The Nine Benefits of Blogging for Business
One of the most powerful ways to increase long-term sales for a local business is to write blog posts.
What are blog posts?
Blogs posts are website pages that educate your prospective and existing customers.
In this article we’re going to talk about the benefits of educational (blog) posts and how they can help your local business grow.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Increases Visitor Engagement
The first benefit is increasing visitor engagement.
What is visitor engagement?
It is the amount of time and number of pages your visitors look at while on your website.
The more time spent and pages visited, the more engaged visitors are, the more likely they are to turn into a lead or sale.
The easiest way to increase time on site is to provide educational content that answers your prospects’ questions. It builds trust.
Builds Brand Awareness and Trust
Trust is at the heart of every purchase ever. Providing free and helpful information as often as possible, builds awareness of your brand and in turn builds trust.
The more often you answer your prospects’ questions, the more well-known and trusted your company becomes.
Positions Your Business as an Authority
As your brand awareness and trust increases your business will become an authority in your industry.
As a trusted authority, it becomes easier to generate leads and close sales because their trust in your business is higher than your competition’s.
Increases Sales Page Traffic
Search engines, like Google, only want to show the most relevant website pages from trusted websites.
So they look at different things outside of that specific page to validate it.
One way to validate a page is to see how many pages of content that website has about that subject.
Here’s an example:
We wanted to get our monthly SEO sales page to rank on the first page of Google in the top ten.
Knowing that ranking for ‘seo’ keywords is very difficult, we researched our competition, wrote our content and built the page using on-page SEO tactics.
After a short while, it was ranking, but only on the third page.
Since very few people ever go to the second or third page, we knew we needed to improve that.
We starting writing educational pages that answered questions local business owners would have about SEO.
So how many educational articles did it take to get our SEO sales page to the first page Google?
Seven.
Once we wrote our seventh educational page, the SEO sales page climbed to the top half of the first page of Google search.
As we write more content, over time our ranking will continue to increase.
optimized sales page + educational pages + time = increased sales rankings.
Makes Selling Easier and Faster
Building trust through education, makes selling easier and faster.
Your transparency extends goodwill to your prospects long before you know they exist.
When done right, most of the typical sales questions should get answered on your website.
By the time educated prospects reach out to you, resistance is much lower.
You can also forward links to specific blog posts you think might answer questions your prospects have.
Grows More Traffic Naturally Over Time
As time goes on and you’ve built up a library of educational content, search engines will validate your website and trust your content faster and easier.
The older, original articles will rank for the harder, higher-traffic keywords.
Your newest pages will rank higher and faster for more competitive keywords.
Overall, it will become easier to rank new content and get more traffic.
Content for Social Media and Advertising
Are you struggling to come up with content to post on your social media pages?
One educational post can provide days and weeks of content.
Grab snippets from your articles and post on Social linking back to the article.
Same thing goes for running digital ads (PPC).
Test out different articles as ‘educational ads’ to get your brand in front of your prospects.
Build Your Own Platform
Running ads online is a good idea, but if you stop paying, the ads stop.
Posting content on social media is also a good idea, but if your page gets taken down for any reason, your content is lost.
All the content on your website is yours forever.
You own it, so you can re-purpose it where, when and how you want.
Increases the Value of Your Business
This is the biggest benefit of all and probably the least talked about.
Over time, your website will generate traffic and leads around the clock which will add to revenue and cash flow.
Increased cash flow increases the value of a business.
The more predictable your cash flow, the more valuable your business becomes.
Conclusion
While it’s important to build up multiple marketing channels, growing your website content may be the most important.
Want to get into the finer details? What is local SEO and how does it work?
Want to see SEO in action? How we ranked a local business on Search in nine days.
Want us to help? San Antonio SEO services.
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