Blogging is a vital part of any inbound marketing strategy because it offers multiple advantages for a business. Blogging provides opportunities to demonstrate thought leadership and authority within your industry, improve your site’s chances of showing up in your potential customers’ search engine results, build relationships with site visitors, and convert those visitors into leads for your business. Blog articles are also great for sharing on social media, allowing your current followers to share your expertise and insight with a wider audience.
Demonstrate Authority and Thought Leadership
You are the expert in your business. Sharing ideas and insights about your industry, discussing the differences between your products or services and others that are available, providing helpful tips, and answering common questions about your business are great ways of showing your audience who you are and the distinct expertise that you offer. Because a blog can be easily updated with new content at any time, you can cover emerging topics and show that you’re ahead of the game.
Build Relationships
When you demonstrate expertise and provide helpful answers to your website visitors’ questions, you’re building trust with your audience. For example, if your business provides home remodeling services, and your website contains helpful answers to questions about how to get a project started, where to look for financing, what to look for in flooring and countertops, and what to think about when planning an addition, then your audience will see that your company has a lot of useful insight into the process and that you care enough about them to take the time to share that insight in a free, public space. These two things can weigh heavily in your favor when a potential customer is deciding where to take their business.
Because of this, it’s a good idea to always end your blog posts with a call to action that relates to the topic you’re discussing. This capitalizes on the trust and goodwill you’ve built in your blog by inviting engagement from the reader. For example, after a blog post about how to get a project started, you might include a clickable call to action that provides the opportunity to request a quote, schedule a consultation, or even just download a more detailed guide to your process after providing some basic contact information. Providing your audience next steps to take with your business is a critical part of inbound marketing.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of practices digital marketers use to increase a website’s chances of being ranked highly in search engine results for relevant queries. While SEO involves much more than blogging, your blog can give your website a tremendous boost in search results if you handle it right.
Keywords
The words that a search engine user types into the search box are referred to as keywords. Your blog gives you an opportunity to add fresh content on a regular basis that specifically addresses your audience’s relevant keyword searches. Each article that you post to your blog lives as its own page on your website; the more website pages you have that address users’ specific queries, the more opportunities your site has to show up in their search results.
In the old days, digital marketers tried to match these keywords exactly in order to rank well in the results pages, since this was the main way search engines were able to determine what content is relevant vs. what isn’t. However, search engines have become much smarter since the early days, and they are able to glean much more from context than they ever were in the past. While keywords are still important because they are a clear way of communicating that you’re providing what users are looking for, torturing the language of your content to fit in unnatural keyword phrases or repeating keywords ad nauseam is more likely to hurt your rankings than help them. Instead, weave the elements of your target keywords naturally into your articles—especially in page titles and header tags. This will cue search engines that you’re providing relevant content without making your site appear spammy.
Link Building
Another helpful SEO feature of your blog is that it’s a great platform for link building. Both internal and external links provide information to search engines on the content of your site. Using your blog to build links within your site (internal links) can help drive visitors to other pages they might find helpful while also providing structural information about your site to search engines. Your blog also gives other sites potential reason to link to your website (external links), lending it additional online credibility. If other reputable sites build links that point to yours, search engines take notice and assume your site is also reputable. (If, on the other hand, several spammy sites are linking to yours, search engines will notice this, too, and assume your site is likewise spammy.)
With all of these benefits blogging can offer your business, why aren’t you doing it yet? If you’re like many business owners, the answer has to do with time. If you’d love to publish a regular blog that shows off your skills and attracts visitors to your site but you just don’t have the time or available staff to do it, we can help. Blue Frog Marketing provides complete inbound marketing services as well as à la carte services such as content writing, editing, and SEO. We can produce and manage your entire blog under your expert guidance to ensure it fits your brand, or our editors can take your rough drafts and polish them into professional-grade articles.
Blue Frog Marketing has offices in Des Moines, Iowa, and Huron, Ohio and serves customers from coast to coast. Click the link below for a consultation, and we’ll discuss how we can best help your business succeed.
