Content Writing: Stop Blowing Off Your Blog
You probably have a blog if you have a business and a website. Or, to be more accurate, you probably have a blog tab with a handful of blogs from 2017. Hey, I get it. Writing and publishing blogs is a time-consuming process, and it’s hard to draw a straight line in your mind from posting a blog to increasing sales.
But just because the line is fuzzy doesn’t mean it isn’t there. There are quite a few significant benefits to maintaining a regular, high-quality blog: from (yes) increased sales to improved search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. Blogging regularly is one business decision you can make that is basically all wins. So, stop neglecting your blog. Once you hit publish, you’ll start to notice your blog makes a difference in both your customer’s overall experience with your organization and your website SEO performance.
Blogs Move Customers Through The Sales Cycle
At a basic level, your blog is a way to help move customers through your sales cycle, which is a pretty significant benefit on its own. Your blogs will:
- Exhibit subject matter expertise in your area
- Create a library of responses to commonly asked questions
- Drive new traffic to your site
- Function as evergreen content
It’s important to note that potential customers probably won’t purchase based on just one blog. That makes regular blogging easy to push off and even more important. Every new blog represents a new chance to drive traffic to your website – especially when you incorporate blogs into your social media marketing strategy.
This benefit is particularly valuable if you have a primarily-online business. Regular content writing helps take the place of a salesperson answering questions in your storefront. And while a reader might not make a purchase immediately, they are more likely to sign up for an email list – assuming your blog was helpful and it includes some way to capture the reader’s information.
Blogs are an Essential Component of SEO Success
Do blogs help a site’s SEO rankings? Yes, but maybe not in the way you’re thinking. The formula is a bit more complicated than website + blog = SEO VICTORY. However, if you care about your site’s search engine ratings (and since you’re reading a digital marketing and web strategy blog, I assume you do), blogs help in a couple of significant ways.
Decreased Bounce Rate
Google cares about how much time visitors spend on your website and how many pages they visit once they’re on your site. A good blog will keep visitors reading and lead them to other pages on your site, like your contact page or a specific product page. Google uses this information to decide how valuable your site is – and displays it in their search engine results accordingly.
Higher Rankings for Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are most organizations’ best path toward search engine success. Unless you’re one of the largest and most well-established organizations in your field, you will struggle to rank well on short, basic keyword terms. Fortunately, half of all searches are four words or longer. These long-tail keywords are better targets for smaller organizations hoping to improve their SEO rankings.
Blog posts are natural homes for long-tail keywords. As you write in-depth about your industry, you end up including those keywords organically as part of the process – instead of jamming the keywords into existing content. This pleases both the SEO powers that be and your readers.
Better Internal Linking Structure
Internal links are an easy way to boost your site’s SEO rankings, and blogs are a natural location for high-quality internal links. Google uses the number of internal links pointing to a page and the anchor text associated with that link to help determine that page’s topic and relative importance. Also, using your blog to link to more significant pages on your website (like your Our Services page) will transfer authority back to that more significant page. Higher authority helps to improve your website search engine results.
Quality Backlink Building
Speaking of higher authority, backlinks – external links back to your site- are another important tool you can use to increase your site’s authority. Just like internal pages transfer authority back to your site, so do external websites. Backlinks are particularly important when the site linking to your content has a higher domain authority than your own. Unfortunately, they can also be a little tricky to obtain. There are a few different approaches to build backlinks, but all of them require that your site has content worth linking to.
Is it possible that your site already has content that is so valuable another website will send its visitors to your site? Sure, but relying on your existing website content to earn you backlinks limits your options. Blogs, on the other hand, expand your options a significant amount. Great, unique, and informative blog content makes great backlinks and highlights your organization’s strengths to a larger audience of readers.
Ready to Start Blogging?
Content writing is undeniably important and should be a central part of any digital marketing plan. If you don’t have the time to create valuable blogs on a regular basis, or have a few more questions about what a good blog in your industry looks like, get in touch. The digital marketing experts at Spring Insight are happy to discuss how blogging fits into your overall web presence and marketing plan.