Blogging is a term that most of us have heard of and is something that has been very much responsible for the exponential growth of the web and what we refer to as ‘content marketing’.
People use the web primarily as a way to find information on a variety of subjects, and blogging allows people with knowledge on their chosen subject to get their ideas and thoughts out there for the world to read. A lot of blogs are written just for pleasure, or about hobbies (check out my mate Nick Bruzon’s unofficial Brentford FC blog as a good example).
The majority of blog sites (such as Nick’s) are built using specific blogging platforms such as Blogger (now owned by Google), Tumblr or WordPress.
But business websites can also contain a blog and if you’re serious about your site being found online then these days it’s vital to have one, and even more vital to keep it updated.
Now considering that we’ve written hundreds of blogs for clients in the last twelve months you’d think that we’d be good at this ourselves – unfortunately we don’t always practise what we preach but we’re working at it! Our last blog post regarding Enhancing Your Personal Brand Using LinkedIn gave us a huge amount of web traffic earlier in the month – hence why I’m writing this blog post today 🙂
There are loads of great reasons to blog on a regular basis – here are four to be getting on with:
1) Authority – Blogging gives you the chance to demonstrate knowledge and authority on your given subject. It’s a great way of telling people who arrive on your website that you know what you’re talking about. You can have a whole load of generic content and copy on your website that explains the services that your business offers, but nothing demonstrates knowledge and understanding of a subject better than a series of blog posts.
2) Keywords – There maybe a whole range of keywords related to what you do as a business, but these can be difficult to fit into your site on a ‘standard’ amount of pages and navigation without it looking like you’re spamming or attempting to over-optimise your site for these specific words and phrases. Blogging allows you write a series of separate articles on all of these subjects, giving each article a keyword-rich title and featuring relevant keywords throughout the articles – linking back to other pages on similar subjects at the same time which is great for the user experience and navigation.
3) Dynamic Content – There are other SEO benefits too besides the opportunity to feature extra keywords. For example, every time you write a new blog post, you are adding dynamic content to your site, and this is something that Google loves to see. Google basically needs to show the ten most relevant pages to the search term on page one of its site. It wants to know that someone searching for a term related to your business will find the most relevant, topical information that they can. One of the factors it uses to determine this is how much you care about your online presence – so adding fresh, unique and relevant content to your site on a regular basis is a brilliant way of demonstrating this to Google.
4) Social Media Content – If you have Social Media accounts that represent your business (and if you don’t, then why not..?!) then your followers and fans want to see updates about the subject that you specialise in – they want to learn more – that’s why they’ve taken the time to follow you in the first place. So blogging gives you a great chance to provide this type of content to your followers. And there’s triple whammy here too. As Google likes to see a diverse range of traffic coming into your website, and shares and re-tweets encourage this from followers of your followers – result! Also – the more traffic you get from Social Media, the more Google deems your site as relevant. The more relevant Google deems your site, the higher it ranks you. The higher Google ranks you, the more search traffic you get. And the more search traffic you get, the more Social Media followers you’ll gain. It’s basically a loop and you the more you put into the loop, the thicker the loop grows and the more you’ll get out of it.
So how often should you blog? Ideally once a week, but once every few weeks is fine if you can’t find the time. Another good way to look at blog content is in terms of how it increases the size of your website. If your website currently has six pages, then blogging every week for a year would add 52 extra keyword-rich pages for Google to find.
Need more help or advice on how to get the most out of blogging? Email us today or give us a call on 08433 832 732.
Thanks for reading 🙂
Written by Matt Davis | Managing Director | The Bright Click