another marketing professional again? – Thankfully not.
What it means is that we need to put out good, meaningful and memorable marketing content out on a regular basis. This is where blogs, how to guides, top tips posts come into their own. They give audiences a reason to engage with you and to get to know your brand, it’s personality and what it stands for.
To Conclude:
Well done on reading this far. This blog will have given you a lot of detail on why blogs are important. If you want an informal discussion around blogs, or alternatively if your business doesn’t have time to write its own blog then call me on 07740983098 or email me on guy.woodcock@gwthemarketingguy.co.uk
