Everyone knows blogs are important. In fact a blog has become a standard fixture on most websites in recent years and everyone and their dog writes blog entries. The trouble is, things have changed and it is no longer a workable strategy to fill up a blog with mindless dirge in an attempt to target a few keywords—and expect it to boost your search engine rankings. No, you need to be smarter than that.
Reasons Why a Blog is the Way Forward
There are of course many reasons why a blog is still extremely useful from an SEO perspective, but if you are yet to be convinced, read the following and see if we can persuade you.
- Social – Social media is becoming increasingly important and if you neglect the social aspect of your SEO campaign, you do so at your peril. Adding social sharing buttons to blog content is a great way of encouraging readers to share the love and help promote your website.
- Great content – Content is King, and writing content for a blog should be no different. Use a blog to write interesting and informative content loosely related to your niche. So if you are a plumber, write How To articles about everyday DIY jobs or What to Do When a Pipe Bursts type of thing. This will build up your website, target keywords and help drive traffic to your website.
- Link building – If your website is small, there is a limit to how many internal links you can build. A blog also increases the opportunity for building some link love via social sharing and other means.
- Encourage engagement – As long as you write entertaining, engaging content, before long people will start to leave comments. Obviously you need to update the blog regularly, but a blog is a really useful way of giving readers a place to make their voices heard.
Reasons Why You Don’t Need a Blog
I would be lying if I said every website could benefit from a blog. In truth there are always exceptions to the rule and in some cases, a blog is merely the icing on the cake. So why might a blog be superfluous?
- Heavyweight website – If your website is already so massively successful that you are at #1 in the SERPS, congratulations, you probably don’t need to bother including a blog on your site.
- Existing evergreen content – Websites with masses of useful articles and a wide range of different content probably won’t benefit much from adding a blog.
- Wildly popular – Are you the most Tweeted about brand ever? Does your Facebook page have billions of fans? If so, a blog won’t make much difference to your popularity—you already rock the Kasbah.
As you can see, there are pros and cons to creating a blog, but although a small minority of businesses and brands really don’t need to worry too much about blogging, for most small businesses, a blog can be a useful asset. So start blogging today and build your brand.