1. SEO: Blogs draw people to your site for a solution to a particular problem
Blog articles on your business website are important because quite simply, they’re a fabulous search engine optimisation tool.
This is because creating high quality blog articles that actually help your customers with solutions to their problems represents an excellent way to feed the right kind of traffic into your business website.
Critically, you need to identify specific keywords that you will target before you write your blog post in order to help your customers with a particular problem. You want these keywords to be those you have strategically selected based on keywords that people are using to search for information on in your topic area. This helps ensure that you draw search engine enquiries to your site. There are a number of paid and free tools that can help you find popular searches in certain subject areas.
Basically, your ideal customers must actually be able to find your helpful article. There is nothing worse than writing an amazing blog article that no one ever actually reads.
As an example, Sam Pho of Ahrefs loves blog articles because most of Ahrefs internet traffic comes to them through blog articles (see the 16:01 mark of this video). Blog posts essentially allow Ahrefs to reach and interact with large audiences, who are simply looking for information to help them solve a problem and happen to find it on the Ahrefs website.
2. Blogs force you to post new content to your website regularly
A blog section on your website forces you to write and then post new content for your customers regularly.
After all, there is no point in including a “Blog” menu header on your business website if there is only one blog article underneath it, or worse, nothing at all.
You need to post helpful and useful new content on a regular basis in order to get search engines to rank your business website at a high level. And blogs help you do this.
Please note, you don’t need to write a blog post every day or even every week. However, writing quality blog articles regularly shows search engines that your enterprise is active and means business.
This makes sense on a number of levels. We all know that activity of any kind drives momentum.
It also makes sense because the job of search engines is to make sure that interesting and valuable new content covering a particular topic eventually shows up when people conduct a search in that topic area.
3. A blog is important because it gives you useful information to share with your email list
Another extremely important benefit of writing blogs and posting them on your business website is that it gives you regular helpful content that you can direct people on your email list to.
People that have signed up to your email list of course love being treated as human beings, and blogs are a great way to give them some love by providing some information that can help them (and at the same time get them looking at your website and the products and services you offer).
In contrast, email newsletters that simply flog your products over and over again without any special discounts or offers to people on your email list are likely to go unread.
4. A blog is useful because it gives you interesting information to share through social media
Similar to the above, blog posts also give you helpful and useful content that you can share with your customers through social media.
Incidentally, posting on social media regularly also demonstrates that you are an active business and helps your social media page rank too.
However, as Marie Forleo emphasises, the key benefit here is always that people come back to your website to check out what you offer, because you own your website whereas you don’t own the social media channel. I think Marie’s approach in this area is spot on.
5. A blog is important because it demonstrates your knowledge, expertise and all round amazing you-ness.
Blog posts or articles are an excellent way to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise.
Basically, whether you recognise it or not, you have invested in yourself and your industry, and you can help customers solve their problems.
The best part is, you decide what you want to talk about. You write helpful content about subjects that grill your steak. You are completely in charge of what you write your blog articles about.
And you decide your style and personality, which shines out to the whole world through your blog articles.
6. Blog articles are important because they help you build audience trust
Blog articles are an amazing opportunity to demonstrate the outstanding quality of your business and to build trust.
This is because blog articles demonstrate:
- The fact that you are an awesome communicator, so you’ll be able to communicate well with your customers and help them.
- The fact that you care about quality, because your blog articles are written well. Throwing a dog vomit assembly of words up as a blog article will have the reverse effect and will reduce trust rather than build it.
- The fact that you are keen to help your customers, because you are providing them with helpful and useful information.
- The fact that you are thorough, because you take the time to provide genuinely useful solutions to a customer’s problem.
Blogs are so enormously important because if you are anything like me, you are often not ready to buy something the first time you look at the website of a business.
You want to look around, and get a feel for what the business offers, to check out their style and see if you would be a good fit to work with them.
It’s a bit like going to the pub when you’re single. You don’t sign up to marry someone the first night you meet them. Of course, you’ll want to find out a bit more about them before you decide to have their babies.