The Importance of Blogging for Websites: You’ve recently launched your business, and with a tight budget and numerous responsibilities to handle, creating a blog may not seem like a priority. However, I would argue that you can’t afford to overlook it. In this article, I will outline the top three reasons why every website needs a blog, providing you with a strategic plan that will enhance your trustworthiness, expand your audience and establish a solid foundation for your business.

1. You need to earn the trust of your potential clients and your industry

It’s easy to slap some decently written content onto a website. Lots of people do this for their businesses expecting high results because they put some time into content that they think will wow others. If I had a pound for every self-published “author” who thought that penning a novel would instantly bring them, readers, I’d be rich. Writing content and slapping it onto a website does not necessarily bring about the yield you are hoping for. That content needs to be written correctly, meaning, it needs to be written for your ideal audience in a way that instantly shows you as a leader and influencer. If the only things on your website are a small “About” section, a landing page, and a place with the products/services you offer then you are cheating your potential clients out of the resources they need to make decisions as well as cheating yourself out of potential clients.

Your potential clients need to get to know who you are. They need to trust you. They need to see that you can bring them value. That needs to be the first impression you make on them. That same impression needs to be made consistently with the things you share on your website and social media sites.

“They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer” written by Marcus Sheridan goes into detail about the value of answering your client’s questions before they ask them. In this book, he shares how he transformed his almost bankrupt local pool installation company into a leading and thriving business in the pool industry by using his blog. He began to earn the trust of not only his potential clients but of other businesses. This trust and his willingness to answer tough questions on their company website allowed them to transform their business. A stronger case for using blogs has never been made than within this book. A blog, and sharing valuable information for your potential clients on your website can change the trajectory of your business.

2. Your blog can help engage your audience on social media

As a small business owner, your time is valuable. Working smarter becomes a way of life. Regardless of what social media platforms you favour, creating branded content for it takes time. If you have a blog, it is easy to pull content from the work you have already to generate several social media posts. A well-written blog post can give you 7-10 great pieces of social media content to post. With the proper links, this can increase the traffic to your site while simultaneously building your trustworthy status with your ideal clients. One piece of content published weekly can generate several great posts to continue sharing valuable information with your audience.

Strong social media posts can also increase the engagement you have with your audience, further firming up their trust and your likability with your ideal clients.

3. A blog increases your SEO performance for your website

It’s likely that you have heard SEO mentioned a few times. Maybe you’re well versed in SEO, and maybe you are still unsure what SEO is. For those still unsure, SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is “the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services”.  Search Engine Land goes into the details of SEO in depth in this article which you can read here. SEO is absolutely vital if your website is to rank decently on any search engine: Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc… SEO are words that we search in order to find the information we seek. For instance, “How to use WordPress” or “Coping with overwhelm” are considered search terms. Search engines use these search terms in their database. They scroll through all of the available websites to see which websites directly answer those questions and then the website gains its rank or visibility based on how well the words match up.

Let’s take Marcus Sheridan’s pool company from above. On his site he would write a blog post with the title, “Can my backyard fit a pool?” He would use that exact title knowing that the average person would ask that exact question in a Google search. He would create a blog post to answer that question. Google would then rank his website pretty high because of how specifically he asked and answered the question that someone would search for.

As a business owner, you should create your blog posts by thinking about what questions your ideal clients would have. Then use those exact questions in the title of your blog posts. This will automatically increase your website visibility in search engine results.

Additionally, having a blog on your website ensures that your website appears well-maintained. Without getting too technical, search engines like Google scroll through the databases of websites to see if the website is well maintained or if it appears as though it hasn’t been taken care of in a while. Those that have not been taken care of will get pushed down to the bottom of any search engine results while those that are well-updated and maintained will rank higher. The higher your rank, the greater the likelihood that you will be seen more often.

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