Ahead of building a new website for a client, our SEO specialists will put together a sitemap to inform our web developers and ensure that the resulting site can be properly crawled by the search engines. This sitemap will pretty much always include a ‘blog’ or ‘news’ section.
Currently, it’s estimated that there are over 500 million blogs in existence on the web. We have a blog section on our own website which we try to regularly populate with posts drafted by team members, covering everything from staff announcements and project work to the very latest marketing and design insights.
But, why do we dedicate so much time to blogging? We can assure you it’s not just for vanity reasons.
Despite protestations from some that “blogging is dead”, for us, and millions of businesses worldwide, blogging still has a place in our content marketing strategies. In our eyes, it’s equally as integral as showcasing online case studies or Tweeting and Instagramming.
To use that old adage, with blogging, what you put in is what you get out.
Habitually uploading perceptive and pertinent content to your website will bear fruit and feel like a worthwhile exercise when you see the various ways it boosts your business.
Enhanced online visibility
Google, Bing and Yahoo are always hungry for fresh content when they come to crawl your website. Feeding them with fresh blog content containing relevant keywords and long tail phrases, will satisfy their appetite and you will be rewarded with a higher ranking within their search results. The more leapfrogging you do over your competitors’ websites, the more it will enhance your sales volumes and online presence.
Become an established expert
Through your blog, you can show the world that you know your industry inside-out and become an authoritative, credible resource that visitors return to time and time again for valuable insight. Demonstrating written expertise in your field can also instigate a trustworthiness in your business and turn previously disinterested customers into buyers and loyal brand advocates.
Shareable content for social
We would hope that you have one or more social accounts for your business. If not, why not? You could be using a Facebook or Twitter profile, or whichever other social outlet best suits, to cross-promote your blogs, extend their reach, drive traffic to them and attract added readership. Any blog links you share through the social networks you use needs to be tailored for each platform, as a one-size-fits all approach simply doesn’t work with social media.
Improved lead capturing
Try not to make too many of your blog posts overtly advertorial as it can put people off, when what you primarily want is for what you’ve written to instigate some form of action. The placement of a single CTA (call-to-action) somewhere within your posts (usually in the final paragraph) can be used to capture leads and prompt them to e.g. download a brochure or click through to a separate section of your website.
Blogging shouldn’t be a sporadic practice – it needs to be done continuously if you want it to have a genuine impact. If you’re too consumed with other areas of your business to be routinely blogging, DigitalKOG is big on blogging and will happily take the writing duties off your hands. Contact us for assistance.
