The short answer? Yes!
I recently was talking with the owner of a plumbing company and I told him that he needed to add a blog to his website. His response? “Who the *&!# is going to read a blog about plumbing?” Fair enough. I explained to him that the purpose of a blog is not just to educate and share information with your website visitors, it is also (and probably more importantly) about increasing your SEO (search engine optimization).
Must Blog Reason 1: Google has made it clear that one (of the many) factors they look at in determining where a company appears in the organic listings on a results page, is freshness of content and how often people are accessing your website. By blogging on a regular basis you are showing the Google bots that you are actively updating your website and you also increase the potential of someone Google-ing a question and your page coming up in the search results. As I told the plumbing business owner – if someone types “how to keep pipes from freezing” and you have a recent blog post on that topic, you have a better likelihood of appearing in the organic results.
Must Blog Reason 2: Even better, another website might find your content and link to it which builds your website’s external links, which also affects search engine ranking. When search engines crawl the web, one of the things they look for is the number of external sites linking to your website. External links prove your website is providing helpful, relevant information.
You can also build your internal links with blog posts by linking to other areas on your website. Search engines want to see that your pages reference each other and are tied together. Blogs can reference your products, services and other pages and help create that internal linking structure.
Must Blog Reason 3: Blogs allow you to reinforce your keywords. We all know that the foundation of SEO is keywords, right? One of the primary ways search engines rank websites is based on the keywords contained in the website. Websites that contain CREDIBLE instances of the searched keywords will rank higher than other similar sites because it is assumed they have more relevant content related to the subject. Websites with regularly updated, relevant blogs will definitely have more related keywords to their industry than sites without a blog.
So yes, you need to blog, but it doesn’t have to be a huge time suck. Here are a couple simple tips for doing it quickly and effectively.
- Not sure what to blog about? Keep a list of some of the most frequently asked questions you get from customers and use those for blog posts.
- Use storytelling. People engage with stories. Do a blog post about a customer success story.
- Spotlight different products or services that you offer. Write about different aspects of your company’s products or services highlighting unique features or benefits.
- Assign blogging responsibilities to everyone. Maybe not everyone in your company is good at writing the actual posts, but everyone can be responsible for coming up with ideas.
- Use Google Analytics to track which topics get the most traffic. Google Analytics is a great way to understand what content your website visitors are most interested in reading.
