On the surface, adding a blog to a website just seems like a lot of extra work — you have to write posts for a blog on a regular basis, at the very least. And if you don’t have time to promote that blog, what do you get for your effort?
Well, actually, you can get a good deal with even a bare bones blog without any promotion. Just by having a blog and adding new posts to it regularly that are related to your business, you can push up your rankings in search engine results. Since most search engines weight results in favor of sites with new and updated content, a small blog can have a big impact.
Building on Basic SEO
Having a blog is a shortcut to creating regular updates to your site, which, in turn, is just one component of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s a very important component — but a blog can do even more. Consider simply building a blog as low-hanging fruit: if you’ve only got time for one thing, start there. But if you have a little more time, consider the strategies below.
Building links: Another factor in how search engines rank their results are the number of links going into a site. The fact that someone linked to a site is like a vote in favor of it. One of the easiest ways to get those links is to offer up some blog posts worth linking to. You’ll have to promote them a bit, but even a few links can have a big impact.
Comments and community: Having regular readers has all sorts of other marketing benefits, but an active community sends a lot of good signals to search engines. They often add more links in a variety of places that would never otherwise link to your site.
Crawlable content: In order to learn what your site is about, search engines have pieces of software that ‘crawl’ the site, analyzing what’s there. Having more content, such as blog posts, means these pieces of software have more information to work with. While the software involved is sophisticated, it isn’t human, and the more information you can give it, the better analysis it will come up with.
Structured content: Most blogging software structures posts in such a way that they’re easy to find and work with for search engines than other types of content.
You certainly don’t have to have a blog for your business — and if you have absolutely no time to invest in it, an empty blog is worse than no blog at all. But like any marketing strategy, if you can put a little work into it, you’ll get a return. That return is especially worthwhile if your prospective customers are searching for you through search engines, rather than flipping through the Yellow Pages or relying on recommendations from friends.
It’s worthwhile to take a look at your marketing strategies as a whole. If blogging isn’t among those strategies — and you don’t have a clear reason why not — perhaps it’s time to think about reallocating your time and resources.