The Importance of a Blog For Your Business: [+10 Reasons Why You Should Invest More]

Still not convinced that your business website needs a blog as part of your marketing strategy? Let us try and convince you.

As a content optimization agency specifically creating and updating SEO blog content, we have plenty of firsthand experience on how much value a blog can bring to a business. From international SaaS and eCommerce companies to localized, small businesses, a blog is often the bedrock on which all digital marketing channels are built.

Business Blogs: The Visibility Boosting Secret Used By Marketers

Commercial blogs are one of the most valuable tools in any content or internet marketers toolbelt. From conversions to visibility, imagine being able to provide your readers with expert advice related to your products and industry at large. Now imagine you create content so useful that other industry leaders and people interested in your exact services begin to share your posts across the internet.

In its simplest form, a business blog is a segment of your company’s website or a website which your company owns that produces written content geared towards educating your current and potential customers.

Great blogs, however, are so much more than educational, they’re full-blown experiences.

The types of blog content a company chooses to produce can vary widely depending on company goals and the experience levels of their in-house team. 

Here are a few of the blog types we often see:‍

1. Important company updates

These types of posts announce new software features, exciting partnership opportunities, new employees, or impressive rounds of funding. They’re typically a way for a company to share with its current customers or investors. ‍

Additionally, they allow traffic to read articles similar to press releases on the companies own website rather than giving all the traffic to an outside news agency.‍

2. Topically relevant educational content

This is often the most valuable type of blog post. Companies can curate their blog around questions or related queries to their products and services. 

An additional enhancement to this marketing strategy is to create blog content around a jobs-to-be-done theory. This means understanding all of the topics your customer is trying to learn to fulfill their business or personal goals. It might mean producing content that, on the surface, seems irrelevant to your own company.‍

3. The executive’s take

For a charismatic business owner, executives, or brave ghostwriters, this type of blog can be useful to a company for the profound insights delivered directly from a leader in the industry. These target hot topics and future trend predictions and are best when they offer concrete data.

The perks of this type of content are that people tend to trust successful business leaders and entrepreneurs for their information. This article type can be picked up by search engines and delivers an opportunity to end up in Google Discover. And due to its ability to contain highly valuable information, it has greater potential for amplification as other industry leaders will be willing to share it instead of just reading it.

10 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Blog Content in 2021 and Beyond

Now let’s get to the meat of this article, or why your company needs a blog.

1) Blogs or Articles Are The Best Way To Grow Your Organic Traffic

In today’s marketing landscape, one of the most valuable channels comes from blogs that have been optimized by SEO agencies or professionals (that’s us!). Search engine optimization is the formatting of blogs that users, bots, and algorithms prioritize for searchers based on the queries (keywords) that they type into Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo. 

The result is that your blogs generate organic traffic, often referred to as “free traffic.” Trust us, it’s not free, but the phrase originates to distinguish it from what digital marketers call “paid traffic.” 

Organic traffic is gained by creating content that searchers need to answer their questions. This means that you won’t be paying for an ad spot to hold a particular position. With organic traffic, high-quality content can attain a position on page 1 of Google. And hopefully, you can lower some of your paid advertising spend due to the popularity and positions your blog content holds.

2) Generates External and Internal Links For SEO

As we’ve mentioned before in multiple parts of our blogs, a major part of SEO rankings comes from internal and external links. Business blogs and many other article-based websites gain their traffic and rankings by producing content that others want to share and even cite on their website.

And while the core pages of your marketing website should also gain links as satisfied customers get to know your company, a blog can significantly increase the likelihood of more people sharing links to every part of your website.

External Link Benefits From Blogging

External links are beneficial because they improve how Google views your authority in a certain space. If you are linked to by another relevant authority figure from your industry, then Google’s algorithms start to recognize that you deserve to be rewarded traffic for these efforts.

Additionally, gaining inbound links from press releases or major publications like Forbes or The New York Times builds real traffic highways from their content directly to yours. The increased traffic to your website means more visibility and more potential for conversions.

Internal Link Benefits From Blogging

Sometimes you can correctly guess a keyword that would be very valuable to your business if you ranked on page 1 or even 2 of Google for that term. Unfortunately, you’re not the only one trying to attain that goal, so you’ll need to prove that you’re an authority around the topics related to that keyword. You can prove that you’re an authority with an internal linking strategy.

Having a single blog post about a topic does not necessarily make you the expert on the internet. You’ll need to build multiple articles explaining different aspects of a single topic that people want to learn about. By creating a tight web of related topics inside your website all connected by internal links that users can read and click on, you will send signals to Google that you are establishing authority in a particular topic area.

3) Creates Easily Distributable Content For All of Your Channels

Another reason your business should blog is to enhance distribution through all of the other marketing channels, such as social media platforms and PPC advertising. Blog posts often come with pro-tips, engaging sections, statistics, how-to’s, downloadable templates, infographics, case studies, and even videos. With just one blog post, you can make the marketing efforts of many teams that much simpler.

These features allow your internal marketing team to easily generate interesting, bite-sized distribution strategies that will give your target audiences what they love. And the best part is, highly-informational images or teasers mean more clicks and links back to your marketing website. 

4) Allows You To Keep Video Traffic On Your Site and Off of YouTube

Videos are awesome. Businesses, users, and algorithms alike recognize that great video content keeps people engaged for more extended amounts of time and is a preferred medium for many people to learn about topics related to your company. 

The biggest struggle many businesses face when producing content on other platforms is how to get that traffic back to their website, the space where they control the narratives. 

There is a simple solution to this problem for your videos. Embed your YouTube-hosted videos on a blog that covers the same topic or a relevant one. This will result in your video coming up in organic search under the video tabs, but instead of being sent to Youtube, they’ll be sent to your blog post and your greater website.

5) Helps You Build An Email and Newsletter Database

Writing a blog for your business might not always result in direct conversions. As an experienced marketer or salesperson knows, nurturing a lead can sometimes be a multi-touch, multi-month process depending on what you’re selling.

Businesses that write blogs that give away useful tools or valuable information and ask for very little (or nothing) in return often generate loyal fans that want to keep receiving valuable information. 

This type of response from readers makes for an excellent lead generation opportunity. You’ll find it much easier to build your e-mail address database which allows you to use newsletters or blog post updates to continue nurturing leads back to your products.

6) Creates Marketing Funnels Directed At Your Products or Services

Another reason to use a blog has to do with its ability to be organized into effective marketing funnels. Effective content mapping will cover the entirety of topics that would lead a person from any related query to your business’s product or service. 

For example:

Let’s say you sell dog bowls. A top-of-the-funnel blog post might be “How To Care for an Aging Dog.” That post might contain a list of things you can do to make an aging dog’s life easier, and on that list, you might suggest that raised dog bowls are one way to care for an older dog. 

That section about raised dog bowls might point to another post about “The Best Raised Dog Bowls in 2021,” in which you list out a bunch of dog bowls, including some of your own. That would then lead them down the funnel and potentially, with the proper CTA, directly onto your product page.

7) Great Blogs Increase Conversions On Your Website

Businesses that write blogs create more opportunities for people that love their brand to convert into paying customers. The example above is what is called an assisted conversion. Meaning those blog posts played a role in the ultimate conversion and sale of the product. If that content didn’t exist on the website and someone else’s blog had captured their interest, it’s very likely that the sale would have never happened.

Sophisticated companies that build detailed pipelines can assign a dollar amount to each post based on any given action and determine the true value of blog content.

Blogs also generate direct conversions at times. This happens for 1 of 3 reasons.

1. You have a sophisticated blog that is equipped to allow customers to buy directly from a product offered on a blog page
2. Depending on the type of nurturing experience a customer requires, sometimes a blog post can lead a customer that abandons their cart back to complete the transaction
3. Your business considers e-mail captures or newsletter sign-ups a direct conversion

‍Recommended: How This Founder Used SEO to Help Grow Revenue From $100k to $100M

8) Writing High-Quality Blogs Builds Trust For Brands

Perhaps one of the more emotional appeals for writing a blog is that high-quality blog content adds brand awareness and, most importantly, will build trust. Giving out high-value information that is always accurate gives readers confidence that they can return to your company when they have questions.

You can build this trust by citing your sources and consistently giving out the correct, updated content about topics. You can also build this trust by acting as an “honest broker.” If you create a head-to-head or versus-style blog content that pits your business against another, then be honest about the strengths of your competitor’s product and when their product might make more sense depending on a buyer’s goals.

9) Evergreen Blog Topics Generate Long-Term Traffic Results

We mentioned in our very first reason to blog that they are a great way to generate organic traffic. One reason that organic traffic is so important in contrast to paid advertising channels is that it can result in long-term traffic results.

You can achieve this by writing evergreen content. Evergreen refers to topics and concepts that will remain true for a long period of time compared to time-sensitive news headlines.

For example:

Writing a blog post about the question, “what is cryptocurrency?” will stay relevant forever and is thus an evergreen topic. A topic that is time-sensitive might center on “Should You Invest In Dogecoin Right Now?”

10) Keeps Current Customers Up To Date On Your Business News

Blogs are often a great way for established companies to share business updates, press releases, or fun marketing offer details for raffles or competition winners. 

While the quality and length of time that these posts should exist on the website are debatable topics, it does create a way for a company to share news via multiple distribution channels and back to their website.

Additionally, when a company adds specific new features to its offerings, it’s a great space to teach customers how to utilize the new features in the absence of a knowledge base.

‍Recommended Reading: Why It’s Worth It To Make Your Press Release SEO-Friendly (And How To Do It Well)

When Should Your Company Create A Blog?

It’s important to evaluate when the right time to start a blog is. The simplest answer is that as soon as you can is likely the best time.

There are two ways to approach the question of when your business should start blogging.

The first is to recognize what stage and health your business is in. If your company is growing, your ads are performing, or you’ve got a reliable revenue stream that allows you to start looking at the long-term investments into your company, then it is time to start seriously considering a blog.

Second, suppose your company is strapped for cash and needs an immediate return on investment. In that case, you’ll likely benefit from pursuing other marketing channels first, such as some form of paid advertising channel like Google or Facebook Ads.

This, however, does not mean that you can’t start a business blog immediately. In the above situation, many companies, particularly startups, have developed highly successful blogs by having founders or CEOs who prioritized writing and publishing daily or weekly blog content themselves.

Ready To Talk About Your Business’ Blog Efforts?

If you think your company is ready to take your content marketing to the next level with a blog, we’d be happy to offer our expertise. Simply follow this link to book a call.

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