It’s really no question at all – your business’ website should absolutely have a blog!
I know what you’re probably thinking: Blogs are a waste of time. Blogs are for Game of Thrones conspiracy theories, not businesses. My company can’t possibly benefit from having a blog.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. No matter how “unsexy” your niche is, no matter what your misconceptions about blogs are, no matter how advanced your marketing is, if you don’t have a company blog, you should start one immediately. Why?
Linkability
One of the most important metrics that Google uses to determine the strength of a given domain is the number of external sites that link to it. The more often a website is referenced by other sites, the more likely it is to rank highly in Google’s search algorithms. If your current website is devoid of a blog, you probably don’t have much content that other external sources are going to link to. If you operate an ecommerce site there’s a chance a few of your product pages will receive links from review websites, but in general it’s hard to receive backlinks without generating unique, informative content – and a company blog is the perfect place to do exactly this. You want your website to appear as an authority in whatever niche it is you’re operating in, and you can establish it as such by authoring a blog that provides high quality content on a variety of related topics.
Click Through Rate
Click Through Rate (CTR) is another metric that Google uses to assess domain strength. This basically refers to the time in seconds each user spends bouncing around the pages of your website. The amount of time spent on the website after locating it on Google tells Google how good or bad of a job your site has done in answering the user’s query. If you Google the phrase “where to buy dog bones in bulk” and the first hit takes you to a page on how to knit socks, you’re probably not going to spend much time on that website: it doesn’t answer your question nor is it relevant to it. A blog gives you the opportunity to write about content people are actually searching for, and it helps increase your domain’s CTR by letting you write longer, more engaging pieces. You probably don’t have many pages on your site with more than 500 words, and I’d bet that the pages that do are talking about product specifications, company history, and other information that isn’t all that interesting to the casual browser. End result? The average user opens a product page, looks at the price, and exits the screen, giving you a terrible CTR and a lower likelihood of appearing organically in a Google search. A blog that routinely churns out interesting content is the perfect antidote to this. Post a 2,000-word article on X topic, come up with a fun title and add a few videos and you’ll have a much better chance of keeping people on your page.
Personality
A blog gives you a great platform to sell your company, instead of your products. You’ve got an entire website dedicated to doing the latter, but without a blog you’re probably unable to effectively do the former because you don’t have an area dedicated to showing the lighter, more personal side of your company. Take advantage of this opportunity and start one! A blog is the one part of your website that doesn’t need to be super formal and business-y. Use it to give your brand some personality by highlighting employee achievements, fun happenings at the company, charitable contributions, or anything else that would seem out of place on a product landing page. You can really improve the public’s perception of your company by hosting a fun blog on your website, generating good will with every post and increasing the likelihood that browsers of your website will eventually turn into paying customers.
No matter your industry/product/service, you can and absolutely SHOULD have a blog on your homepage. If you’re confident in your writing, go ahead and get posting today – if not, consider hiring a consultant to really reap all the SEO-related benefits that a regularly-updated blog has to offer.
