If you seek the consult of a digital marketing professional, he or she will start by analyzing your website for the best ways to enhance your site authority, SEO, user interface, and so forth. One element that will typically be addressed during this analysis is your blog and its importance.

There is a misconception in the greater world about blogging and its relevance to business success. When you mention the word “blogging” to some people they may think it to be a frivolous thing – something that any foodie or fashionista with basic web skills can do to broadcast their opinions to the world. While there may be some truth in that perspective, the fact is that blogging is an incremental part of successful online presence, regardless of your business or industry.

The advantages of a regularly updated, properly formatted blog can be broken down into five key segments. Great blogs:

1. Drive Traffic To Your Website
2. Improve Your SEO
3. Create Immediate & Long-Term Leads
4. Give You & Your Brand Authority
5. Improve Relationships with Your Customers

1. Drive Traffic To Your Website

Every blog you write is an opportunity to get noticed. Blogging allows you a continuous means to create fresh content for your website visitors, as well as the Search Engines.

Your site can only have so many pages, and those pages can only be updated so frequently. But you can produce as many blogs as you like. This influx of new, relevant content is an ongoing gold mine. Every blog post that goes up equals one more indexed page for your website, which will show up in the search engines. Furthermore, the regular addition of quality indexed pages tells the search engines that your website is active and they should check it frequently.

Past that, new blogs provide great content for your social media outlets. They lend to relevant, quality posts that can backlink to your site, directing traffic that way. And by spreading your blog info across all your social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.—you can bring your business the attention of many different audiences. As a bonus, this is a mutually beneficial approach; social posting about blogs redirects people to your site and blog content makes for quality, engaging social posts.

2. Improve Your SEO

Quality content mixed with quantity is a recipe for strong SEO. Blogs allow you to write about topics related to your business. Those topics provide an influx of fresh new additions to your site that can bolster keywords, increase your site authority, and thus strengthen your content channel footprint. Overall, blogs can give you the SEO oomph to beat out competitors in the search result pages.

3. Create Immediate & Long-Term Leads

With blogs increasing the amount of traffic directed to your website, so comes the opportunity to convert more website visitors into leads. Add a CTA (call to action) to every blog post and make sure the text is hyperlinked for easy navigation and user interface, connecting to other relevant pages and products on your site. This can influence your average visitor to become a Lead. This will not convert 100% of visitors, but it is definitely an area of opportunity that can work in your favor.

In terms of generating long-term leads, you may think there is an expiration date to the inflow of traffic/leads produced by your blog. There isn’t. Your blog may accrue the majority of its traffic and leads in the first few weeks it is up, but that doesn’t mean it will become obsolete once more time has passed. Every view and lead that your blog ever got helped it rank higher in the search engines. As a result, for a long time past its posting, people can continue to find your blog somewhere in the search result pages. So leads could potentially be generated indefinitely for that blog, though spaced out significantly in time. That’s why you want to write blogs posts that will hold up in terms of relevancy and quality as time passes. They can continue to work for you for months, even years down the line.

4. Give You & Your Brand Authority

When you compose blogs that are well written, on-topic, and full of rich information, you are positioning yourself as a thought leader in that area. Being a thought leader translates to authority on a subject. People will read your blogs to get answers to questions they have, learn about topics they are interested in, and further their journey through the sales funnel that they might already be in. Think about it. If someone out there is interested in LASIK eye surgery and your local Ophthalmology website has a blog that addresses all their questions and concerns, if that person decides to commit to LASIK there is a solid chance he or she will pursue your practice for treatment first because of the authority your blog established for you on that subject. Moreover, good blog posts can also increase visitor engagement with your website, and thereby send trust signals to the search engines.

5. Improve Relationships With Your Customers

Blogs give you a chance to connect with customers/site visitors in a multitude of ways. For starters, they add a more affable essence to your site. Page content on a website may not always have the chance to be personable, particularly on a site with a heavy Ecommerce emphasis (designed to sell a product). But blogs create a way for you to speak to your customers like you would another person—with genuine amiability, and a touch less formality. Furthermore, blogs can deepen customer trust in your brand (this goes back to showing authority), and offer a way to interact with your customers past a purchasing action or service inquiry.

You can (and should) also respond to any comments left on your blogs and answer any questions posted there too. Unlike social media posts, blog posts have a much longer lifespan and as such your interactions with customers can have a longer impact.

Yay, Blogging!

Aside from the five key components listed above, blogs are also great for developing your brand’s essence, releasing PR materials like product releases, press releases, and special event information, and working as a tool to enhance other marketing campaign efforts. Whichever specific aspect appeals to you the most though, doesn’t matter. The fact is that having a well crafted, regularly updated blog will provide advantages across the board that your site and company will benefit from!

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