Why Is It Important To Have A Blog?
Blogging has been a big part of the Internet since the late 90s, when fortune 500 companies adopted blogs as a way to announce new products or service announcements. For example, Google has numerous blogs about their many products and services. Each blog dedicated to many facets such as announcing upcoming changes to Google AdWords or new web interface changes to Google Analytics. For small businesses, how important is blogging? The answer is quite simple: a lot. Blogging is a great tool for small business to help generate search traffic and communicate authority about their respective industry, which helps create fresh content on a regular basis.
It is equally important to keep in mind that the way search engines rank websites has changed, and now there is an emphasis on websites with fresh, relevant content to gain priority in results over other pages with “stale” content. Blogs are a great solution to this. A relevant, consistently updated blog on your website will not only allow you to engage with your customers – it may also increase your rankings in search engines such as Google.
Answer Customer Questions
The reason search engines were born were to answer questions and to help others find the right content they desire. The same concept can be said about blogs. Developing blog posts is a great way to answer questions potential customers have about the product or service and possibly engage with them early on in the buying cycle. Entries should be geared around answering questions. Talk to your loyal customer base and see what type of questions they have prior to purchasing a product or service. What are the deciding factors that cultivated your leads into real paying customers? From experience and research, writing up blog posts that answer questions are the most useful blog entries, it even helps with content marketing.
Creates Fresh Content for Search Engines
Fresh content. Marketers have been striving to develop new content on a daily basis. This is where the blog really kicks in. In addition to answering customers questions, when a company types up a blog post and pushes to the final product to the website, search engine spiders will crawl the page and add the page to the search engine’s index. The new blog post signals to search engines new content has been added to the website, which gives the business a higher chance of moving up in the organic search results page. The other benefit of developing new posts on the blog will assist in the companies linking strategy, which is an important ranking factor for search engines. More on this topic on a future blog post. Creating fresh content is an important part of attracting search engines to the blog and will help the business move up the search results ladder.
Positions You as a Credible Resource
A lot of small businesses do not blog in today’s fast changing market. Small businesses should hop on the bandwagon and start blogging! Small businesses are very busy with a lot individuals wearing different hats at many times. The perception of blogging for small business is who has the time? Its not a high priority on the to-do list? It doesn’t make sales? Well I’m here to tell you that these notions are false. When an expert blogs on a topic and elaborates on the specifics of a product or service, this begins to create a sense of trust and authorship with the audience. When customers begin to build trust with an individual who blogs on a product or service, the probability of the individual engaging with that expert greatly increases and so does the chance the customer will do business with the author. Reminder, blogs are not sale pitches. Blogs are for establishing credibility and creating a trust factor with a desired audience.
How To Start A Blog
Even for the uninitiated, starting a blog is much easier than you may think. Assuming you already have a website, there are applications available to make blogging simple, and the most popular platform to use is WordPress (and it’s free!). With WordPress installed on your site, you can login and write new blogs as easily as you would write a post for social media. You can even add media files, save drafts to work on at a later time, choose how your posts appear in search results, and much more. Your website administrator can assist you with installing WordPress to your site. You may also contact our team at ZumaTech and we’re more than happy to help you get started with your very own blog today.
What is also great about blogging is that it can be an enjoyable experience and very rewarding. You can talk about anything – A business could talk about how they became established, new trends, favorite places to eat during lunch breaks, news, personal stories or even positive interactions with customers and clients. The content is yours!
Have questions or comments? Contact us directly or leave a comment here on our blog! We’d like to engage with you!