Blogs take time and can cost money. However, the upside is blogs can bring in traffic and new customers.
Blogs are primarily used to increase the visibility of a website, and it is even seen as a credible source on the products and topics the website covers.
Regularly posting content on a schedule can drive new visitors to your website, and even repeated customers.
If you plan to grow your website’s traffic, engage with new customers, and retain current customers, a blog is a great platform to implement if you have a proper strategy.
What Is A Blog Used For?
Let’s take a closer look at how blogs are supposed to be used.
- A blog is used to bring traffic to your website.
- It’s also used to increase your authority.
- But most importantly, it’s to help your users and target audience.
Blogs are also used to convert traffic into leads, and leads may become customers and consumers of the service or product being discussed. So growing your website traffic through a blog is an indirect way to increase revenue.
The content you write allows you to become an authority in a niche, as well, which will snowball your efforts to gain momentum.
Encouraging engagement on your blog can further help potential customers come to trust you, become more loyal, and help them to become even more informed.
Furthermore, blogs are great for boosting social media efforts and presence, too.
Creating original, entertaining content about your niche and posting it over social media can help drive your business’s long-term results by pulling interested users to your website from the social network you posted it on.
What Are The BIG Benefits Of A Blog?
Before you sit down and start writing your first article, take a moment to consider the pros a blog will offer your business:
- Search traffic can increase over time, and quite substantially.
- You can establish yourself as an authority on your topic within your niche.
- A blog can proactively reduce administrative overhead by answering questions in blogs and their comments.
- A blog can aid in increasing your social media presence, which can further audience engagement.
- A blog can help you learn what your customers want and what they need, as well.
Because a blog is an extension of your website or business, it does bring customers or potential customers to you.
Having content which targets basic or even specific queries can answer your readers questions even before they ask them. Many people use FAQ style posts for this.
Lastly, a blog never really expires, because you can constantly updated it. In addition, you can publish evergreen content which never grows old.
What Are The Drawbacks Of A Blog?
Not everything is all roses and rainbows, of course. There can be drawbacks:
- It can become a big time commitment
- It can require extensive research and expertise
- You need to learn a baseline amount of SEO to optimize each post
- You’ll need to learn more advanced SEO, like site architecture and internal linking as the blog grows
- When you’ve exhausted the more common ideas, you’ll need to perform deeper keyword research
- The content you create will need to be informative, but also written well enough to get the readers to convert to customers
Even if you’re committed to doing it right, there is a lag time to getting a blog to grow. Eventually, it will sustain itself to a degree, but the larger it gets, the more maintenance it will require.
All things said, these are a small price to pay for a long, steady growth in your website traffic.
How Does It Help My Overall SEO?
Search engines are always looking for relevant content to index and add to their results for each and every query.
Posting relevant content to your blog may answer these queries, which can generate traffic and leads when done correctly.
In fact, even if you’re primarily a local-only business, your blog can help pick up attention from anywhere, all across the United States, and even world.
If you’ve ever wanted to reach a wide audience, this is definitely one way to do it. But the more you blog shows search engines what your business is all about, the more they can feel confident in listing your website for additional queries.
How Much Content Do I Need?
Content should be published consistently, ideally on a schedule. The more original content you post, the higher you’ll be able to rank.
However, that’s not all you have to consider when considering how much content you need for a blog.
Of course, simply published LOTS of small posts or only a handful of MASSIVE ones may or may not be ideal.
In a perfect world, each article is very succinct, accurate, and gives the reader exactly what they need, all without being too brief or verbose.
For example, the first page results usually have around 1,800 words on average.
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Now, these may be more competitive niches and not necessarily local keywords, but it shows you’ll need to be at least somewhat comprehensive if you want to beat your competitors blogs.
Lead generation is typically best done by long-form content. Longer form content shows customers you know what you are talking about, and search engines, too.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is essentially finding what to write about.
By figuring out what people are looking for, what questions they have, and what they need reassurance about before buying, you can find topics to write about.
Keyword research is a significant long-term game-plan for most businesses and websites.
In a nut shell, it’s a way of finding out what people need or want and using those things as a foundation for constructing your own content plan to keep them satisfied.
Keyword research is the process by which you research popular search terms people type into search engines like Google, and include them strategically in your content so that your content appears higher on a search engine results page (SERP).
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By understanding how your customers or potential customers are searching for the product or service in Google, you can further your rankings, your views and, hopefully, your sales.
Is A Blog Right For You?
There is no right answer for everyone, though the answer is rarely just “No.”
Because every viable business has customers, there is bound to be something to write about to inform, to reassure, and grow your brand in the eyes of readers.