Here at Citywide SEO, we often give suggestions and advice about how to make small tweaks to your small-business marketing strategy and improve your online presence. As we’ve discussed multiple times in our blog section, one of the biggest factors in your online presence is the content of your website. A great way to improve that content is through—ironically enough—blogging about your business!
While no one – well, almost no one, at least—genuinely enjoys writing blogs about their business, it’s a great way to not only connect your business to more customers and grow your bottom line, but also to give information and details about your business back to your consumers. In this post, we’ll talk about how blogging helps this mutually beneficial exchange between your business and your customers.
- Blogging Increases the Strength of Your Brand
You already know that your website is an essential piece of your marketing. It helps provide critical content to your customers, such as which services you provide, where you’re located, how to contact your business, etc. However, you don’t want to have a website that only throws information at your customers, you want to give them an experience. With just about any business, there’s way too much information to fit into the homepage, so it can be ridiculously challenging to get your business personality and voice to come across in so little space.
Blogging helps a business to get more customers by helping to provide the experience that you want visitors to your website to have—the experience that sets your business apart from competitors and makes an impression on people. Through the use of consistent tone and voice—a business blogging fundamental—you can develop your brand identity and make clear to your customers the personality and values of your company. The more that people can feel personally connected to your business, the more likely they are to become customers.
- Blogging Improves Your Online Visibility
A greater online presence affords your business more opportunities to express its personality, and also more eyes on your brand. The more people are exposed to your business, and the more familiar they become with your business, the more likely they are to become customers—or better yet, loyal/repeat customers.
Blogging helps a business to get more customers by increasing its online presence. First of all, your business website has a limited number of pages. However, with a blog, every post counts as a page. The more pages you have, the greater the chances you have of being discovered by potential customers searching online.
Second, if another blogger, local media outlet or larger organization finds one of your blog posts to be helpful, they may include a link to your post in their content. This is called backlinking, and it now puts you in front of their target audience as well. Expanding your reach to a relevant audience greatly increases your chances of obtaining more customers.
Third, blogging yields content that can be shared. By sharing your blog through social media posts and via email, you can greatly amplify the number of people who see your post. Each new person who reads your post is another introduction made to your business—and another potential customer.
- Blogging Lends Additional Credibility
Establishing your expertise within your industry is a great way to attract more customers to your business. Providing useful information to your target audience will earn their trust while at the same time showing your value. However, you only have so much space on your business website to show how much you know and prove that you can be trusted.
A blog, on the other hand, provides a platform to continuously showcase your knowledge and show visitors that you are there to help. Through it, you can become a trusted go-to resource for people in need of your service. They may use one of your blog posts to do something on their own, but when it comes to a greater task that they aren’t able to do, they already have a trusted resource in their head that they will turn to. If you’ve helped them in the past, they are more likely to turn to you in the future. Blogging helps you to get more customers by establishing trust and keeping you top of mind with your target audience.
- Blogging Drives More Web Traffic
Increasing traffic to your website can bring in more leads and potential customers. People can go to your site by typing your address into the search bar, but that requires them to know you exist, and to know your website address. What about all of the other people out there who don’t know that you exist?
Here’s where blogging helps your business. Each blog post is an additional channel by which people can arrive at your website and discover your business—not because they knew to look for your business specifically, but because they were searching for information that your blog post provided. Blogging helps your business to get more customers because it not only brings more people to your website, it brings in people who are interested in your products or services. By sharing your blog posts on social media and with your email list, you can further increase website traffic.
- Blogging Boosts SEO
We are Citywide SEO, so you really should have known this point was coming up sooner or later. Perhaps the most important reason to incorporate blogging into your online marketing is because it’s a great way to help increase your SEO rankings.
It’s important to know that writing a blog does not get you more customers through informative content alone. You need the people who are searching for the information to find it in the first place; and if your website shows up on 7th page of Google search results, let alone the 2nd, it is unlikely to get seen.
That being said, blogging can actually help your website rank higher overall. Search engine optimization requires several efforts over a period of time, and blogging can help facilitate the process. Search engines (such as Google, Yahoo or Bing) prefer to showcase websites that have a strong online presence and produce fresh content—two things that a blog can provide. The search engines also place high value on relevancy. Blogging gives you more opportunities to put keywords into your content, which will help Google to serve up your content to people searching for it.
Summary
Using your online presence and expertise, you can strengthen your brand messaging and familiarize people with your business. Blogging is like the glue that binds these efforts together, ultimately connecting your business to more people who are looking for it. So, do your business and your customers a favor, and start blogging!