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As a small business owner, you may wonder if it’s worth the time and effort to maintain a blog on your website. You’re not a blogger, so why do you need to blog? Actually, there are many reasons why it’s a good idea for your small business website should have a blog and today we’re here to share these with you!
1. Improve Your Website’s SEO
A typical small business website might only consist of 5 – 10 pages, which should be enough to convey and sell your product/service to your target audience. But is it enough to help your potential customers find your website in the first place? Remember, you’re relatively small website is actively competing with others for top search engine rankings.
That’s where your blog can help you! Every new blog post that you publish adds a new page to your website, increasing your digital footprint and your entire website’s SEO.
A few ways a regularly updated blog can boost your website’s SEO:
- Titles and Keywords: Each new blog post add more content, titles, and keywords to your website, which helps search engines to better understand what your website/business is about and index you better in the search engine results pages.
- Regular Updates: Blog posts should be published more regularly than your other site pages are updated. Search engines see this regular activity as an indication that your site contains current, relevant information and will up your SEO ranking.
- Categories and Tags: These act as metadata for each of your posts and help to boost your keywords to search engines.
- Increased length of site visits: Having a well-maintained blog can increase the time a visitor spends on your website, exploring your content. This increases your site’s stats in terms of the length of site visits, indicating to search engines that visitors find your website useful and informative.
- Internal linking: Adding links to other pages (or blog posts) to your blog posts helps to boost your SEO and drives your visitors to pages that you want them to see.
- And much more!
2. Drive Traffic to Your Website
Now that we’ve established that a regularly updated blog WILL be seen by search engines, what about being seen by actual people? This goes hand-in-hand with increasing your website’s SEO. Good SEO results are largely driven by new content and relevant keywords, which means that when you are regularly adding relevant blog posts that your audience will find interesting, your website will become easier to find!
Articles that answer your target audience’s questions or speaks to their interests will pop up when your audience searches specific queries. And because you’re providing relevant content via your blog, chances are more people will click through to your website.
3. Start a Conversation
Blogs provide a great platform for speaking directly to your audience via the comment section. Encourage people to give feedback, ask questions and share their thoughts! This is a good way to gauge your target market about new ideas you might have for your business. Answering your audience’s comments also shows that you are responsive and care about your customers’ opinions. It’s a win-win!
4. Become a Subject-Matter Expert
Build credibility with your blog by posting articles that your audience will find helpful or useful. This not only helps to establish your business as an expert in its field (look at all the knowledge you have!) but is also shows that you care about educating your customers and not just constantly selling your products and services to them.
5. Augment Your Social Media Strategy
Ooh, this is such a good one! Since you’re already creating interesting, good quality content for your blog, it would be an opportunity missed if you don’t share your posts to your social media channels! Blog content is perfect for sharing on social media as it provides an opportunity to promote your expertise via content marketing.
And, unlike posting curated content on your social media channels, content that’s shared from your blog will link back to your website! All-in-all, it’s a very cost-effective strategy for increasing your website’s traffic, and thus your business’ reach and visibility to potential customers.
6. Expand Your Brand
You have your logo, corporate identity, and marketing collateral, but blogging is a way for you to establish a VOICE for your brand. As we know, branding is one of the first things that potential customers take into consideration when deciding to do business with you. And this includes your brand voice.
Are you formal and informative? Relatable and friendly? The way you choose to communicate helps to establish who you are as a brand – and blogging is the platform to do just that!
7. Bonus: Getting Started
As a bonus, we’re sharing a few best practices to keep in mind for creating a successful blog – you’re welcome 😊
- Content is King: When it comes to blogging, it’s about quality over quantity. Write high-quality content that speaks to your audience’s pain points and your readers are bound to come back for more.
- Consistency Consistency Consistency: Many people start off their blogging journey strong but lose momentum. You should really try to avoid this by scheduling in time to write and publish regular blog posts. When you publish quality content on a regular basis, search engines have more to index and your readers can develop a loyalty to your blog. If not updated, you might lose your reader’s interest as they won’t know when to expect a new post. Also, it sends a negative message when your ‘latest’ blog post on your website was published years ago!
- Encourage Feedback: Enable the comments section on your blog to turn a one-way marketing tool into a two-way conversation with your audience! How will you know what your customers think if they don’t have a mechanism for providing feedback?
- Promote Your Content: Remember to SHARE your blog posts on social media so that more people can see it, share it and comment! This is how you grow your reader base.
Blogging increases your visibility and credibility to your audience (your potential customers!), so consider regularly posting quality content on your website that will be interesting and useful to them.
TOP TIP: Not a fan of the word ‘blog’? Even though a blog will be where your content lives, you don’t need to call it that! On many websites this section is called News, Articles, Case Studies etc. so you can really customise your blog to your needs!
