Five Things a Company Blog Can Do For Your Business

 
In today’s business world, blogging is no longer something that is done just for fun. The benefits of blogging are numerous and well-documented, and can make all the difference when it comes to your company’s site being found on the web.

A company blog helps your business get discovered.

Unless your company is constantly providing new products or services, for the most part, once a website is created, it is done. Search engines, however, love content that is updated on a regular basis. The solution? A frequently updated company blog that continuously adds pages to the web for indexing. In this sense, Google and other search engines will know to keep an eye on your site, checking back frequently and allowing you more and more opportunities to be gain ranks and be seen in the search engines.

Once your business is discovered, you can start generating leads. This is typically done through call-to-action buttons, allowing your prospective customers to submit questions, receive a free offer, or sign-up for a newsletter or RSS Feed, keeping them further connected with you and ensuring that they will see all future posts as well.

A company blog helps your website gain authority in search engines.

Some SEO experts believe that website authority is the single most important factor in determining search engine rankings. Authority not only makes your business seem more trustworthy and credible to customers, but Google and other search engines will reward you for good authority by moving you up in the search engine rankings.

So what is website authority and how does it relate to content? Let’s say your prospective customer is interested in “herbal cold remedies,” and they type this phrase into a search engine. Your website comes up because the title is “Herbal Cold Remedies You Can Do at Home,” but, upon entering your site, the customer discovers that your website is really about learning how to speak spanish at home. Now your potential customer is mad because you not only wasted their time, but you lied to them as well. Search engines like websites with quality content that actually relate to the keywords that they are being found by, and a blog is the perfect way to create content that is useful to your customers. A good business blog will be continuously updated with information that answer’s customer questions and satisfies target needs, and Google and other search engines will take note of your website’s resourcefulness and reward you in turn.

A company blog generates long-term results with short-term effort.

A blog is easy to create, simple to maintain, and, in most instances, completely free – with the exception of wages paid to whoever is writing and maintaining the blog, whether that means paying one of your current employees or contracting with an outside SEO marketing agency. One can spend less than an hour a day creating and publishing quality posts, and the results will last as long as people continue to search for related content.

Let’s say you own a residential pool company and you create a post in June describing various products. You’ll probably see a lot of traffic at first, during the summer months, and a steady drop-off once fall and cold weather hits. You’ll probably still receive a decent amount of traffic from southern states throughout the year, where the weather stays warm, but once May hits the following year, and more and more people are searching for “residential pool installment options,” for example, your traffic will increase once again. Thus, an article you spent less than an hour writing is still gaining traffic to your website a year later, with no additional work. As long as your product or service still serves the community, people will still be looking for you, and, with a successful company blog, they will be finding you as well.

A company blog will make your business part of a larger network.

Every company can benefit from having both an internal and external network. Large companies that have thousands of employees can take advantage of a company blog to discuss important industry news or make announcements – a blog makes it easy to reach thousands of people simultaneously, regardless of their timezone or location.

A blog can also help your company to create an external network of important contacts within your industry. One of the most useful ways for generating traffic and authority is through links – links going out of your site and links coming back in. As your blog presence expands, you can collaborate and swap links with other corporations, creating mutually beneficial relationships that increase both your authority and theirs within search engines. As a result of this networking, other businesses will often recommend your business first when customers come to them in need of a service that only you provide.

A company blog encourages customer and corporate interaction.

A blog gives your company a personality. Each blog writer has their own writing style and voice, and this will shine through in the company blog. Your company will gain the presence of a business with “real people” behind it, and your customers will start to feel like they know you on a more personal level. Because customers feel like they have a personal relationship with you, they will be far more likely to trust you and recommend your business to others.

Most blogs also offer an option for visitors to leave comments, and your company can benefit greatly from this positive or negative feedback. Listening and understanding your customers’ likes and dislikes will help your company to provide better quality products or services to them in the future, which in turn will only bring your company more business.