There’s a few reasons why blogging is important for business. Blogging is a good, cheap way of generating traffic to a website. Without it, you rely solely on paid marketing or word of mouth advertising which is out of your control.
When you have built a lot of content through blogging, it can attract traffic to your business absolutely free from the search engines, backlinks, and social shares. While this can take a long time to transpire, and a lot of content, it puts you ahead of your competitors in a number of ways:
- Your website will attract free searches from Google, and other search engines.
- Quality content positions you as an authority in your niche. This is both good for customer acquisition and your authority with the search engines.
- Website content can be used to answer customer questions regarding your products/service and lead them to make a purchase.
- Good quality content in your niche attracts shares, likes and backlinks, all of which can increase your domain authority and therefore traffic over time.
Why Blogging Is Important For Business
Making a habit out of blogging is well worth the effort because over time you are building a digital asset which will attract more business via the SERPS – search engine results pages. While this can take months or even years to accomplish, it’s well worth the effort. Your competitors are surely doing this anyway and so unless you do it as well, you’re going to fall behind.
A good publishing profile of continuous content will show Google you’re serious about what you do. Ideally, publish content as much as possible or at least three times a week, more if you can. Over time this will demonstrate that you know your topic; particularly if your content is of high quality because other websites will link to it over time.
Older websites which have thousands of backlinks rank highly in the search engines. This means they attract customers for the search terms which they intend to rank for and which are relevant to their business.
Why Blogging Is Important For Business: Long Tail Keywords Benefits
One strategy you can use for blogging is to find long tail keywords which offer lower SEO difficulty than the rest. One of the main problems with blogging is that there’s a lot of competition in most topics. To get your content found can therefore be difficult.
A way around this problem is to target content with long tail keywords. A long tail keyword of 4 or more words is typically much less competitive than a shorter phrase of two or three words. You can find long tail keywords using Google’s free keyword planner. Just type in your main keyword which relates to your business. Look for longer tail derivatives which you can create content for.
Long tail keywords have another benefit for business blogs too. They are much more targeted than shorter terms. A long tail keyword generally is more specific so you can also attract a much more targeted search query to your site by using them in your copy.
A more targeted search query is more likely to turn into a customer than a shorter and more general search query; if you choose the right ones to put on your website.
Blogging Vs. Paid Ads
Of course paid advertising is a far faster and more scalable method of attracting new customers to your business, see PPC vs. organic marketing. While blogging requires a lot of upfront effort to get any traction at all, the long term benefit of blogging is free traffic. So once you’ve put the work in beforehand, you can attract customers passively from the search traffic if/when your content manages to rank in the search engines.
To make this happen will usually require a minimum of several months of regularly blogging. It might be more in a very competitive topic. Initially the work you do won’t seem to generate any traction at all, and it can be easy to think this is a pointless and futile strategy.
But stick with it and over time your hard work will pay off. Blogging is slow initially but as your body of content grows, you should find a sudden upsurge in traffic after a certain period of time.
Summary
Why is blogging so important for business? A business can survive without a blog if it uses other forms of advertising. Many businesses don’t have a blog and prefer instead to concentrate on other marketing strategies which are faster and more scalable.
However, building a blog can, over time, give you a digital asset which attracts organic traffic from the search engines. While this may take months or years, it’s well worth doing as a longer term strategy. Blogging ultimately can give you free traffic and sales if you stick with it over the longer term. It can be a great focus if you have a limited advertising budget but have the time to do it.