Many people still aren’t convinced of the power of SEO and why blogging is essential for businesses. In my opinion, I believe blogging is an excellent and learnable skill set, from reviving a company to taking it online and earning a full-time income.
“When you brand yourself properly, the competition becomes irrelevant.” – Dan Schawbel
I’ve studied numerous websites and businesses to see how SEO affects the increase and decrease in customers. Even without a company, you can still earn an enormous income from advertisements, affiliate marketing, selling subscriptions, or various other ways.
Several years ago, I created a blogging group, met with some top bloggers, and learned from many success stories and countless blogging mistakes. I’ll go further in-depth on the advantages and disadvantages for businesses with and without a blog.
Reasons Why Blogging is Important For Businesses
The number of positive reasons why blogging is essential for businesses is endless. If your business doesn’t have a blog yet, then I highly recommend it because you’re missing out on the potential customers, leads, and increase in overall sales.
As an owner of over ten websites, a co-founder of a marketing company, and an editor-in-chief for a multi-million dollar company, I can assure you that many local businesses are missing out on owning a website and doing search engine optimization (SEO).
By learning SEO and blogging, you have the advantages of:
- Driving new customers to your business
- Increase brand awareness
- Taking your business online
- Save money on paid advertisements
- More streamlines of income
Search engine optimization or SEO is when you optimize your website pages or content so that search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other similar platforms will rank you higher on the rankings.
With various marketing tools like Semrush or Ahrefs, you can determine the average search volume of most keywords.
Let’s use “pet store” as a keyword example. On the search bar of each platform, I typed in the keyword, clicked search, and these platforms display many related keywords with the search volume appearing next to it.
Keep in mind that the volume of these keywords isn’t always accurate, but it’ll give you an idea of what to expect when you’re targeting a particular keyword.
Semrush Example
Ahrefs Example
With these marketing tools, you’ll be able to study your competitors and find opportunities. Once you see these keyword opportunities, you can target them by writing helpful content.
The best way to start a new website is to target long-tail keywords. As you create more pages with SEO’s best practices, your website will gradually rank higher, which means it’ll benefit your business in numerous ways.
- Blogging Tip: Avoid doing anything shady, like plagiarizing another website’s content, because search engines like Google are getting smarter every day and can detect this. Your business website could get penalized for going against search engines’ guidelines.
1. Driving New Customers To Your Business
One of the reasons blogging is important for businesses is that it can drive more customers to your website. If you’re running a family restaurant, ranking the keyword “best places to eat” in your area will result in search traffic clicking on your page.
Once this traffic clicks on your page, whether they go to your family restaurant or not depends on how you deliver your information.
Here are several examples of how different niches and keywords can benefit a business with new customers:
- Car Dealerships: Whether you’re running a car dealership or being a salesman, running a blog that targets buyer intent keywords can result in more leads. For instance, if you target “best car dealerships in (location)” as one of your pages and rank, the traffic searching for this is primarily interested in purchasing a vehicle.
- Phone Repairs: You understand the ins and outs of repairing phones; however, you don’t have customers. With a blog that’s niched down to teaching people how to repair phones, your traffic will likely contact you for your help. You can provide your services on your business website and have customers coming to you when they can’t repair their phones themselves.
2. Increase Brand Awareness
Whether your business is declining in customers or brand new, owning a blog will help increase brand awareness from potential customers worldwide. You can add your business phone number on your website, social media accounts, etc., and your traffic will contact you if they’re interested in your products or services.
3. Taking Your Business Online
Driving new customers to your business and increasing brand awareness is already an enormous benefit. What about taking your business online? During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people lost their jobs due to the government shutdown.
Not only did people lose their jobs, but many businesses had to close down, file for bankruptcy, etc. However, owning a website with passive traffic is beneficial during difficult times like the beginning of the pandemic. When your business website ranks and you’re getting traffic, you can take your business online as the perfect alternative.
4. Save Money on Paid Advertisements
Forget paying about ads. By blogging for your business and following SEO’s best practices, you’ll have passive traffic 24 hours a day. Don’t get me wrong – paid advertisements work! If you’d like to utilize paid advertising (Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc.), why not grow your business with blogging on the side?
Several of my blogging friends are receiving enough traffic to promote their businesses, and the traffic growth trends upward every month as long as you publish new content. If you continue this route, paid advertisements will be something of the past. Your business blog will be the blog companies want to pay to get featured once your website grows.
