Blogs are a great way to engage with your audience, create a sense of authority on a topic, or even attract new customers. You can share text-based stories or create an immersive experience for your visitors with photos or videos. These are the top five reasons to create and maintain a blog.
Win at SEO
Blogs are one of the best ways to improve the SEO of your website. Google, the undisputed leader of search engine traffic, tends to remain vague on the ranking criteria for websites, but having high quality, original, and authoritative content is thought to be among the top factors. Blogs allow businesses to share tips and tricks, offer deeper insight into industry trends or current products, and other information that bolsters the website ranking. It’s important to have clear and original writing that’s focused, but not artificially stuffed with keywords.
Stay in touch & top of mind
Seasonal and e-commerce businesses often have websites with new or changing information. This offers a marketing advantage when reaching out to email lists or re-targeting lists. Service providers or websites that feature a static inventory can use blogs to give visitors a reason to return. Having a consistently updated blog offers businesses a natural way to stay in touch with clients or customers without a hard sales approach. Blogs offer the ability to share long text like case studies or press releases or interactive content like quizzes and games. Business WordPress websites should use an email capture plugin to collect subscriber details and share regular updates directly to the email list.
Maintain a clean design
A good website is streamlined and helps users easily navigate to the most important and valuable parts. The best websites make it easy for page viewers to become clients and customers. This is ideal for converting sales or appointments, but having the ability to share stories, advice, or other assorted information is valuable in other ways. Blogs allow website owners to keep the main website optimized for conversions while allowing for an on-brand space to share assorted traffic-boosting content.
Automated marketing
Thanks to a variety of (often free) WordPress plugins, blogs can be transformed into a variety of marketing materials automatically. Blogs can be automatically posted to Facebook to connect with followers there. Other plugins can be used to send blogs as an email newsletter, publish as an RSS feed, or post to additional social channels. Websites benefit from both the organic, search engine traffic and the amplification of additional exposure.
Offer additional value
Blogs are a great place to offer additional value to current or potential customers. Blogs can offer how-to instructions (while promoting additional products) like the Home Depot blog or can be a brand-building news hub like the Starbucks blog.
Blogs are only as successful as the websites they support. Visit our Shop to learn more about creating or optimizing a WordPress website for your business. We offer website design, maintenance, and blog writing services to help you attract and connect with your customers.