Are you considering blogging for your brand or business, and wondering if the effort and time will pay off?
Or you probably already have a blog, but you’re not sure if it actually attracts your target audience?
These and many other questions often run through marketers’ and business owners’ minds when they’re trying to decide whether to launch a blog or not for their brand or business.
However, the answers can be found easily in data because numbers don’t lie.
To give you some perspective on just how important and powerful blogging is, here are a few statistics:
- 60 percent of companies believe that company blogs are beneficial, and the average company blog generates 97 percent more inbound links.
- Once a website has 52 or more blog posts, traffic generation goes up by up to 77 percent
- Blogging four times a week generates the biggest increase in leads and traffic
- A site with more than 300 indexed pages gets an increase in traffic generation by 236 percent
Why blogs generate 55 percent more traffic?
Blogging is perhaps the single most effective investment that can be made to ensure your website, brand, and/or business remains visible and relevant to potential customers over a period of time.
Image source - 67notout
A blog is a serious tool with implications on search engine optimization (SEO) and SEO score, offering serious repurposing possibilities for your content.
It is also a lead generating magnet and gives you something to share on social channels.
However, as with anything worth doing, blogs also take effort and commitment.
If you’re willing to be committed to creation of relevant, quality, and customer-focused content, blogging will prove to be a powerful and effective tool for you.
Data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly SMBs) revealed that out of 795 businesses in the sample blogged, while the rest did not.
This shows that companies that blog have far better results on their marketing including 97 percent more inbound links, 55 percent more visitors, and 434 percent more indexed pages.
Website traffic is important because the more visitors you have, the more people you have to convert to leads, and eventually to sales.
As mentioned, having a blog generates 97 percent more inbound links, which are important as they signal authority to search engines, thereby raising your chances of being found by online consumers.
The same goes for having more indexed pages on your site, as this raises your SEO rankings.
- Blogs increase search engine traffic
Like fishing, the more hooks you have in the water, the higher your likelihood of catching fish.
Similarly, a blog helps increase traffic to your website as you add more content to it, and as more pages from your domain get indexed.
In this way, your website traffic increases as the organic search visibility improves.
Image source - hadeninteractive
With each new page, you’re dropping a new hook into the water and as opportunities increase, your target audience is likely to find your bait and you get more bites.
Additionally, the more blog posts you have on your site, the higher your chances of ranking for a variety of keywords.
- Blogs humanize brands
A blog offers a way of touching on concerns and issues of interest to your brand’s prospects, while sharing with them what you and/or your team is passionate about.
Blog posts give you a unique chance to share your personality and voice while building trust and increasing the likeability of your brand.
- Builds thought leadership and industry authority
One of the best ways to establish yourself as an expert in your industry is through a blog.
It offers the platform you need to share important insights and information (industry-related), and as you build thought leadership and authority, it breeds familiarity and trust.
This helps keep you top-of-mind once prospects are ready to buy, plus conversion rates increase.
- Increases leads and improves conversion rates
The more pages your site has, the higher the number of leads you get.
HubSpot reports that businesses with 401-1000 pages of content attract six times more leads than those with less.
Consequently, the more you blog, the more leads your site generates, because more content translates to more submissions, email opt-ins, quote requests, and eventually higher sales.
Active blogging communicates to your audience that your business is alive, doing well, and maintained.
High quality content also builds loyalty to your brand, thus increasing your conversion rates further. HubSpot added that businesses that prioritize blogging experience an overall increase in ROI by 13 percent year after year.
Image source - Neilpatel
- Generates inbound links
High quality inbound links are one of the three SEO pillars, but without a blog, it is hard to attract such links to your website. Optimize your content for SEO.
Once new content is added, it serves as a resource for media and other bloggers, thus accumulates natural inbound links as other bloggers, authors, journalists, and contributors reference and cite your content in theirs.
These links improve your SEO score while generating significant referral traffic back to your website.
- Blogs help with long-tail search query ranking
Websites with blogs have an easier time ranking for long-tail search queries.
A blog with more content means more chances to rank for higher-converting keyword phrases and long-tail queries.
- Blogs support social media
Without unique, high quality content, it is difficult to maintain an active presence on social media.
If you'd would like to direct leads social media to your own site, a blog will help you do this as it provides the content for you to share thus increasing your website’s traffic.
