Blogging used to be reserved only for writers with great coding skills. That is not the case in today's digital world. Anyone can blog, and everyone who wants to have a website that draws traffic should be blogging. Here's why:
1. It Will Help Your SEO Ranking
This is probably the number one reason to create a blog. SEO catalogs words on a website to make it searchable on Google. How can you add more keywords without making your website overwhelmed with text? Add a blog. Then you can add lots of text full of rich key words and long tail keywords to make your website move up on Google without overwhelming someone when they are searching through your site to learn about you. Also, updating your website frequently tells Google that your site is still active. You don’t want to continually change the layout of your website, so having a regular update to your blog is a great way to keep your site active.
2. Establish Authority in Your Field
If you can write a compelling blog post full of excellent information and advice, readers will view you as an expert. Imagine this: someone is considering buying your services but they’re on the fence. They’re looking around your website, and there aren’t any red flags, but they still aren’t convinced. They decide to click on your blog and they see article after article that you’ve written showing your knowledge and expertise. Better yet - you shared a new blog post within the last week. This shows your potential customer that you are committed to learning more about your industry and that you’re up to do with the latest trends and news. They reach out for a consultation. The blog convinced them in a way that your “About” section couldn’t.
3. Keeps People on Your Website for Longer
Google’s goal is to have the first option on their page be the best option. If you search for something, click on the first link, and immediately leave that site because it didn’t have the answer you were looking for - Google learns that its first option wasn’t very good. If someone finds your website through a blog post, they’re far more likely to stick around on your website to read the blog post. And in general, pages with more text tend to rank higher on Google. BackLinkO analyzed 11.8 million google searches and this is what they found, “... we found that longer content tends to rank higher in Google's search results. The average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.”
4. Link to Yourself
When you start to build up a library of articles, linking to yourself becomes very easy. If you’ve written an in depth post on a concept, be sure to link back to the in depth article whenever you mention that concept again. Not utilizing internal linking is one of the simplest SEO mistakes you can make. You can also think of your blog as a sales funnel. Don’t make a sales pitch with every single post because your casual readers will become annoyed and stop reading your content. But every once and awhile, toss in how your business can solve the problem discussed in the article and link back to the page on your site that describes the services you offer.
5. Authenticity in Long Form Writing
If you have a blog, you can control the narrative around yourself, your brand, and/or your business. You can give first hand accounts of your experience in your industry. You can tell the origin story of your business. You can show your personality in a way that can’t happen on other areas of your website. Blogging can show who you are, not just what you do. Add humanity to your website by creating a blog.
At the end of the day, blogging is just good business sense when it comes to website traffic. Studies show that business who have website with blogs receive 55% more site visitors than businesses who don’t have a blog. That’s a huge difference. Most website hosting options already include a blogging platform, so you’re probably already equipped with the tools you need to start blogging ASAP. Now’s the time. You’ve got this.
