Today I wanted to cover a question I get from business owners all the time – Does my company/business need a blog? This guide is purely aimed at helping small, medium, and professional companies that want to explore the world of blogging for SEO value.
Large internet companies, such as Tecnisa, Google, IBM, and many others, use their blogs daily to create relationships with their users, but above all, to generate potential customers for their businesses. Internet personalities like Neil Patel have transformed their companies into sales powerhouses through blogging.
While greatly undervalued, a company blog is an amazing way to generate more sales through organic traffic to your site. If you have a business, whether micro, small, medium, or large, having a basic website where you can show your products or services is not enough. Sometimes, prospects are looking for a resourceful partner, and a company blog can help you achieve just that.
Why a Company Blog Works
Markets are conversations. In your market, there is an internal conversation related to your company (A) and a conversation that is established between those who buy your products and services (B). A membrane (X) separates A and B.
In an ideal market, A and B should be aligned and have equal opinions on critical issues in the mutual space. The most effective way to achieve this is by opening the X loopholes to facilitate effective communication between A and B. A blog is an exceptional tool for this
Why your Company Needs a Blog
Why not? CMS (Content Management systems) are easy to use nowadays. Tools like WordPress (my favorite), Blogger, Typepad, Joomla, and Drupal are free to use and offer tons of possibilities for customization.
A company blog gives you the opportunity to share knowledge and experience with your target audience. Through the solutions you give on your blog, you not only prove to your prospects that you are a professional in the field but also open up more opportunities for receiving referrals through the shareable content.
Organic traffic generation. Over time, the SEO content on your website starts to gain traction on search engines. Organic traffic is a great way to bring down your marketing costs since you don’t have to pay for digital ads. Your blog naturally attracts leads, and since they are already interested in your content, they are more than likely to convert.
Finally, a company blog allows members of your organization to build relationships with other bloggers. Bloggers are invaluable sources of information and can act as powerful influencers to push your product or service to market.
Read 15 Blogging Mistakes You Are Making on Your Company Website
Things to Consider When Starting a Company Blog
Now that we’ve seen why you should be in the blogging bandwagon, what next? What’s the strategy behind it all? Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Traffic is the number one reason for starting any blog. There are so many things you can do with your website’s traffic – you can market specific products/services to them, serve third-party ads for some extra income, build an email list, and even generate sales
SEO is one of the best ways to organically position your website on search engines. Search engines, more specifically Google, admit that the more good content you generate, the more indexed pages your website will have on Google.
Posting frequently
The number of times you post on your company blog has a somewhat direct correlation to the number of visits you get. The more you post, the more visibility you get for your company website. Again, websites that are updated frequently tend to be crawled more often by search engine bots.
Keywords
Keywords are a fundamental part of your overall SEO strategy. Purpose to optimize your blog’s content around a certain keyword niche. There are tons of techniques online (and on our blog) that you can use to learn how to leverage keywords for blog traffic growth.
Content Optimization
At the end of the day, nothing really matters if your content sucks. If your blog posts are full of grammatical errors and other similar silly mistakes, you will definitely miss out on loyal readership. Sure your keyword strategy might land you a few visitors, but over 90% of these visitors will bounce.
Define a closer relationship with customers and prospects
For example, if you allow visitors to post comments on your blog posts, the company can establish two-way communication with these users. This goes a long way in showing your readers that you are a real HUMAN company.
Become a Leader
Your blog is an asset that puts you as a thought leader. So, with your experience, with your corporate rotation, you can post on the blog, and with that, you can easily build trust between you and your readers (potential customers). Here’s how to nail it as a content leader:
Become a problem solver: Chances are you already know what most customers in your field struggle with. Perfect! With this mind, you can develop concise content around these topics and present practical solutions to such problems.
Build a leadership of ideas: Your company blog is a platform for your ideas, knowledge, and experiences. By sharing resourceful knowledge on your blog, you can easily stand out from your competitors. Good content shows that you are indeed better and more knowledgeable than your competition
Gain the trust of the people: Once your readers start becoming loyal to your company blog, it becomes relatively easy to sell your products or services to them because they already believe that you can be trusted.
Call to Actions
Call to actions can be anything from making a purchase to sharing your content on social media. A good place to start when deciding on which call to action to use is by determining what you are trying to achieve from your blog post.
If, for example, you are reviewing the best hair products on a blog post, and your company sells hair products, you can find a witty way to include your company in the review without sounding biased or too “salesy”.
