5 Reasons Why Your Business Should Have A Blog

These days, blogs run the internet. You see blog posts everywhere: on Facebook, Twitter, and Google searches. Your competitors regularly publish new articles, and you’re beginning to wonder if you should too.

But you might be also be wondering why blogging is such a common practice. How could starting a blog possibly benefit your business, and would the time you spent writing be worth the investment?

Adding a blog to your business’s website can have many positive results, and for many businesses, the benefits of adding a blog outweigh the inconveniences. Blogs can improve your site’s status in search engine rankings, attract new traffic to your site, and help establish your business as an authority in your industry.

Need more information? Keep reading for the top six reasons your business needs a blog as well as a brief guide to starting a blog for your business.

Why Your Business Needs A Blog

Here are the six biggest reasons to add a blog to your site.

1. Boost Your SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Improving your SEO helps you get featured higher up in search engine results and, ultimately, be found by more potential clients and customers.

One of the biggest reasons you should consider adding a blog to your website is the positive effect it has on SEO. Blogs boost your SEO in many ways. Here are just a few:

• Your Site Stays Active: Publishing frequent blog posts keeps your site “active” in Google’s eyes. Active sites are considered more relevant to potential customers, and they are consistently ranked higher by search engines.
• Target Keywords: Blogs provide more material for search engine crawlers to grab onto. In particular, blog posts are a great opportunity to target long-tail keywords, which are effective in attracting the right kind of traffic to your site.
• Longer Visit Times: Blog posts keep visitors on your site for longer. Longer visit times tell Google that your site has value, which can lead to better search results.
• Create Opportunities For Backlinks: A blog can make your site more “shareable.” Readers are far more likely to share an engaging blog post than they are to share a product page. All of these backlinks do a lot to bump you up on search results.

According to HubSpot, while it’s certain that adding a blog to your website boosts your SEO, businesses have varying degrees of success with this. Your SEO gets the most positive impact if you are strategic in what you write and how you market your blog. Stay to the end of the article for tips on optimizing your blog posts to gather the most traffic.

2. Strengthen Your Brand

Blogging doesn’t just build your reputation with Google; it also builds your reputation with your customers. Use your blog as an opportunity to communicate your brand’s personality and values.

For example, if you own a lifestyle brand that aims to connect with customers on a personal level, your blog should have a casual, welcoming tone. If your brand values transparency and clear communication, you should demonstrate that in your blog. Creating a strong sense of brand can go a long way to building confidence in your clients, and a blog is a great place to start.

3. Market Your Business

Blogs are an excellent addition to your current marketing strategy. Data from HubSpot in 2018 showed that 55% of marketers listed blog content creation as their top inbound marketing priority. And it seems that prioritizing your blog pays off. In 2019, marketers who prioritized blogging efforts were 13x more likely to see positive ROI.

In particular, blogs are a great way to create new content for social media. Currently, there are 3.5 billion social media users globally. Reach those users by sharing your blog posts on social media and then engaging with readers and customers in the comments.

4. Show Your Expertise

Blogs are a great place to demonstrate expertise in your industry. If you operate a skincare business, you can use your blog to share advice on creating a great skincare routine. If you are a personal trainer, you can use your blog to share at-home workouts and meal plans. Publishing a blog allows you to become a source of information for potential clients and customers.

5. Connect With Your Customers

Finally, adding a blog allows you to strengthen connections with your customers. You can use the comments section of your blog to talk directly with your customers. You can find out what questions your customers may have, respond to customer concerns, and thank your readers for their patronage.

What Should Your Business Blog About?

One of the first steps to adding a blog to your website is to decide on a topic.

As you decide on a focus for your blog, you should look for a topic that meets two main qualifications: It should be related to your business, and it should be a topic that is frequently searched online.

Choose A Topic Related To Your Business

The topic that you choose for your blog should be naturally related to your business. For example, if you own a site that sells products for nurseries and babies, your blog could be about parenthood or child development. If you are an independent real estate agent, your blog could give step-by-step guidance for buying and selling homes.

It’s important that your blog is clearly connected to your business because it will help you attract readers who are interested in the products and services you offer.

Choose A Topic That Draws In Traffic

There’s no point in writing blog posts that no one is interested in. Use tools such as SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner to see if there’s interest in the topics you are considering. Look for topics that have a decent amount of searches but are also not incredibly competitive. The more competitive the topic, the harder it is to be seen.

If you are stuck on ideas for your blog, here are a few places to start:

• Lifestyle
• Home maintenance
• How-to guides
• Fashion
• Photography
• Design
• Recipes
• Parenting
• Teaching

How To Add A Blog To Your Business’s Website

At this point, it’s clear why you should establish a blog, but you may not know how to begin. Fortunately, these days it’s relatively simple to add a blog to your website. Here are the steps you should take to get set up:

1. Research Your Competition’s Blog

Before you create your blog, take an hour or so to go through competitors’ blogs. Look at how long their posts are, view their traffic, and use tools such as SEMrush to determine which keywords they’re targeting.

As you research your competition, ask yourself what they are doing well and how they can improve. Your goal is to create a blog that serves your readers better than the competition.

2. Identify Your Audience

This seems like a fairly obvious step, but it needs to be said: Make sure the content you write is the type of content your customers want to read.

Before you even put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), take a moment to consider your store’s target demographic. Are you marketing to young professionals? High school students? Homeowners? Self-professed foodies? Write down every word you can think of to describe your customers. These people are your audience.

Next, take a moment to consider the types of content that your audience wants to read. Make sure that every article you publish is engaging for this specific group of people. Posts can be either entertaining or informative. They just have to pique your readers’ interest.

3. Claim A Domain Name

If you already have a website, you can skip this step! You can easily add a blog to your current site, and you don’t need to register a new domain.

However, if you don’t already have a website, or you’re using a generic domain name from your hosting provider, now is the time to claim your own custom domain.

You can buy a domain name starting at $10-$20/year on a site such as GoDaddy, or you can purchase one from your website builder for a similar price.

4. Choose A Blogging Platform

If you already have a website set up, now is the time to figure out how to add a blog. It’s possible that your website builder already offers blogging features, and you just have to enable them! In other cases, you may have to add a blog through an add-on or extension.

If you don’t have a website yet, you should look into available blogging platforms and website builders. Blogging platforms include WordPress, Blogger, and Drupal. You can use these platforms to set up a very simple blog quickly, and you can use editing tools to customize the site to better fit your business.

On the other hand, if you plan to use your site for more than just blogging (for example, you’d like to add an online store), you should look into more comprehensive website builders. Some website builders, such as Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Duda, and Ucraft, have blogging tools already built into the software. Take a look at our comparison of these five website builders for more information.

5. Start Writing

Once you have a blog added to your website, it’s time to get writing. Identify some keywords that you can address, and write a few articles using plenty of headings and subheadings. According to research by HubSpot, to get the best results for SEO, you should write roughly 2,100-2,400 words in each post. For more tips on writing great content for your site, keep reading.

Best Blogging Tips For Businesses

To get the biggest impact from your blogging efforts, it helps to follow a few basic rules. Here are the best tips to keep in mind as you write posts for your new blog.

Set Goals For Your Blog

Businesses often set specific goals for their blogs. You might use your blog to build credibility, attract new traffic to your site, or build an email list. Take some time to set a specific goal (or two) for your blog. That will help you leverage your blog to benefit your business.

Once you’ve decided on a goal, create a Call To Action to accomplish it. For example, you could create a popup that asks readers to signup for the newsletter. Or, if your goal is to attract readers to your online store, you can include links to products within your blog and advertise your products in the sidebar.

Create A Content Schedule

As you add new posts to your blog, it’s a good idea to create a content schedule. A content schedule is a plan to spells out what content you will publish and when you will publish it.

Maintaining a regular posting routine is great for promoting your content. Posting frequently is one of the best ways to alert Google to the fact that your site is active and up to date. Also, frequent posts let your customers know that your website is current.

Target Keywords

There’s a lot to learn about Search Engine Optimization, and keywords are only one small element of SEO. As you become more comfortable with operating a blog, you should begin trying to implement a few SEO strategies. One of the strategies you should look into is keyword optimization.

As you plan your posts, take some time to look for keywords that get decent views but aren’t too competitive. We recommend using tools such as SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner to identify keywords before you write.

We also recommend that you look for advice from SEO experts, such as Neil Patel. SEO is a big challenge, and it’s one that requires a lot of studying!

Use Visuals

Adding visuals to your blog posts (images, infographics, videos, and screenshots) can have a big impact on your blog’s performance.

We’ve seen evidence from social media that using visuals within a post can significantly improve engagement rates. According to data from WebDam, posts that include images get 650% more engagement than posts with just text. So look for free stock photography on sites such as Unsplash, take your own photos, and maybe try your hand at creating a video! Do what you can to visually engage readers on your site.

A final note: Make sure you always add alt text to the images you include in your site. Adding alt text helps your SEO, and it makes your site more accessible to users who rely on screen readers.

Use Headings & Subheadings

One great way to help your SEO while also improving user experience is to break up written text using headings and subheadings.

According to data from WebDam, 81% of readers skim online content instead of reading it word-for-word. Dividing your content into headings and subheadings helps readers quickly find the information they are looking for.

Additionally, Google uses headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to identify the content on your site. These headings show Google that you are considering reader intent, which makes the search engine more likely to list your site higher on search results.

Track Your Blog’s Performance

It’s a good idea to keep an eye on your blog’s performance as you progress. Check up periodically on Google Analytics and other reporting tools to see which of your blog posts do well and which do poorly. This can help you identify what’s working and what isn’t.

Getting Started

Getting started on any new project can feel overwhelming at first. But I encourage you to start working on a blog sooner rather than later. It will likely take a while to hone in on your brand’s voice and to find topics that perform well on search results, but it’s worth the effort!

So get out there and add a blog to your business site. Write a few posts, track your performance, and see how a blog can benefit your business.

Your audience awaits.