Starting a blog may seem daunting since it doesn’t always have immediate results. Play the long game instead: blogs help you express thought leadership within your industry, improve SEO, and humanize your business, giving your target segment a more personal glimpse into your brand beyond the businesslike copy on your website. Blogs are a tool to keep your audience up-to-date, share content, and build brand awareness. Around 77% of Internet users read blog posts regularly, and 71% of B2B buyers read blogs at some point during the buyer journey. 

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Blogs Show Off Your Expertise

When it comes to your business, product, and/or service, you are the most knowledgeable. Blogging lets you show you’re an expert in your industry. It strengthens your reputation, which can lead to connecting with journalists, other industry bloggers and influencers in your field that come to you for your expertise. Developing a well-written blog – whether you’re writing it or someone is ghost-writing it for you based on your input – gives you an outlet to speak about industry trends, weigh in on current events (but be careful), or even provide guidance on topics that are adjacent to the product or service you provide. 

For example, if you operate a skydiving business, you can write blog posts on other adventurous pastimes. Even if you don’t invest in professional market research to confirm your hypothesis, you can reasonably assume that skydivers would be interested to learn more about other extreme sports. In fact, you can use SEO keywords to pull in internet searchers who are looking for similar services to what you offer, give them valuable information in your blog, then introduce them to what you’re actually selling.  

Blogs Boost SEO

Another way your blog boosts SEO is by driving more web traffic to your site. Backlinks, also referred to as inbound external links, are the links you have pointing to your site’s pages from anchor text placed within the content of a referring (external) domain.  These, along with other actions, like sharing blog posts on your social media platforms, increase the reach of your content and the opportunity for it to be shared by others. The more clicks you receive, the higher your blog and website moves on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when searches related to your content are made. In addition to making your blog easier to find, this increase in placement validates your business and blog as trustworthy and credible. 

Your blog posts should include internal links to product pages, landing pages, and other parts of your website, coaxing readers to stick around a while and continue their way down the marketing funnel. Internal links (linking from one page of your site to another) can improve SERP rankings for pages on your site by  painting a clearer picture of your site’s content for Google to map and understand, and support keyword building for pages when used in the referring anchor text.

Blogs are a gold mine of content that you can repurpose for social media, email campaigns, and more.

Blogs Humanize your Brand

Blogs are a place for you to be yourself and connect with your customers outside of the corporate feel of a website. You can interview an expert, share a case study, or give a behind-the-scenes look into additions or changes within the business. These tactics engage with your audience and humanize your brand. It’s important to show that your company is much more than just selling products; you also care about things that are important to your customers and want to build a meaningful relationship with them. A blog creates a community of like-minded audience members as they interact with each other and the business via comments, make suggestions, and feel comfortable to reach out for further information.

There may be some hesitation on whether your business needs a blog. It takes time to grow, needs consistently interesting and high-quality content to engage with your audience, and takes work to maintain. Despite these worries, establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry, turbocharging your SEO, and building authentic relationships makes blogging a strong contender for content marketing.

Ready To Start Your Blog?

A well developed blog with engaging and consistent content can increase your reach, SEO and make you a leader in your industry. If you’re ready to employ blogging to help meet your marketing initiatives, Mustard & Moxie is here to support you. Our copywriting team can manage building the blog, content, execution and tracking results to connect with your customers in an impactful way. Contact us here.

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