Benefits of blogging for your business — with proof!

Think blogging for your business is a waste of time? Think again. 

There’s a reason that so many business websites have a dedicated ‘Blog’ page. Sometimes the blog is clearly promoted and other times it’s strategically hidden. Believe me, it isn’t there just because the company writers want to put their thoughts and feelings somewhere on the internet.

It’s there because consistently publishing quality and expert blog articles for your company website pays off in numerous ways. 

Without further ado, here are 4 reasons why blogging is worth the time and how it can benefit your business.

Blogging can improve SEO & help new customers find your business 

SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization.’ It’s the process of improving your website for a better opportunity to get found on search engines like Google. 

Good SEO practices can increase your chances of being discovered, while poor SEO makes it harder for your ideal customers to find you online.

So how does blogging help SEO? Blogging is actually one of the MOST efficient ways to improve your SEO. Here are just a few of the benefits:

• Increasing the number of your indexed pages
• Higher ranking for your target keywords
• Acquiring  more backlinks and internal linking
• Builds authority from a search engine point of view
• More website visits, leading to increasing visibility and generating more leads

For the past month and a half at U7, our digital marketing team has been working hard to publish blogs every week, starting on June 11. Below are screenshot results of our Google Analytics data from our efforts SO FAR: 

 

 

With no other changes to our website other than the weekly blog posts, here are the key improvements to our metrics:

• Increased number of users by over 50%
• Increased number of sessions by 45%
• Decreased our bounce rate (people stay on the website longer, instead of exiting immediately)
• Increased the average session duration
• Consistent upward trend of users since June 11th, when we first started writing blogs again after a long break
• Increased our organic search traffic by 29%:

Though these are only the results of 1.5 months of consistent blogging, they show promising upward trends and indicate that our efforts are making an impact. 

This goes to show that business blogging is a lot more than just writing. If you do it right, it’s incredibly effective for SEO, which directly benefits your business!

 

 

Set the tone for your brand through blogging

Written tone, which is an essential trait of this digital age, is established by the words you use and how you structure your sentences. 

Have you ever re-read your email drafts over and over to make sure you ‘sound’ friendly before sending it? Of course you have – we all have. That’s because we all know that our writing can be interpreted completely differently by a reader than how we originally meant it. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. 

This study showed that people are 73% likely to correctly guess your intended emotion when hearing your voice, while only 50% accurate when it comes to interpreting the same message over written communication. Here’s a helpful explanation for this finding:

“During in-person communication, there are verbal, audial, and visual cues that convey how you feel about what you’re saying. For example, your facial expressions, voice pitch, and hand gestures give the other person more information about your attitude toward a topic. Different tones in writing achieve a similar goal: to illustrate through words your emotional perspective about what you’re communicating. Certain words, sentence structures, and punctuation choices elicit different types of tones.” – Jennifer Calonia, Grammarly writer

When you write for your business blog, you get to have control over the voice of your brand.

Source

Depending on your audience, ask yourself how you’d like to ‘sound’ in front of your ideal clientele? Take our company, U7 Solutions, as an example. If I could sum up our brand’s tone of voice in a few words, it would be 

1. Informal 
2. Fun
3. Friendly
4. Confident
5. Relatable 

This works for us because we’re a digital marketing agency, but for industries that require more seriousness to their tone (such as law firms, charities, insurance…), they’d need to take a more formal approach.

The way you write your blogs is a great way to establish “how you sound”, so that you can attract the audience you’re hoping for. Having the right tone of voice can help your business gain respect and strengthen trust from your audience, which impacts your overall reputation.

Blogging is an opportunity to explain your services and expertise in detail 

When there’s a topic that you’re an expert in, you probably have a lot to say about it.

That’s what your business blog is for! 

When someone searches your business, they’re looking for an expert just like you. The thing is, they’re probably doing their due diligence by looking at your competitors and evaluating who would be the most helpful to them. 

The key is finding the balance between writing blog posts that establish your audience’s confidence in you to do what they need, while not giving away TOO much information.

Remember that the objective of your business blog is still to explain how your services work and why a prospective client may benefit from doing business with you.

One blog article = content for days

A common objection to blogging is that it takes too much time and not enough people will see it, therefore it’s not worth the effort. This is true IF blogging is the ONLY type of content you’re creating. But there’s a simple solution to avoid letting your blogging efforts go to waste:

Last month, I wrote about how the secret to never running out of content is through a process called repurposing. 

You can think of repurposing as if you’re recycling your idea into different content types so you can use it more than once, across multiple platforms, reaching a wider audience. 

Blogs are just ONE type of content. The content within 1 blog can be broken up and reused in many other ways, such as graphics, videos, newsletters, reels, photo captions, and 80 more pieces of content you can repurpose just from 1 blog post.

At U7, we love repurposing our blogs. See how our marketing team turned this one blog post into the following content types for different platforms:

Graphics on Facebook/Instagram/Linkedin:

Video content for Instagram reels/Tiktok:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by U7 SOLUTIONS (@u7solutions)

Shareable article on Linkedin:

 

Using your blog content for other platforms works well for your business because after the time spent researching, writing, and editing a blog, the repurposing part becomes easy-peasy. All your ideas are already articulated at this point, so all that’s left is sharing it with your audience!

Don’t underestimate the power of blogging for your business

Now that you’ve read about some of the benefits of blogging for your business, put it to the test and see it for yourself! 

There’s no downside to increasing your chances of getting found on Google, letting your audience get to know you better, all while creating timeless content that you can reuse for your marketing. 

If you need help getting started on your business blog, repurposing, or any other digital marketing needs, book a free discovery call with us!