Why Your Business Should Have an Active Blog

There are billions of people worldwide  currently using the internet (4.66 billion, as of mid-late 2021) to conduct business and communicate with others, so it makes perfect sense why blogging has become an integral component of most brands’ marketing strategies. More eyes than ever before are scanning screens for fresh, relevant, and valuable content — so having an active blog on your site is the perfect way to connect and interact with those readers and potential customers.

Blogging helps build credibility around your brand, especially if you’re newer to launching your online efforts. By making customers feel connected with you and your company, you can reasonably expect to increase your lead generation and sales. We’ve previously covered how to optimize your online presence if you’re looking for more insights.

Does your website for your small or medium-sized business (SMB) have an active blog? If not, here’s why it should.

Assuming you’re a business looking for ways to increase your marketing effectiveness, blogging might be a good option for you. Rather than sitting idle and waiting for clients to magically appear in your sales funnel, you can take action and start putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys, we suppose). Potential leads can find your business in a variety of ways, for example:

These methods are tried and true, and some may work for your business’s unique needs. However, the reality is that none of these options help expand your website’s reach organically without paying for leads or impressions. But you know what doesn’t cost money and only requires a bit of dedication, consistency, and time? BLOGGING.

Let’s dive in a bit deeper.

If you’re an SMB, your website probably contains a handful of main landing pages (About, Services, Blog, Portfolio, etc.) and maybe a few hidden pages that users need to navigate to. In most cases, you likely don’t have many more places on your website where content is housed and can be found, so you’re limiting the ability to be seen on major search engines as a result. Blogging is an excellent method to add fresh content to a stale site, giving Google and Bing opportunities to locate relevant pages and deliver those links to a user’s search results.

When you publish a new blog post on your site, you automatically create an additional page for search engines to index and review. If your latest blog post contains relevant and interesting information — preferably original content, not just reposting existing articles — you’ve opened up the floodgates for how many prospective customers can find you. Plus, regularly posting fresh content tells Google it should frequently check back in on your site to re-index and see what else you’ve been up to lately.

As mentioned above, you’ll be adding one page after another to be indexed on your site by blogging. Each new post is not only an excellent opportunity to boost your site’s SEO, but it’s also a great way to generate new leads as well. By adding a lead-generating call-to-action(CTA) on each and every blog article you write, you allow readers to become leads, which ultimately should convert into paying customers if you provide a seamless customer journey.

For many companies, the call-to-action involves some sort of sign-up offer that provides access to resources like webinars, newsletters, e-books, free trials, complimentary strategy/consultation sessions, white papers, fact sheets, and so on. People want demonstrated immediate value in exchange for their precious personal information and access to their inbox, so make your blogs pop and high-impact to get readers to take that next step. Industry-leading blogs include CTAs in virtually every post they write, and ideally, your company’s blog should, too, if you want it to be worth your time and effort.

Just keep in mind that not every brand’s blog turns into a lead factory — no blog is perfect and converts at a 100 percent clip. For many companies, it’s simply a way to boost SEO, and they generate leads through alternative means. This is an inexpensive and intelligent option for other companies with limited advertising revenue. We recommend that you start blogging, write high-quality content, include those CTAs whenever you can, and continue to monitor your progress over a long period. Blogs take time to develop(you can expect to be writing blog content for 3-6 months before noticing significant traffic increases), so be patient and understand that it’ll all be worth it one day.

Another necessary evil of your marketing strategy is social media, of course. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn tend to be the biggest platforms for SMBs, but even newcomers like TikTok are rising in popularity and prominence (depending on the industry your business serves). So, how do your social media channels and your blog tie in with one another?

By writing a substantial, big impact blog that people genuinely have an interest in reading, you have an opportunity to use it for getting discovered on social media. When you write your latest and greatest masterpiece and post it, you’ve generated new content that followers can share across your various channels. As your blog grows, so will your following, and the growth becomes exponential from there if you remain consistent. This is all key to SEO and your overall digital marketing efforts.

If you’re regularly posting social media content while simultaneously trying to build your brand, you can kill two birds with one stone by blogging. Blogs, if written thoroughly, can act as huge repositories of content for your social media channels. If you need a new LinkedIn post and want to share a quick fun fact, it’s as simple as choosing a statistic from your latest and most relevant blog and turning it into something shareable for your feed.

Ideally, the shareable post links back to your website or blog and creates a lead generation and nurturing ecosystem. A win-win-win situation, if you ask us. Your business generates new top-of-funnel interest, your existing clients get to keep up with your updates, and new prospects/clients have an opportunity to find your content and gain valuable information in the process. Everybody’s happy.

If you’re writing the type of content you should be writing, you’ll be able to answer a majority of the pressing, frequently asked questions that your readers and customers might have. By creating a bank of educational, targeted, and relevant blog posts, you can become a credible source among your peers and a go-to for information for your audience. Establish authority within your industry and ensure that as many leads as possible choose to contact your business because you’re seen as a thought-leader and the best option available.

For example: when a customer is concerned about services we offer — or maybe isn’t sure they want to work with us at all — we have valuable content like this post on why you should hire a digital marketing agency to share with them. We happily present this type of content to address an issue or help clear up confusion because it shows that we’ve got a handle on all elements of our business. Imagine being able to replicate that same level of transparency and impact for your own business every single time a customer comes forward with some sort of challenge or objection.

While we recognize that "Establishing authority" isn’t easily measurable like SEO metrics, web traffic, social media likes/shares, or leads generated, it can make a difference for you and your team. You’re blogging because you want to create traffic and ultimately generate sales, so become an authority figure and use your blog for what it is — a sales enablement tool.

The more content you have in your blogs relevant to the services you offer or the products you sell, the more likely it is that a future customer will find you through those posts. HubSpot is a prime example since most digital marketing-related searches result in a HubSpot blog being listed at the top of the organic search results. This is referred to as Inbound Marketing, where customers naturally find your business because you’ve provided valuable and reliable content for them to use to make a purchase decision.

Customers who find you via your blog are likely to enter your funnel as leads because you’ve established that authority and credibility and likely answered most (or all) of their questions. Prospects routinely reading and sharing your blogs will possess greater knowledge of your products and services than a randomly sourced lead, which leads to a greater likelihood of conversion.

If and when a prospect makes contact with your business, you have a stronger foundation to base your initial conversation on. When faced with particularly complex or in-depth questions, business owners and their salespeople can reference back to existing content that can further answer a client’s question. These articles can help increase the speed at which customers move through the sales process by using company assets (in this case, blogs) to their advantage.

Backlinks are one of the top factors (among 199 others) that Google’s complex algorithm takes into consideration when it ranks a site on its search engine results pages. Inbound links or backlinks are among the 200 factors the Google algorithm considers when ranking a site on its search engine result page.

The more you link your blogs to credible resources, the more trustworthy your blog becomes. Ideally, over time, you also receive backlinks from other blogs to your website to assist in driving new traffic to your business. If someone links from their authoritative website, it can serve as a vote of confidence or recommendation, and it signals to Google that you’re worth bumping in search rankings because of how expert you seem in your field. An additional benefit of backlinks is that they help you build your domain authority, which helps improve your site’s ability to be seen and ranked.

The TL:DR version of this article is that blogs are important and will significantly impact the way search engines index and rank your website. While it may seem like a time-consuming task to generate consistent blog content, it’ll be well worth your while and can genuinely make a difference in your SEO efforts. Contact us to get started on your blog today.