With over 200 million active websites worldwide, yours needs to stand out from the crowd if you want it to help your business grow. Having a blog on your website is a brilliant way of doing this. Having regular, fresh, engaging, and informative blog posts not only helps you to communicate with your customers. They are also vital to get your website picked up by search engines and shown to the people you want to do business with.

A blog can help your business to grow in lots of ways. It’s a great way of increasing your traffic. And more traffic means more people looking at your business, bringing more sales potential. According to a survey carried out by Hubspot, company blogs were described by 29% of marketing leaders as their “most important channels” for hitting goals.

Increases your search engine ranking

Search engines love fresh content. Each new post triggers a visit from the search engine spiders who index your site. They will see your site’s been updated and move it a little higher up the rankings. The higher up you are in the rankings for your area of business, the easier it is for potential customers to find you.

Having regular blog posts increases the number of pages on your website. That helps search engines see you’re website is active and looking for business.

Shows Google your EEAT

Google uses quality criteria to decide how far up in search results your website appears. To assess your site, it looks at how it showcases your experience, expertise, authority in your field and trustworthiness. Blog posts are the perfect place to do this. You can share your expertise and experience with client testimonials used as part of a case study post, or do a deep-dive into a particular aspect of your business to show that you know your stuff.

Interview yourself to share your business journey so far and why you do what you do. You could also use the questions as an interview series and get clients and people you admire to contribute.

Blog posts are also a great place to do a deep dive into one of your products or services and show the problems it solves and why it’s better than any other on the market.

Getting to know you

You can use your blog to let your customers learn more about you. Share with them your journey to getting to where you are. What makes you tick? Why did you set up your business? What do you do? How can your product or service help them?

Knowing more about you, helps readers and customers build a relationship with you. To be willing to buy from or work with you, they need to know they can trust you. That you’ll do what you say you will. Blog posts about you are therefore an excellent way to build the know, like and trust factor with your clients.

Updates

A blog is a great way to share regular updates about your products or services. You can offer discounts or special offer codes to readers, giving them an incentive to keep coming back. It’s also a good way of sharing details about a product or how something works.

You can also use your blog to share tips and advice about the things your customers will be interested in learning about.

For example, if you’re a yoga teacher, a blog about how to fit a 10-minute practice into your day is likely to be of interest. It’s helping readers solve a common problem that may be putting them off trying your paid services. Showing them that yoga can be done in small chunks of time may be something they didn’t think could be done.

Make it regular

For a blog to work well for your business, it needs to have regular, engaging, well-written content. Decide on the frequency of your posts, and make sure you stick to it. Posting once a month is better than saying it will be weekly and then getting overwhelmed and not writing at all.

To have a big impact, it needs to be error-free. That’s really important. You can have the best product or service in the world. But if a blog telling the world about it is littered with errors, you’ll lose customers. Not everyone is great with grammar and punctuation. If that’s you, there are lots of online tools you can use to help with that.

How I can help

I’ve got a range of services that will help you make sure your website content is fresh, engaging and attracting the right people to you business so that your leads and sales increase.

If writing isn’t for you or you don’t have the time to devote to your business blog, I can help. My blog packages give you weekly, fortnightly or monthly optimised blog posts giving you time back to do something else. Or my Content Power Hours can be used to plan content, create an interview series, or update and re-publish older posts to get new eyes on them and keep your website fresh.