Everyone Is Blogging! Why Does Your Website Need A Blog?
Blogs are good for your website and your brand for a multitude of reasons.
Firstly, before any technicalities for SEO are explored we’ll start with the simple and obvious reason: credibility. If someone wants to know if you really are worth the investment for your service, they will want to find out if you know what you are talking about. Blogs let visitors in, to get to know you before they commit. They also make your website more interesting as it becomes a rounded experience.
Show Your Knowledge
A blog is a way of showing customers your expertise in the field you are in. This, in turn, will get people who are interested in your service or subject area, revisiting your site to read your latest feature. From here you can build up a customer community. Blogs can also be converted to content for newsletters if you have a mailing list to a customer base, so blogs can accumulate original content that can be utilised to great effect. An aspect that is attractive with blogs is that you can go into detail with offers and specific services or products. In another way, you can use the blog to introduce the people behind the scenes to put faces to the brand, making it more welcoming.
The SEO Advantages
For optimisation purposes, blogs can be ‘heavy hitters’ ticking a lot of SEO triggers that can potentially improve where your website ranks. First there is the updating factor. The biggest search engine, Google, likes your website to be active, updated and moving – it’s an indicator it is alive and kicking. By posting a blog once or more a week, it will be noticeable for its activity. Secondly, adding blogs means more clicks and traffic to the website, as well as sharing on social media. As blogs require engaged reading, it will mean people will stop at your website for longer than a few seconds – another SEO signal covered. Images can be added which can be optimised for SEO too. For ‘long tail’ searches where people are looking for specific lengthy terms in the search, there is a higher chance of finding the website which has lots of content on it.
A ‘long tail’ google search that ranks our related blog in top position
Also – although ‘Authorship’ has been culled – Author Rank is still in effect which means that Google can judge content based around its author and rank it accordingly.
If you have a blog that shares interesting and insightful information you may find a blog post is linked to it and it is being highlighted as a source by another writer on a strong website, which could have positive repercussions for your ranking. A great stat is that companies that blog have been found to have 97% more inbound links.
It Does Work
‘Blogs are nice but do they pay – do they get ROI?’ is a question we have heard. At Varn we can confidently say ‘yes’ as we have had business enquiries which led to contracts on the strength of blog posts. Whilst it may seem time consuming, to some SME’s with high workload and limited resource for instance, by publishing a blog on your website you’ll have a good reason for people to visit it and that is half the battle done in terms of marketing.
For advice on how to go about setting up and running a blog on your business website Contact Us at Varn and we can take you through the process.
