When you look at your busy schedule, you think of the things you could cross out. You cannot postpone doing the accounts. You cannot skip checking on an order that a client is waiting for and has not arrived yet. What about writing the weekly blog post? Could you skip it for now? Or maybe, even take a break from blogging for a while? As tempting as it sounds, we don’t recommend it. We understand your frustrations, but blogging is important for your SEO and marketing.
The number one reason why blogging is so effective, especially for small and medium sized businesses, is that it is cost effective. It is even free if you do your own blogging (as you are). Taking a break from writing blogs means putting money into paid traffic if you want to keep the same levels of website traffic and foot traffic in your store.
Blogging Is Better than Paying for Traffic
To be fair, we have to say it: organic traffic always beats paid traffic in terms of relevance and quality. Many people click on ads out of curiosity or because they are big and very visible on the screen. They spend a few seconds on your site, decide it’s not interesting and leave. You have not gained a potential customer. But you paid for their click.
Now that you understand the value of organic traffic, we focus on the best ways of getting it. And the answer is through an effective content marketing and SEO strategy. The two elements converge to one thing: blogging.
The Main Benefits of Blogging for SEO and Marketing
Let us look at all the ways in which each blog post you write and publish on your company site helps your SEO and marketing strategy:
1. Nurture Customer Trust
The relationship between any consumer and a business is based on trust. The client trusts that they get quality products they need at a fair price. Or they believe that they get the services they need, supplied by knowledgeable professionals.
But how does a business win a consumer’s trust? The answer is: through blogging. Each blog post that contains useful and reliable information generates a bit of trust. And bit by bit you reach the point when a blog subscriber decides that they can trust your products or services.
2. Blogging Helps You Rank for Specific Keywords
Here’s a big reason to rely on blogging for SEO and marketing. You can rank for keywords that are not directly product related, but relevant for your business. For example, if you are running a bio grocery store, you may rank for the keyword “benefits of ecological farming”. Now, this keyword would be awkward to include in most product descriptions. You may place it as a secondary keyword in the “About Us” page, but that’s all.
However, you can create a series of articles on the benefits of ecological farming and use the phrase as main keyword for the topic pillar.
3. Grow the Number of Quality Backlinks
Well written and researched blog posts represent a reliable source of information for other sites. They may link back to your blog in their own content to support the argument they are debating in their articles.
As you know by now, Google relies on quality backlinks to determine the reputation and authoritativeness of a website for ranking purposes. Thus, blogging is your best option for improving the page rank of your site.
4. Blogging Is Effective for Increasing Brand Awareness
Brand awareness means that people instantly recognise a brand when they see its logo, name and tagline. Some brands have grown so big, that they no longer write their name or tagline in ads or on product packages. Think of Nike or Apple. You see their iconic logos and you know exactly the full details of the company.
This level of awareness comes after decades of clever marketing strategies. For starters, your business should reach the level of brand awareness where people click on a link just because it is published on your site. High quality blogs can generate this type of brand awareness, so make sure that you keep blogging.
5. Get More Indexed Pages on Google
What are the best chances of making it to the first page of search results? You would say: good SEO strategy. That is true. But let’s focus on the simplest answer. And it is: having a lot of web pages published online and indexed by Google.
And this is exactly why blogging for SEO and marketing is so effective. Every new blog post you publish represents one more web page attached to your domain name. Strength is in large numbers, so continue to publish those weekly blog posts!
6. Blogging Generates Long-Term Results
Let us return a bit to the issue of paid traffic. It has one major drawback (apart for the fact that you have to pay for it). You will see results only immediately. After you stop an ad campaign, the results also stop. You will notice a significant drop in traffic and conversions.
By contrast, blogging for SEO and marketing continues to generate results weeks and months after you published each article. This is even more visible when you focus on evergreen content topics. These are topics that are not time dependent – such as advice for seasonal home décor. But even these remain valuable, because these celebrations when people decorate their homes occur year after year.
7. Planning Blogs Allows You to Understand Customers
You are doing a lot of thinking before you write a blog. You look for a topic that will generate a lot of visits. You want to keep each reader engaged until the end of the article. You want them to follow through with the CTA.
All this thinking is good for blogging, but it also helps you achieve something even more important: a deeper understanding of your potential clients. You understand their pains and constraints, their needs and interests. And this helps you serve them better and create an improved user experience for them both on your site and in any interactions with your business.
Conclusion
Blogging is the number one tool for an efficient and cost effective SEO and marketing strategy. If you feel that it is too much for you to handle on your own, you can outsource blog writing to freelance copywriters or an agency. But do not give up blogging, because it is one of your biggest sources of organic traffic, conversions and, ultimately, sales.