Still being unsure about whether your website needs a blog in 2014 is like deciding whether or not your company needed a website a decade earlier. You need one.
A blog presence is a modern necessity for your web presence, and here are just a few reasons why.
SEO
Good SEO comes with web design best practices and an active online presence. Two ways to do this are with good semantic markup and numerous back links. The third is a blog presence. Google indexes blog posts much quicker than other pages (
if done correctly) because they update so frequently. A quickly updating blog with the right keyword usage, great headline and content, will help move your website up Google search results faster.
As users engage with your blog, and share more of your content, your back links will also increase, moving your web presence up even further.
In fact, a 2013
report from Hubspot found that businesses that blog have 97% more inbound links from third party websites and users. They also report that, on average, websites that blog receive 400% more indexed Google pages that those that don’t.
Neil Patel, an SEO blogger and researcher, reports that after analyzing 63 Google Webmaster Tools accounts, ‘Blog post’ is the sixth highest in most clicked-through words.
User-Engagement
The second reason is that
you’re reading this on a blog right now. Blogs are a great way to interact with, update and engage with your user base. Suddenly, there’s a two-way conversation, with a comment and sharing section for users to talk back. People on the internet are much more discerning in how they spend their time online than they were just a couple of years ago, and a static, unchanging website is essentially just an e-brochure.
Users want to feel like they’re being engaged with, and that they have a personal connection to the brands and platforms that they visit. A blog is a great way to provide a voice to your product/company/platform that is updated with the latest information instead of just being information storage.
Branding
Blogs are a great way to develop your online brand. Because a blog provides a voice for your company, it allows you to build a rapport and culture/personality in your reader’s minds in a more organic, less forced way.
A handy infographic at
Quicksprout pools data from user-survey statistics and finds that:
- 60% of consumers feel positive about a corporate brand after reading their blog
- 61% of U.S. consumers have made purchases based on a blog post
- and perhaps most importantly, 70% of surveyed consumers said that they learned more about a company/service/product through blog posts than they did through advertisement.
Syndication
Wouldn’t it be great if other people started marketing your brand for you? Blog posts can achieve this. Other bloggers, commenters, and social media users often share and repost blog content that they liked. This helps spread your online reach much further than an internal marketing team can do alone, by simple word of mouth.
Good, frequently updated content with interesting, informative topics will ensure that your brand/message spreads in an organic, non-forced way, where your users will start doing the fair share of your marketing for you.
