The Importance of Having a Blog for Your Business Website

By Hazel Burgess on 11.10.15   /   Content Marketing   /   Leave a comment

Having a blog for your business website is more important than you may realize.

As a small business owner you most likely don’t have the luxury of designating a specific staff person to solely be responsible for writing blog articles for your business website. All hands are on deck when resources are limited and none truer than for small business owners. But, if you think about, this is sort of a catch 22. You know – you don’t have the time or staff to create useful and lead generating content for your business website blog, but you need those leads and customer engagement to help your business grow.

Unfortunately, this mindset can lead to a never-ending struggle to grow a small business. Here’s why your small business should be blogging and how content marketing can offer increased visibility and credibility for your company to consumers.

1. Become an Authority in Your Industry

It’s one thing to tell potential customers you’re the best at what you do or your company has the better product than xyz competitor, it’s another to show it or prove it. Your small business blog can answer potential customers’ common questions and discuss industry trends. If your potential customers view your blog as providing relevant information for topics they care about, they may be more willing to buy your products or use your services over those of your competitors. The goal is to establish your company as an industry expert who customers need to hire or use their products and services that help them solve a problem.

2. Drive Traffic to Your Website

Google SEO is geared towards new content and relevant keywords. Therefore, a blog is the perfect platform to house your fresh content to drive traffic to your website and higher rankings in search results than other websites, giving it a higher possibility of getting clicked.

3. Build Relationships with Existing and Potential Customers

Although you may not intimately know every one of your readers, by building a sense of community with your blog, readers begin to feel like they have a connection to your company and the comments section on your blog is the place on a website where you can have a two-way discussion with them. Encouraging engagement can be as simple as asking a question to get the dialogue started and then responding to them when they answer. This has a double impact; you’re gaining insight on what your customers are looking for and you’re building trust.

4. Opportunities to Convert Traffic Into Leads

So, your website is now generating more traffic – cease the opportunities to convert that traffic into leads. One way to generate leads is to give something to get something. You do this by adding a call-to-action to each blog post or in the blog section’s sidebar. For example, offer your readers something free like an e-book, discount on their next purchase, or free webinar. Most people will be willing to give up a little contact information to get free stuff. Once you have that contact information, you or the appropriate sales person can follow-up with that lead.

Influencing Long-Term Growth

Make sure to promote your website’s blog articles on your social networks and hopefully they will get some shares. So, you’ve written articles for your blog, posted them on your social channels – now what? Well, those blog pages are still ranked in search engines and your blog should continue to be visited as long as it’s on the Internet. Even your old blog content can still continue to boost total traffic to your website, providing the potential of a fairly considerable return on the few hours you invested in writing a couple of articles.

So, putting it all into perspective – adding a blog to your small-business website may just make sense. With minimal expense and effort (almost, it does take time to write each post), you can build credibility, improve search engine rankings, develop relationships with customers and increase website traffic.