Blogs? For a business website?

Oh, yes!

Business blogging is a hugely useful marketing tool that can be used to establish companies as reliable, authoritative experts within their industry. They can also help your website to stand-out from the rest of the competition on the vast worldwide web.

In fact, Hubspot (an organisation who specialise in customer relationship management) compare business blogging to that of a “marketing Swiss Army knife”, and to be honest, I think they’re spot on.

After reading this blog and the seven reasons below, I think that you will too.

Reason 1: Increase in Website Traffic

Due to the nature of a business website, it’s likely that your website won’t have loads of pages and that they won’t receive regular updates.

That’s fair enough. You want your website to be simple to navigate, to ensure that the key info is easily found. Plus, unless your company undergoes a major overhaul, it’s unlikely that your pages will ever need that big of an update.

But, this can be a problem in terms of search engine results and optimisation.

(This is exactly where blogging comes in)

For every blog that you publish, you add another indexed page of fresh, relevant and useful content to your website. Google, and other search engines, recognise this and reward you with an increased likelihood of appearing on search engine results pages. For an added bonus, you are also more likely to attract traffic via organic searches.

Put simply, blogging (when done properly) will boost the number of people that see your website.

There is of course the alternative option in paid advertisements, but they will cost you at least two arms and legs.

Reason 2: Social Media

Provided that your blogs are interesting and useful to your target audience, people are likely to share them on social media.

Via the sharing of your blogs on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit, your website will be introduced to lots of new people. As these people are friends on Facebook, they likely share similar interests and therefore likely fall within your target market.

Blogs also provide great content for you to share on your own social media channels, enabling you to interact with your consumers more regularly.

Reason 3: Increased Traffic = Increased Marketing Leads = Increased Sales

Simply by the law of odds, the increased traffic that you will achieve from blogging is likely to increase the amount of sales that you’ll achieve.

In order to boost these odds, consider adding blog-specific discounts or offers into your posts. Not only will this really encourage your clientele to repeatedly re-visit your site, it provides you an opportunity to establish leads into potential new customers.

Don’t give away the discounts entirely for free, ask the reader for their email address in return. Then  you can contact new customers directly with future offers with the aim of turning them into a regular customer.

Reason 4: Establish yourself a reputation

Good business blogs will consistently provide readers with valuable, interesting, relevant and informative content. They should also answer common queries and concerns that the companies customers may have.

By delivering on the above criteria you will:

  • Establish your company as an industry leading organisation that regularly provides insightful and worthwhile information about the industry they operate in.
  • Establish a trustworthy and reputable reputation for your company. Customers will know that the company they are buying from is knowledgable and transparent with their customer base.

Reason 5: Search Engine Results Optimisation

Let me set the scene.

You have now published  a series of high quality blog posts. They meet all the relevant criteria (see above) and have helped establish your company a wonderful reputation. Soon, other companies within your industry begin to link your blog posts on their own website as they are so informative.

Jackpot.

These links to your site provide Google with a stamp of approval to say, your website and its content is A*. Subsequently, your site is acknowledged more and you’re bumped further up their results page. The more links, the higher you appear.

Your discoverability in search engines is also improved.

Better blogs = more links = higher placement on search engine results pages = better business exposure.

Reason 6:  Humanise your Company

Don’t be afraid to share news about your business and the people within it. This will help to remind your customers that ultimately, your team is made up of  real, hard-working people, that want to provide the best for their customers.

It also provides you with an opportunity to share company or product news and can even help with recruitment.

Reason 7: Monetisation

Through affiliate marketing and the referring of your readership to associated products or services within your blogs, you could monetise the publishing of your content.

It also presents an opportunity to partner with companies within your field.

So after all that, I think you can now agree, HubSpot really were spot on weren’t they?