Your business should be blogging. Here's why.
For any successful content marketing strategy, blogging (and blogging well) is king.
Why do we love content marketing? At a foundational level, content marketing is driven by your desire to actually help your customers. Especially true of small businesses, the reason we start in the first place is that desire to help, to add value to our customer's lives in some way. Researching, producing and sharing quality content is a great way to do this. Importantly, the more consistently you do this, the more you build brand trust amongst your audience and with Google itself.
Any half-decent SEO campaign will use blogging as a primary tactic to drive organic traffic.
Content creation is a highly effective SEO technique. Google will index your blogs as website pages which will then rank for relevant search queries. The more pages for people to find your website through, the more traffic you will drive. If the content is high quality and answers their question, there’s a good chance they’ll stick around to learn more, or engage with your product or service.Blog posts can also increase the number of keywords you rank for. Knowledge is power baby, and that’s where topical authority comes into play. The higher your perceived authority on a topic, the higher Google will rank you. Lots of high-quality content on a topic increases your perceived authority, and blogging is a much better way to do this than jamming extra pages into your website itself.
So what makes content worthy of authority?
Google knows when you’re bluffing. For Google to do its job properly, people need to be able to find the most relevant, useful and engaging content for their query. Useful is key, the content must bring something to the person who reads it. It all used to be solely based on keywords, but things are much smarter and more complex these days, and content can be classified on its quality and value.
Well-written, researched articles are considered much more valuable than the random word soup that’s been thrown together and jammed full of keywords just for SEO purposes. Google also knows that web developers probably have no business posting articles about the latest sheep farming innovation to come out of rural New South Wales. It pays to stay in your lane. If your blog is sporadic, contains stolen or useless content and is poorly written, Google (and your potential customers) will not see you as a trustworthy source of information.
Circling back to our original why - our customers.
We can track all the tangible benefits of blogging, increased SEO results, traffic, leads and higher conversion rates. What we can’t put a dollar value on, but of equal importance, is building brand trust. Blog posts are not sales pitches or advertisements. It’s an opportunity to share what you know if the hopes of providing something of value to someone else. The more value you put out into the world, the more of a trusted source you become. It’s also a great opportunity to network with other people and businesses by discussing relevant topics to your industry.
If you’re posting on social media every day without blogging, you are missing out on a golden opportunity.
Social media works really well to reach a wide audience in an instant. It’s actually an epic platform for promoting and sharing blog posts, driving even more traffic back to your site and converting those leads. The more people that share your blog post around on socials, the more people will find their way to your website. A blog post can be repurposed into social media posts themselves; you could easily get 3-4 Instagram posts, TikTok Videos or LinkedIn posts from the content of one decent blog. It works in reverse, too. A video or podcast can easily be transcribed into a blog post.
We’re well aware that the biggest barrier to consistently blogging is time.
It is undoubtedly a substantial time and energy investment to research and produce content. However, consistency is key to seeing the benefits of blogging.
Blogs last a lot longer than other forms of promotional content. Once the post is up, it stays up until you take it down. Regularly adding value to your customer's lives will compound trust over time. We live for our weekly James Clear newsletters in the office. A quote from today’s email might feel relevant if you’re still thinking about whether you should start or not.
"Consistency before intensity.
Start small and become the kind of person who shows up every day. Build a new identity.
Then increase the intensity."
-James Clear
Or, we can do it for you ;)
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