Regularly producing blog articles on your website allows you to share important and up-to-date information pertaining to your business, your industry, or your visitors’ interests. The benefits of blogging are numerous and include:
- Demonstrated Expertise
- Strengthened Brand Voice
- SEO Value
- Effective Communication
- Increased Web Traffic
- More Profit
What Is a Blog?
Your website’s blog is the place where you publish articles that are useful to your audience. Other pages of your site can (and should) link to your blog and encourage site visitors to explore your articles. The goal is for users to learn something new, gain more insight into your capabilities, and develop an appreciation for your expertise and authoritativeness in your field or industry.
The articles featured on your blog can (and should) cover a range of topics or categories that pertain to your business and should be published consistently on whatever schedule you’d like. Creating and sticking to a blog schedule is important, especially if you have dedicated blog followers or other marketing channels that rely on your blog articles for content. For instance, many companies that regularly update their blogs on a consistent schedule will include article-related posts in their social media or email marketing strategies.
Depending on your blogging goals and the information you have to share, you can upload your articles:
- Daily
- Weekly
- Biweekly
- Monthly
- Bimonthly
- Quarterly
- Semiannually*
- Annually*
*Although it’s possible to upload a new article every six to twelve months, the most SEO-optimized blogs are updated far more frequently than once or twice a year.
Why Should My Business Website Include a Blog?
The vast majority of companies looking to grow and prosper in today’s business landscape must have, at minimum, a clean, ADA-compliant, SEO-focused website. It’s crucial to communicate effectively with audiences, customers, employees, future hires, and anyone else who may interact with your business. Your website is the primary marketing channel that is comprehensive enough to communicate your various messages to all intended audiences.
In addition to the pages already featured on your website, a blog allows you to capture the attention of search engine algorithms, attract interested users, drive traffic to your site, and convert site visitors into paying customers.
The most successful SEO strategies include regularly producing relevant, accurate, and expert-based content for audiences to interact with. Audiences want to know they are turning to the experts when they click on an article link. A well-managed and well-maintained blog can easily demonstrate your experience, expertise, and authority to users, ultimately gaining their trust (and likely their business!).
Benefits of Blogging
From promoting your company to targeting audiences and enhancing your website’s SEO, blogging is a simple, practical, and efficient way to achieve the goals you have for your website and your business. Here are just a few of the many benefits of having a blog:
A Blog Demonstrates Your Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)
In the world of AI-generated summaries and quick, vague, or questionable content online, users want to gather information from reliable sources they know they can trust. By uploading articles to your blog that contain relevant, accurate, expert-backed content, you can establish yourself as an authority that users and site visitors can depend on.
It’s invaluable for visitors to see that you have E-E-A-T, or experience with the topics you cover, expertise in the information you are providing, and authoritativeness within your field or industry. Achieving all three via your content can cultivate trustworthiness among your audiences.
In the world of SEO, E-E-A-T is a driving force behind better rankings on search engines like Google. Algorithms want to find and present reliable, credible content. The more your content demonstrates your company’s E-E-A-T, the better your site will perform in relevant searches.
A Blog Adds Significant SEO Value
We’ve already mentioned the SEO value of your E-E-A-T-based content. However, there are other rank-improving SEO strategies your blog articles can also satisfy, including keyword targeting and backlinking.
Keyword Targeting
Google and other search engines are continuously revising the way they depend on keywords in content. It used to be that content filled with the right keywords would be sent to the top of page one in a relevant search. For example, someone searching “HVAC repair service” would likely come across sites and articles stuffed with keywords like “HVAC repair,” “HVAC service,” “AC repair,” and so on. Algorithms would scan the content and use the keywords they came across as search signals when indexing a page.
But now, the relationship between algorithms and keywords in content is not so exact anymore. Things are intent-based these days, meaning that algorithms are interpreting the intent behind the content and the keywords used, not so much the keywords themselves. Algorithms and users alike benefit from content crafted with more natural language and more natural keyword usage. Crafting articles using an effective keyword strategy and a clear understanding of the new relationship between search engines and keywords can greatly improve your site’s SEO value.
Backlinking
Backlinks, sometimes called referral links, are links to your website that are found on other websites. For example, let’s say you own a coffee house in a touristy location and maintain an active website. If a travel site like Tripadvisor listed your shop in its “10 Ten Best Cafés in ___” post, the listing would include a link back to your website, or a backlink.
Search engines love to see other sites linking back to yours. Backlinks show the algorithms that your content is valuable enough to link to from other websites. It boosts the fact that you are an authority in your field, encourages referral traffic, increases brand awareness, and so many other benefits that work to improve your performance on search engines.
Blog articles are an excellent way to encourage organic backlinking* to your site. If the content in your articles is valuable to other site owners or contributors, they could include links to your article(s) in their articles or directly on their web pages, a huge value to your SEO.
*Algorithms pay attention to how you get your backlinks, as well as the quality of sources linking back to your site. Search engines place a lot of value on natural backlinking and can tell, for the most part, when a backlink has been purchased or “earned” in an inorganic way. They also evaluate the source linking back to the website. If the referring site is a low-quality site or one that has no determinable reason to link back to yours, the algorithm may deem your site suspicious, which could negatively impact your rankings.
A Blog Allows for Effective Communication
Blogging opens the door for you to share information, announcements, ideas, and opinions with the people who visit your site and those who conduct relevant searches on Google, Bing, and other search engines. Blogs can be as short or as long as you need them to be to get your point across and address the topic(s) at hand. Your blog articles allow for message and topic flexibility, meaning you can cover as much or as little as you want (although it’s important to note that the articles algorithms tend to push are the ones that are fleshed out with a lot of rich, juicy content).
Common blog article types include:
- Deep dives into a single topic
- How-tos explaining a process, product feature, DIY project, etc.
- Beginner, intermediate, and expert guides
- Surface-level informational articles
And many others. Blogging provides the perfect space and flexibility to communicate your message to your audience however you need or want.
A Blog Helps Increase Web Traffic and Gain More Business
As we’ve mentioned, one of the main goals of having a blog and producing content on a regular basis is to boost the number of people clicking through to your website.
If you have many articles featured on your blog that attract the attention of search engine algorithms and, in turn, users, you will see the number of website visitors rise. The more visitors to your site, the more likely you are to convert visitors into leads and customers.
How Does M&R Serve Clients With Blog Article Development?
As a part of our many marketing services, M&R offers valuable blog article development services to any client interested in boosting their SEO efforts. Whether you have a website through us or not, we can craft well-researched, well-written blog articles on your behalf, post them according to your schedule, and track their performance regularly. With over 16 years of blogging for our clients, we understand the strategies to pursue and the pivots to make to improve your SEO further and serve your audience.
M&R’s Blog Article Development Process
Step One – Discovery
Before we begin our research or strategy planning, we must understand your business, your services, and the topics that are most important to your audience. We will conduct a thorough discovery with you that will reveal the who, what, when, and why of your blog:
- Who – the audience(s) we will be speaking to and the company we will be writing for.
- What – the topics we will be covering, as well as the facts about what they are and how they pertain to your audience.
- When – the posting schedule, whether you want a blog posted once a month, twice a month, once a week, or whatever schedule you care to maintain.
- Why – the goals you have for your blog, whether it’s to increase brand awareness, inform readers of particular products or services, deliver specific announcements, etc.
Step 2 – Strategy
Your copywriter will perform detailed keyword research, company research, and industry research to create an effective first blog strategy. You can approve or adjust the strategy as you like.
Step 3 – Writing and Posting
Your copywriter will use the information gathered from discovery, as well as the approved blog strategy, to craft well-written, SEO-focused blog articles. Our standard service includes six months of blog article development and management, with one article posted per month.
At the end of your first six-month strategy, we will reach out and begin creating another well-researched, well-informed strategy.
Step 4 – Evaluation
If you opt for quarterly reporting services, we provide a blog report evaluating your blog’s performance and identifying ways to pivot or push momentum with your audience forward. You can’t always tell when your SEO efforts are working. Reporting is highly beneficial in showing us and you just how effective your blog articles are at attracting visitors to your site and boosting your likelihood of winning conversions.
Ready to Harness the Power of Words With Blog Article Development? Talk to the SEO Experts at M&R!
Since 2008, M&R has created blog strategies, written articles, and managed posting schedules for local and regional companies. From clients in the healthcare industry to those in the service industry, legal field, financial industry, and others, we have crafted helpful, accurate, and informative articles that speak to their audiences and drive traffic to their sites.
Call 478-621-4491 or contact one of our business development managers today to learn more about how our blog development services can work for you.
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