SEO, Lead Capture, and Thought Leadership. Is Your Website Working Hard For You?
With the right tools in place, your website can be a workhorse and bring more ROI than you may have originally considered.
One of the hardest working tools on your website is a blog. You may not believe that what began as a virtual corkboard has become a powerful platform for growing your business. “On average, companies [that] blog produce 67% more leads per month.”
Benefits of a blog
Today’s blogs are so much more than the simple corkboard. Organizations of all size are realizing the benefits of add a blog to their marketing mix. The best blogs add value to your website. Want to know how?
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the most important (and measurable) benefit of hosting a blog. Your website has great usability for your customers, and provides information to help educate and convert visitors to customers. But is that enough to move you to a Page 1 Search Engine Results Page (SERP)? Probably not.
What people are searching for, and the way they search for it, is always changing. It isn’t practical to keep re-writing your web pages to capture those secondary keywords. A blog allows you to introduce them to your domain in a timely and unobtrusive way.
Your website reach is greatly expanded with the addition of specific search terms and relevant content for the current environment. Search engine algorithms favor fresh content. You can serve that to them with ongoing blog posts on your website.
Audience Engagement
If your organization is active on social media, you understand the value of engagement with your followers. Likes, clicks, and views are nice metrics to look at and provide quantitative data. However, on social platforms, audiences are engaging with the platform rather than with your brand directly.
By allowing comments, reactions, and discussions on your blog posts, you’re able to have – and measure — those conversations. What you have, now, is an audience that is engaged directly with your brand. This high level of audience engagement will benefit your SEO tremendously, and provide you with qualitative data.
Lead Capture & List Building
Building a blog into your website creates a whole new dimension for capturing leads and email subscribers. If you’re executing well on your blog, many new organic visitors will arrive at your site via one of your blog posts. Quality content that is relevant to your organization and industry will encourage people to engage with forms attached to your blog. In this way, you blog becomes somewhat of a landing page library that is optimized to attract and capture potential customers.
Demonstrating Authority
Well-written blog posts convey authority in a given area, which increases trust and boosts brand association among your site visitors. A blog is the ideal place to offer your unique insights and experience to the world. Blog posts that truly speak to and educate your audience will help to close the customer acquisition loop.
Knowledgeable, well-written blog posts can position your organization as an industry thought leader. Not only will that lead to off-line opportunities to speak about your brand, but it likely will lead to invitations from other blogs to author guest posts or to share your links. All of which can increase your SEO.
Ways To Use A Blog
Blogs are a flexible, powerful tool that integrate easily with most major CMS platforms. As you begin thinking about how you’ll integrate a blog into your website, remember, you don’t necessarily need to use the heading of “blog.” Here are a few common titles you might consider for your blog:
- Company News and Announcements
- Press Releases
- Cultural/Industry Insights
- Promotions
- Case Studies and Use Cases
- Product Tutorials
- Media Archive
- White Papers
- Brand or Customer Stories
Many popular sites have had great success in branding their blog as a standalone industry resource that subtly funnels readers to their own products and services. This is your opportunity to get creative, supplement your core content, expand your message, establish thought leadership, and build SEO.
