Why Blogging is Essential for Your Business

Blogging has been going strong for nearly a decade now and has become part of our regular language. It’s moved from the über internet savvy generation to a common household term and yet not all businesses owners understand what it is and why they should be doing it.

As a Digital Marketing Consultancy we continuously see websites that are “static”. So the following are a list of reasons that explain what blogging is and why it is important to your business and your Digital Marketing Strategy.

Fresh Content

Google and Bing love websites that are updated regularly. The sole purpose of Search Engines is to give the user the most up to date Relevant information as fast as possible. They are continuously scouring the internet pulling in every bit of content as soon as it is published in order that they can provide it to their users at an instants notice.

Having a blog on your website suddenly gives you the ability to add content on the fly. Instead of being a static business card website it brings your website to life and makes it current.

Increase the time visitors stay on your website

When people do visit your website they are more likely going to stay on it longer if they have found an interesting article to read.

Google are placing an increasing importance in its own development to try and work out good quality content from bad. In it’s last major update “Panda” many websites lost their rankings in Google. Upon inspection of research data companies like SearchMetrics and Sistrix agree that the biggest losers from Google’s last update had “high bounce rates” and “low average time on site”.

Although Google officially does not say it uses this information it is almost certain that they use aspects of these metrics to judge the quality of your website.

Become Relevant for a Greater Number of Search Terms

Way back in 2008 Google stated that “20% of the queries Google receives each day are ones we haven’t seen in at least 90 days“. You can read the whole article here.

On a recent presentation shared by Google this statistic seems to have increased from 90 days to 6 months.

What does this mean to you?

Every page on your website is Relevant to a limited range of search terms. As a practice we target less than a handful of search terms for each page on our clients websites.

When you blog you are essentially becoming Relevant for another handful of search terms that you have not got covered by your existing content.

Appear Instantly In Google and Bing for Trending Topics

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, one of the main objectives of a Search Engine is to provide you with the most up to date information available.

Using your blog you can comment on Breaking News in your industry and easily benefit from a natural surge for information online by getting high rankings quickly for search terms related to the news.

With a properly configured Content Management System and Blog you can get a brand new page on your website and sitting at the top of Google within minutes of publishing it providing you with a nice spike in targeted traffic for the duration of the trending topic.

The most Powerful Social Media Tool in Your Arsenal

Your Blog can be connected up to your Facebook Page, your Twitter account and your Linked In account so that whenever you update your blog with some new and interesting it can be syndicated out to all your Social profiles as well and be available for people to comment upon or entice them back to your website.

Check out http://ping.fm/ for a service that will allow you to update over 40 social networks instantly from your WordPress blog or website.

Modern blogs can be easily be configured to allow commenting on to gain feedback from your visitors without the need to install a complex forum.

Both Bing and Google are and will be using social media indicators to influence their search rankings. It’s therefore a good idea to hook it up to your social profiles.

Your blog can literally be at the hub of your Social Media properties.

Increases in Customers and Business

In short, the greater number of pages you have indexed by Google the greater number of searches conducted by your target audience you are likely to appear for.

More pages in search engines leads to more targeted website traffic leads to more customers.

Our Recommended Blogging Solution

We highly recommend you have a look at WordPress.org. It’s free, extremely powerful and although was originally a blogging platform, it is now a full blown Content Management System (CMS).

Mashable.com use it, Microsoft use it for their free websites and the BBC use it for Top Gear. It is the CMS of choice for millions of websites on the internet.

If you are considering rebuilding your website, our sincerest advice is get it built in WordPress.