Blogging: Yes, It Really Is Important

Unlike our office, most people aren’t plugged in to their computers all day long. That used to make keeping up with your business’s social media pretty tough, but the proliferation of smart phones and social apps has alleviated most of those problems. One area that hasn’t been made any easier though, is blogging. Writing a simple text message can be hard enough with just your thumbs; a whole article almost certainly requires a desktop. Yes, it may be more work, but blogging is a very useful tool for some companies, helping them to increase their page-rankings on search engines and in-turn, increase business.

We’re just as guilty as anyone when it comes to putting our own needs on the back-burner when there’s work to be done, but with the new year we’ll be taking a more complete approach to blogging: brainstorming ideas related to our services, creating a schedule for posting, and designating time in our busy days to write – putting our own blog on par with any other project we do for our clients. Yes, it can be that important.

fresh, new content encourages traffic

Let’s say your local grocer has a website. Chances are, without a blog, the business doesn’t lend itself to much new and exciting content. With the exception of checking for a phone number or store hours, this site would not receive very much repeat traffic, if any. Now, if that same grocer developed a blog to which they posted original articles about specials, featured brands, and recipes, there’s a good chance people would come back more often to check out what was new. The same goes for search engines.

Search engines “crawl” websites, which more or less means they read through your site, click on all your links, looks at your pictures, and even read your code. Based on what the crawl uncovers, a search engine can determine what your site is about. This information is then indexed, which is how search engines are able to return relevant links whenever you search for a term.

Because it was filled with static content and almost never updated, your grocer’s old site would have been crawled very rarely, meaning any updates that were made would take a long time to have any effect on search results. The same is true with people: If you visit the site and discover that the last blog post was from 5 months ago, you’re less likely to return for more anytime soon (if at all). You assume there simply isn’t more. If you don’t pay attention to your site and add content, you risk no one else paying attention to it either.

fresh, new content encourages links

New content posted to your blog can be a magnet for quality inbound links, which are like gold in the world of SEO and are an underlying force with our content marketing services. Whether it’s through social media outlets or other blogs, new content is much more likely to be shared than a static page that hasn’t changed in months or years. The more links out there to your blog/site, the more likely you are to increase your site’s traffic beyond just return visitors, and as we discussed, traffic is great for search engine optimization.

It’s important to understand, however, that blogging (much like social media) might not be for appropriate for everyone. While new content is important, in some fields it can be hard to come by. Posting just for the sake of posting will end up being a waste of time and resources; the content you add should be engaging, informative and entertaining, or all of the above. If you can continually build on the content your site has -relevant to your market niche, of course- an audience will grow. Consistently, the sites that rank at the top of Page 1 of Google searches are authoritative industry leaders; people come to them looking for information and guidance. If you want to rank well and cement your spot there, what’s really key is making sure the content you post is relevant to what you do and is of interest to your audience, making you an information resource in your industry.

Luckily, that tech-savvy grocer of yours got the memo and now has a regularly updated blog which gets visited and crawled more often, and his quality content gets shared not only by patrons, but by people around the country as well!