How Blogging Works to Grow Your Business

Whether you're new to SEO Content or have been doing things like this for years, you may wonder how blogging works to grow your business. Does blogging do that much for you? What's the point of it anyway? Is it an important business strategy?

Well, honestly, blogging can help because it keeps you focused on your writing and your subject. It also enables you to show your readers that you're an expert in a given subject area.

If you're providing information that they find helpful (better yet, useful) they're likely to keep coming back to read more. And really, isn't that the goal of most websites? Finally, it can benefit your search engine rankings but more on that later.

My primary goal here is to help people better understand what SEO Content is all about. To me, it's so much more than a trendy buzzword. It's really about telling a great story, one that's interesting to the audience, and one that provides the information they need or want. If I do it right, they'll return again and again to see what's new. If I only focus on myself and my objective, then it's not going to work out as well. So I have to stay focused on what matters to you, my readers.

Always Blog for your Customers

If you want to avoid the pitfalls of some of those abandoned blogs, you want to make sure you stay focused on your customer. What do they need to know, what are they interested in, and what questions do they have? When you blog with your customer in mind you can have great success.

Blogging can be a powerful marketing tool. It should be part of your SEO Content mix, but you want to be sure you think about your audience. Sure you want to have some promotional information, but you also want to have things that are helpful or lifestyle articles, based on your specific blog's target audience. A pretty good rule of thumb is to have a 70/30 mix between promotional and lifestyle content.

Your customers are interested in your products or services or they wouldn't be your customers and reading your blog but when the conversation is me, me, me, me it gets boring for them. Right? 

Blogging can boost your SEO and Keyword Rankings

So back to the question at hand, why blog? As I said, blogging is a great marketing tool when done right. It allows you to connect with your audience. It lets you build your authority on a given subject, and it can help your site's overall SEO as well if you've got your blog optimized. You can increase your site's authority in Google's eyes because people are coming to you to read information. The more your readers engage with you (come back, read more, stay longer, comment on social media, etc.) the better Google believes you're doing and hopefully, the better they start ranking you for relevant keywords. It's all related. While a single excellent blog post won't get you ranking position #1 for some super competitive term, a series of excellent blog posts, that your audience engages with can help.

The final reason why blogging is beneficial for your SEO is that it helps build authority. If you have information that people might want to link to and share with their audience, that's another signal that Google looks at when choosing keyword rank. If other sites link to you, Google sees that almost as their endorsement of your information.

Blogging Can Drive Leads

Lastly, blogging can be a great lead generation tool for your business too. According to a survey from Hubspot, 2015 B2C Companies that post 11+ times per month get 4X the leads from their blog that companies that post 4-5 times per month do. I don't know about you, but I'd love that type of lift in leads. It seems worth the effort to me but then again, I'm a writer and love this stuff, and not everyone feels the same way I do.

Blogging can Drive Sales

When you write blog posts that are helpful and provide useful information for your customers you can ultimately drive sales too, if you are strategic in your approach. When you're blogging, if you're writing a post where you could link to a product or service, it's OK to do that. I've had clients who required a product link in all posts. One was a home decor company with hundreds of locations nationwide and a very large e-commerce presence. When we created blog posts for that client we focused on home decor trends and always featured products in the posts. It's OK to feature products in your posts, as long as it's not ALL products all the time. Make sure there's still great value for your reader. 

You want to use SEO and Content together, my friend. Create content your customer is interested in, choose keywords you can rank for, and link to your products or services in your posts to grow your business with a blog.