Blogging is something that is helping businesses, creators and ordinary people expand their networks, increase business opportunities, and even generate revenue! But why? It's rather simple actually, let's dive in!
The What
Let's start with this question: What is a blog?
A blog is an online publication that is focused on/relates to a specific topic, and typically consists of articles, links and commentary by one (or more) authors.
Often blogs include photos, infographics or short video clips based on the topic.
Blogs are essential pieces of content, which can allow the author to place other bits of their own content into it for further understanding, such as photos and videos mentioned above! Keep in mind that a blog can be written by anyone, so just as with every blog you read, make sure you know that the authors are trustworthy! Now knowing this, we can hone in on why blogs are essential for websites.
The Why
Beyond providing more (and FREE) information to your website visitors, you increase the chances those website visitors become clients/customers by offering them solutions to the problems they face! This will not only help increase website visitor trust, but also helps to attract new visitors through SEO! Having a blog can add that extra element of personalization to your brand by offering consistent and valuable sources of information, rather than only having pages that exclusively list your products and prices which may be more sales-oriented and don't exactly make potential customers feel all warm and fuzzy inside. We are humans after all, we are social creatures who do like to connect with others on a personal level to establish trust, so why not have a blog to make your brand seem more relatable?
One of the main factors in blogs being a huge boost to your SEO is that each blog is a brand new webpage on your website, with new keywords which can help your site rank higher for a wider range of keywords! If you ensure that your on-page SEO (meta-data, alt-text, keyword selection, etc...) is good then your site will be able to rank higher for topics that may even extend outside of your niche!
3 things to focus on when writing blogs to ensure that they present well and have good SEO!
Ensure that your blog theme is consistent with your website theme! Your blog looking like a different website can throw off your readers and cause them to think it is clickbait, or a spam link. Using your brand colours consistently helps to avoid this happening, and don't forget to include your logo in there too!
Ensure your content is ENGAGING, and you actually provide the information while using words that your readers will understand! Those food recipes which have the author's life story beforehand? Get rid of that, and quick. Long form content is great, but you need to give usable information and answers before you can establish your reader's trust.
Ensure your Meta-Data (the descriptions and keywords in/around the data, images and so on) is complete. This means all meta-tags and meta-descriptions, title, check your URL slug, alt-text, and ensure you have a clear meta-description for SERPs.
Bonus: Change your images to low-file size jpeg's for better SEO - it will improve the loading speed of the webpage as the files require less time to load.
And there you have it - the reason that we blog, and three tips to help get you started on your own!