With social signals and content at the forefront of SEO, an onsite blog can really help you push forward in these areas. My name’s John Waghorn, and today I’m going to be looking at the benefits of an onsite blog or a website blog.
So what are they? Well, first of all it allows you to establish a voice within your industry. When you start out, you might be thinking, What can I post? Or you might be posting one blog post a day or even more frequently, say 8 to 10 posts per week. But as you build and populate your blog, you’ll start to find that you build your community as well. Over time your community will come to your blog as a useful and authoritative resource. So this is the first thing it allows you to do. It allows you to establish a voice within your industry and really make an impact.
Second of all it allows you to have a regular stream of fresh content being uploaded on a daily basis or however often you post. This is something that Google favours. They like to see sites which are using regularly updated content. So by doing this you’ll be working with Google, not against them, not trying to game the system in any way. When Google crawl your website and they crawl your blog, they’ll see that there’s a regularly updated stream of fresh content being added, which will only benefit you in the search engine results pages.
It’s also ideal for ranking for individual blog posts. So let’s say you’ve done some keyword analysis, some keyword research and you found that for your industry the terms that you want to be ranking for in the search engines you’re doing really well in and others you’re not doing so well in. Well, what you can do is you can target those keywords that you’re not doing so well in and then write a blog post around that subject, maybe incorporating a few of the keywords within the blog post as well, and then what will happen is you might start to rank for that individual blog post. So, in effect, you’ve got your website rankings here, and you’ve got a blog post down here for some of the keywords that you’re not ranking so well for. You can start to build that up as well in the search engine results pages and start to rank for that individual blog post, again, giving you more traffic through to your website.
It also gives you links back to your site. So obviously, the nature of content, having regular fresh content, like we said earlier, on your blog serves its own purpose. Then more people pick it up and feature it on their own blog. You’re going to get links back from that, which is exactly what you want when it comes to generating off page links pointing towards your website. More traffic. So say, for example, you’ve written one blog post and ten other blog posts decide to reference this within their blog posts, you’re going to get traffic back from that and the chance of people clicking through from that initial blog post that comes through to your blog and then your website, which could help with conversions as well. So all good for that point.
Build relationships. Obviously, as is the nature of business, you want to build relationships anyway. But it helps your blog to create customer relationships, business relationships, client relationships. Anything along those lines it just helps you to build up a profile and establish a connection between the company and the people who are writing for the blog and people outside of the company as well, external contact.
Content for social, point number six. Now, a lot of companies come to us and they say they want to start getting more active on social media, but they’re not really sure what to post. Well, by having a blog, you’re going to have regular content there ready to post. So once it goes live, let’s say it goes live on the Monday, you might leave it to sort of gain its own traction initially or a couple of hours later or even the following day, on the Tuesday you might decide to start promoting it via social media outlets. Google+, Twitter, and Facebook are prime examples. So, like I say, it gives you a regular stream of content that you can use for the purpose of sharing on social media, again allowing you to push that out to your followers and connections there.
It also gives your company personality, which is a very important point here, point number seven. So you might be perceived as a corporate company, a very professional image with your design and your branding, which is excellent. But by having a blog post where let’s say ten of your members of staff or a whole department or even the whole team contribute to your blog on a regular basis, you’re going to start to generate a bit more company personality. I mean this is great for just really building the connections between you and the people that are outside the office. You can share news stories, events, day-to-day activities, and really start to develop your own individual profile besides the perceived corporate company image that you may or may not have. So it’s excellent for that.
Showcasing products. Obviously, when you release a new service or a new product, you’re going to want to generate some exposure. So your blog post is a quick way of doing this. You can just write something and have a review online and quickly promote it that way. So it’s an easy way of knowing that you’re going to get a bit of exposure if, say, you have a new service, a new product, or anything else on those lines that you can just quickly write a 400 or 500 word piece around and place it on your onsite blog. So it’s perfect for showcasing products.
Managing your reputation is the last one, point number nine. What this means is if you’ve received any negative PR, so if someone has decided to make a complaint or they’re not very happy and they’ve voiced their opinions on social media, your blog is a platform where you can respond to this positively. So you might release a statement from the company director, or you might just simply apologise by using your blog, and it allows you to take away some of that negative attention and negative pressure. So it allows you to manage your reputation, which is point number nine. So in certain situations this might become very handy and very useful for you if you’ve received a complaint.
So that’s nine benefits of a website blog. Thanks for watching. For more information visit Koozai.com, or please visit any of the social profiles after this video.
Thanks for your video –
I’ve built loads of blogs, maybe 80 over the last 5 years –
Only whilst watching your video did it dawn on me that my main business, which hires out event furniture, never had a blog.
Yes, its got a website but no blog.
Guess where I’m going now?
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