Ask a Digital Marketing Professional: Does My Website Need a Blog?

A common assumption you, as a business owner may have, is that a business blog is a luxury. Maybe you feel it’s a nonessential line item in your marketing budget. This is not uncommon opinion. And it may have even been a little true in the past. But these days, content is king and the value of having a blog has become much impactful on your online strategy.

“Sounds like this is going to cost me time and money. Give me one good reason I need a blog,” you say.

Okay, here goes. There are lots of reasons your business needs a blog, but here’s the one reason I, as a professional marketing strategist, think is the most compelling:

It allows you to "be" what people are looking for

Most businesses see a huge portion of their traffic land on their home page. I’ve seen websites where up to 80% of the web traffic they generate land on the home page – and then leave. That’s right, visitors arrive on the site (because their search or some campaign, promotion or other advertising dollars sent them there), they take one look and they’re gone (bounce). What a waste!

This is because whatever those users were seeking, they didn’t find it. Your home page wasn’t what they were looking for. And you can try to keep adding banners and widgets to your home page in order to be all things to all users but this will only complicate your navigation and mess with your design.

Wouldn’t it be great if the traffic from your website landed on a page that was precisely what they were looking for? Maybe they clicked on a pay-per-click ad. Maybe they saw a link on social media or on another website. Maybe they typed in a query in Google search.

They find your website. And it’s exactly what they wanted and were expecting to see. The beauty of the blog is that it's an area on your website that you can edit; you can add, edit and delete content whenever you want. 

Blogs generate SEO juice (this is a good thing)

A lot of the time, the real value in a blog lies in the "SEO juice". SEO (search engine optimization). Where you rank in Google search depends on how well your website is optimized. Every page on your website should be optimized for a different 'key word':

Easy enough, but there are only so many pages on your website. And one of the very basic reasons to keep publishing blog articles is that you get more opportunities to build on your SEO and optimize as many key words as you need.

Example:

• Company A sells monkey wrenches
• Customer B types in search for “best monkey wrench reviews”
• Your existing website pages are optimized for “Company A’s Monkey Wrench Emporium” and other monkey wrench related terms, but none that include the word "reviews"
• You create a blog post entitled “The Best of The Best Monkey Wrench Reviews of <year>” & search engines have a way better chance of finding you because you match the search term exactly

If your blog perfectly answers the searcher’s question, you have a much better chance of Google sending them your way. This is applicable to organic searches (non-paid) as well as PPC (pay-per-click) and SEO (search engine optimization) campaigns. Social media channels with advertising platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram also have similar algorithms.

The bottom line is: the best way to be found online these days is keyword optimized content. If you don’t have good content, optimized by the search terms that people are actively using, it’s much harder to build and audience and gain momentum. Online audiences are fickle; they will not try very hard to find you when search engines are just as happy to serve up your competitors instead.

To succeed online, you have to be the best answer to the questions your customers are asking. And the place to answer these questions is your business blog. It’s the easiest, most cost-effective way of being multiple things to multiple audiences.