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August 17, 2016

You Need a Blog on Your Website. And Here’s Why.

Author: Valerie Baker

I remember my pre-Atilus days. I’d see blogs on large company websites and think “why?” Why is there a blog on a website that has nothing to do with writing? Well, I started at Atilus in 2012 and now I know.

Ask any one of the Atilus team members what you need to do to market your site (it’s okay. I’ll wait). Chances are, if you’ve talked to any of us about marketing your website, one of our recommendations will be that you need to blog.

Adding content to your website is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to make sure your website ranks for certain terms. As old as this practice is, it’s strange to me that I still get asked this question (but I guess that’s why we’re the experts). J To shed some light, I figured I’d lay it all out in a blog post (even if it is strange to write a blog about blogging…).

I think that blogging can be broken down into serving 2 major purposes:

  1. Getting more traffic (helps SEO).
  2. Share your wealth of knowledge (more of a business practice).

First, we’ll start with SEO.

Adding Content Consistently = Organic Traffic

Organic traffic, or unpaid traffic, is traffic you receive from users searching for keywords related to your business and your website appears. For example, if you were to search for “web design company Florida,” you would see the results below.

Screen Shot 2016-08-16 at 4.18.34 PM

This is a result of a number of things: the structure of the website, the content on the website (including the blog), and some technical things like site speed, errors, etc.

The goal of blogging on your website is to consistently add fresh content to your website, which shows Google (and other search engines) that you’re active and credible. One example I always use to explain this to clients is our What Does a Website Cost? blog. Month over month, this blog ALONE accounts for over 50% of our traffic. This is an extreme case because we’ve refined this post over a number of years, but it does showcase the power a blog can have.

What Do You Want Clients, Prospects, and Competitors to Know?

Blogging – much like a personal journal or diary – is a way for you to speak indirectly with your clients and others. What do you want them to know? (Or not know?) Having a company blog is an easy way to share industry news, your knowledge, and just things you’d like to put out to the web. Whether an actual human being reads it or not, Google will index this content and again, you’re establishing that credibility within your field.

For example, one of the biggest reasons I’m writing this post is because it’s a question I get asked quite often. Why do I need to blog? How often should I blog? What should I blog about? Obviously, blog topics and such should be handled on a custom basis, but as a rule of thumb, I would recommend the following.

  • Add a new blog to your website at least once/month. If you can do more, great, if not, try to stick to once a month.
  • Blog topics – if you’re a client, contact one of us to ask for help. Keywords and keyword research play a role in which topics you should pick, but if you blog about what you know, you’re probably on the right path – EXCEPT…

Blog in Normal People Words!

This, more than any other question, is one I am challenged with quite frequently. A blog is an amazing platform for you to write about your business, your experience, and your industry. However, you must keep the regular end-user in mind.

As a marketing agency, we draft blogs for clients to post on their websites. We choose these topics based on keywords and trends we see within Google’s Keyword Planner. We also know a thing or two about the business itself and try to craft our blog topics/messaging around getting that business’s core concept across. However, there’s a fine line between blogging about your industry and blogging FOR your industry.

Take Atilus as an example. We provide a few major services:

  • Digital marketing
  • Web design
  • Web development
  • Web hosting

(I know more about digital marketing, so I’ll go ahead and focus on that.)

AdWords is an amazing tool we use. We could blog about best practices – why you should use phrase, exact, and broad match keywords and why you should separate keywords into their own ad groups. However, would our end user understand this? (Chances are that the answer is no.)

However, we can take that same information and blog about what AdWords is and the overall benefits of it. However, me going into detail about the specifics of AdWords will serve only our competitors or others in the industry. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but our goal is to educate our clients and prospects while boosting our organic traffic.

To summarize the above:

  • Yes, you should have a blog.
  • You should post a minimum of one blog/month on your website.
  • You should stick to topics that your audience – clients, prospects, etc. can understand.

What other questions do you have about blogging? Leave them in the comments below!

Valerie Baker

Valerie is the Support Lead here at Atilus. Her background includes digital marketing and web development. She takes amazing care of our clients and assists with overall website updates and development.

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