According to HubSpot, companies with blogs attract 55% more website visitors, get 97% more inbound links and have 434% more indexed web pages than blog-less companies. It sounds great, but there are still a lot of companies who don't have a business blog, or only publish once a month, or who wrote 10 posts last year and that's it. Business blogging is hard, but do it right and it's worth the effort. Here are the three main reasons why businesses are blogging:
To Be an Authority in the Industry
Businesses blog to position the company and its writers as thought leaders, as the ones who know everything there is to know about the industry and how to be successful with their product or service. This is very different from writing about your company, products, or services, as there isnt' any authority or thought leadership in that. Businesses blog to show that they are the ones aware of trends, that they are the ones that can help customers best, and that they are the ones who have all the good ideas.
This is an incredibly important reason if a) your industry hasn't embraced business blogging yet, or done it well, or b) your local competitors haven't started blogging yet. Why follow a path when you can blaze a trail?
It's Great for SEO
Admit it, SEO is important to you, and you're still working very hard to get to the first page of search results (or stay there), or even increase your rankings. It's important to a lot of businesses, which is why they blog. Here's how blogging is great for SEO:
- Blogging increases the number of web pages you have, increasing the number of pages people can find you on search engines
- Blogging increases the number of web pages you have, which conditions the search engines to crawl your site regularly and to index those pages
- Blogging increases the number of web pages you have, increasing the number of keywords you can rank for
- Blogging increases the number of web pages you have, increasing the number of pages people can link back to (and we all know the importance of inbound links to SEO)
- Blogging increases the number of web pages you have, increasing your web traffic because there are now more ways and more reasons to visit your site and to share it
Essentially, business blogging is great for SEO because it increases the number of pages you have. Hey, no one said having 300, 500, 1000+ pages to your website is a bad thing!
It's an Investment into Other Types of Content
No one says that all your blog posts have to stay on your blog. Use them to create white papers, e-newsletter content, slideshows, webinars, press releases etc. That's what we did with our "How to Blog for Business" eBook, which you can download at the bottom of the article. We also do a blog digest as part of our email marketing and e-newsletter series, choosing five or six blog posts around a specific topic or theme to help our readers. Businesses blog because it's the easiest way to get started with content marketing, and often becomes the biggest repository for future content and content ideas.
Related Links:
Why You Should Have a Blog for 2013
How Business Blogging Affects the Buying Process
Why Blogging is Different from Your Website
