Small business owners may be scratching their heads, wondering why blogging and content marketing is so important for boosting sales and SEO page rankings. After all, what, exactly, do businesses have to share that they don’t already sell to their customers? Isn’t a website with a few pages enough?
A professional collection of regularly published articles is like fishing with a net instead of a few unbaited hooks — articles give the benefit of providing more information that will house a myriad of keywords and provide ample opportunity for searchers to be drawn in.
Personal Spaces vs. Expert Writers
A personal blog might be about ones family, hobbies or perspective and is very different from a corporate blog. A business’s blog is dedicated to their expertise and target audience. A sports company, for example, might post about new products as well as workouts and healthy recipes that will appeal to their target crowd. A restaurant might post blog articles about special events in the area, wine and meal pairings they recommend and perhaps a special highlight of their chef or ingredients used in one of their dishes.
The goal of a corporate blog is to show industry authority, provide viewers with valuable content and be found more readily by search engines. Many businesses pay freelance ghost writers or content websites to write articles for them and then give them the full rights to publish each article under their business’s name. Using outside writers saves business owners and managers from spending an extensive amount of time on writing, saves a business from having to hire a new position for writing and provides an excellent quality of writing.
With a corporate blog, sloppiness will reflect directly on the business and seem unprofessional. Expert writers and proofreading all articles before being publishing will ensure that the content you publish will benefit your brand and not hurt it.
A Variety of Content that Attracts
A target audience is the group of potential consumers who have the money to purchase, the power to purchase and the motivation to purchase. In order for your target audience to need or want your product, they must be exposed to your product. According to research compiled by Ignite and posted on Social Media Today on blogging statistics:
- 61% of consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post
- 90% of consumers find customer content useful
- 70% of consumers learn about a company through articles rather than ads
Businesses are quickly realizing the importance of blogging. According to data compiled by WebDAM for their infographic on marketing statistics:
- B2B companies that blog gain 67% more leads than those who don’t
- Small businesses with blogs generate 126% more leads than those that don’t
- Nearly 50% of businesses have blogging strategies
Thinking Like a Bot: Algorithms Designed for Users
When a user types a search into a search engine, bot programs crawl the web (in a matter of lightening-fast seconds!) and compile a list of search results based on what they believe to be most relevant to the searcher. Web search engines like Google pride themselves on offering great search results to the users – if their algorithms for finding pages were easily tricked by spam sites, then they would loose customers to another search engine.
In order to be an organically top ranked site, you will have to think like your customers do; articles will need to be published on subjects your target market cares about and will search for, you will have to be consistent in your publishing and you should include links within your articles (both outbound and within your own site) to keep your page from being a dead end.
Search engine bots will have much more to pull from your site when you have been publishing a steady stream of posts. According to Ignite:
- Websites with blogs have 434% more indexed pages
- 77% of internet users read blogs
- 82% of consumers appreciate reading relevant content from their brands
Alethea M is a corporate blogging guru and freelance writer for WriterAccess. She often uses interesting facts from her article research to impress friends at dinner parties. Her husband is her biggest fan — though this may be because her writing income allows her to share in bill-paying each month.
