I was recently speaking at a sales and marketing summit and was asked why you should blog. My first response was, “Why not?” I received all the usual reasons – no time, too difficult, don’t know what to write about, and my favorite, “will it help my business?” The answer is YES! I believe everyone should have a blog – even if you are in the same industry! No two businesses are the same, even if they do the same service. What makes your business different? Why should I hire your company?
A blog gives you a public forum for you to tout your difference and actually explain them. You can “talk” about your competitive differences, your customers, YOUR COMPANY. And more importantly, a blog will actually help you drive more business. A study was done comparing over 1500 business – 795 had blogs. The results were overwhelming.
The companies that had blogs had 55% more visits to their website which translates to more prospects and opportunities for you. Those with blogs also had 97% more inbound links. This translates to more direct traffic and ranking higher in search engines like Google. Then the biggest difference was companies with blogs had 434% more indexed pages. This is the holy grail of search engine optimization. When Google indexes a page, it will then tie the key words to that web page.
For example, if you do a blog that talks about plumbing, pipes, and repairs. When Google indexes that page, it will tie the keywords used most on the site (plumbing, pipes, and repairs in this example) and will tie your website with those key words. Then someone that needs a plumber does a search on Google. Google will pull up the sites that have the keyword (plumber in this case) associated with their website the most.
There are many different tricks to help improve your search engine rankings. Many of them require coding or special programs. Blogging is an easy way to promote your business, increase your business, and improve search engine optimization. So again I ask, “Why not?”
