Skip to main content

Last Updated: 23rd May, 2016

Brochure websites are dead.

Having a company website only featuring your contact information, “about us” page and a list of your products and services is no longer good enough if you want to have a successful online presence.

Your business must develop a content marketing strategy to actively engage your customers. One of the most effective ways to do this is a company blog.

What are the Benefits of a Business Blog?

7 Reasons why all businesses should have a blog: 

Benefit #1 – Links

Links are still extremely important for SEO and improving website credibility. It is difficult to get links to your website unless you have good content that is worth linking to.

Most people aren’t going to link to your boring “services” or “about” page but they might link to a blog post the company has written commenting on changes in the industry or a list of videos that someone in the industry should watch.

The more unique, useful and interesting the blog posts – the more likely it is to get linked to.

Benefit #2 – Engagement

Writing blog posts gives your customers the opportunity to engage with your business through comments, Twitter interaction or Facebook comments about the latest post.

Asking your readers for feedback or encouraging them to share or give their opinion at the end of the post can open up an excellent 2-way dialogue with your customers and give your ideas for future posts or changes to your product or service offering.

Benefit #3 – Branding, Credibility and Authority

Blogging allows your company to demonstrate it’s knowledge, expertise and creativity which positions your company as an expert in your market. Providing unique insights and suggestions that solve your reader’s problems further enhances your branding and promotes sharing of your content.

In the eyes of both Google and your customers, good content = good brand.

Benefit #4 – SEO

Links, user engagement and branding are three of the most important SEO elements for any website. The more quality backlinks you have pointing to your website, generally the better.

The more engaged your customers are with your website, and the stronger your branding is online, this typically also leads to favourable SEO results through higher rankings and more traffic.

Another SEO benefit of a blog is that it allows your business to target specific topics or keywords and create content specifically tailored to questions, common industry terminology or problems customers in your market might be experiencing.

But in order to maximise the SEO benefits of your blog post, you must make sure that is SEO friendly.

Benefit #5 – More Traffic To Your Website

With more links and better Google rankings, your traffic will begin to grow.

Slowly at first.

But over time, you’ll start to notice a steady increase in visitors to your website.

Benefit #6 – Grow Your Email List

With the extra website traffic, you now have a greater opportunity to have these visitors sign up to your mailing list, or download a guide in exchange for their email address.

If your information is useful, then people will want more.

So they will sign up to your email list so they can consume more of your valuable knowledge.

Benefit #7 – More Enquiries

Every single post you write is an opportunity to generate more website enquiries.

Each post is its own individual new landing page, and offers the possibility of converting the visitor into a new customer.

This is why each blog post should be:

  1. High Quality
  2. Engaging
  3. Solves a problem for the reader
  4. Contain an action you want the user to take (eg: sign up to mailing list, enquire, leave a comment)

How Often Should your Business Blog?

Your new company blog should be updated with new content around once a week if possible with high quality, in-depth articles.

The most effective way to manage this is to create a blogging calendar and schedule your content to be released at regular intervals.

  • Pick who is going to blog, and what topics.
  • Build up a database of blog posts before you go live – a month or two of blog posts would be a good start.
  • Mix up the type of blog posts, use video, infographics, podcasts and other media to keep the content interesting to your readers.

Where Should your Blog Sit?

As a general rule, your blog should reside on your company’s domain name as a subfolder, and NOT as a separate blog website or subdomain.

It should look like this:

companyname.com.au/blog

Get Started Now!

A business blog can be an extremely effective way to attract new customers and engage existing ones.

With some forward planning and a little bit of research, your business can create a successful blog and content marketing strategy at the same time.

Bonus: If you’re stuck for topics to blog about, check out part 2 of our epic 7 step system to outsourcing your blog content.

Andrew Webber

Andrew Webber is the Company Director of The Marketing Department. He's also an avid basketballer with a passion for SEO and all forms of digital marketing!