Why You Should Blog Your Way to Better Business

Blogging is perhaps the No. 1 way to boost your visibility on search engines. It will also drive organic traffic to your site (read: traffic you didn’t pay for with advertising).

That’s right, it helps drive traffic to your site for free. Is anything better than free?

Here are some other great reasons blogging helps your business:

1. One of Google’s First Ranking Factors Is Content

Google loves pages with good content – it’s one of the search engine’s major ranking factors. And, whatever Google loves gets closer and closer to a first-page ranking, the holy grail of SEO.

Of course, good content has defining features. When you have a blog, you can strive to hit all of them in every post. This will boost your individual page ranking and your site ranking.

Here’s what your content should strive to do to rank:

• Be relevant. The topic you write about should fit into your industry, but also be relevant to what your customers need. Relevance, of course, also means you should be using keywords and key phrases in your content. It’s no longer about keyword density, though. Rather, it’s about placement in the right areas (H1s and H2s, for instance) and using them naturally throughout your blog posts.
• Hit the right length. The word count of the blogs you post has an effect on the amount of traffic you get. Hit the sweet spot regarding length, and you could see a lot more page visits, leads, and conversions. According to HubSpot, it’s best to go longer. In a study they did of their most successful posts, the ones that got the highest engagement were between 2,250 and 2,500 words:
• Be comprehensive. Along with length, your posts should go in-depth on relevant topics. Don’t skim the surface – explore the nooks, crannies, and facets of your subject, and come out with golden pieces of wisdom for your readers.

Here’s a piece of an infographic from Social Media Today that simplifies how beneficial blogging is for driving traffic:

2. Blogging Is a Great Conversion Tool

Once you optimize your posts to drive in traffic, your blog can also convert those visitors into solid leads. You can do it by adding a call-to-action at the end of every blog post.

If your blog intrigues your audience and they enjoy reading it, your CTAs can become tempting, too. Wherever your call-to-action takes them – to a landing page where they enter their e-mails for an offer, or to one of your sales pages where they’re prompted to do business with you – if they follow through, you’ve captured a lead through a blog.

The best part: If you’re blogging regularly, you’ll have tons of different lead-generating tools out there that search engines are indexing and people are finding.

This leads into our next point…

3. Blogging Gets You Steady, Long-Term Growth

Creating a blog and keeping it updated generates content. Each post is an optimized tool that helps search engines find you, rank you and present your link to users in the SERPs.

As you generate more blogs, you drop more and more of these seeds into the soil of the Internet. Your posts take root as search engines note how you’ve optimized each blog. They also analyze how much content you put out, how fresh your site is, and the quality of the sites that are linking back to you.

The more seeds you have out there, the better your content crop will fare. A time passes, the first seeds you planted will grow from sprouts to saplings to full-grown trees. They’ll have wide, spreading branches that will fan out all over the Internet.

Here’s a great blogging stat that backs that up: Business websites with 401-1,000 pages on their sites regularly get six times more leads than business websites with only 51-100 pages.

More blogs, more pages. More pages, more leads. More leads, more conversions. You get the idea.

It takes time and patience, but it works. If you want a content forest that can get you noticed, start a blog.

Article by Jack Joseph from Sofnet Solutions Ltd