Is blogging necessary? This is a question that tends to spark quite some debate, not only among marketers, but also among business owners. Countless times, I’ve been in a meeting where concerns have been raised at the mention of blogging. “That’s not for our industry,” or “We don’t have time for that,” as well as “I don’t see how it will help my bottom line.” These are among some of the most common objections I tend to hear. The question of blogging being a necessity becomes irrelevant once we learn of statistics such as, 81% of people conduct online research before making any purchase. If 81% of your potential clients are researching online, would you even want to risk that the information they are gathering is coming from elsewhere online, for example, your competitor’s website? In the current digital age, there are two main reasons why you can’t afford not to blog and I will be discussing those in more detail below.

1. SEO Purposes: Google loves new content. Websites that are static and rarely get updated are viewed as being less relevant than ones that are continually adding new content to their site. Blogging is one of the easiest ways to frequently release new content. We recommend to create a blogging schedule and stick to it, preferably releasing a new blog at least once a week. Our own results have proven the effectiveness of this. Since we started blogging weekly, we’ve had nearly a 600% increase in organic traffic to our website! Obviously these results didn’t happen overnight, but rather through discipline and diligence. The other way blogging directly affects your search engine optimization efforts, is your search engine ranking position, also known as your SERP. A common question we are asked when we first meet with a potential clients is, “why does my competitor’s website rank higher in the search engine when I search specific keywords?” This once again comes down to Google’s specific algorithm and what they look for when they give preference to specific websites over others. We do however know that as Google crawls the pages of your site, it not only takes in to account specific keywords that are used, but also page length and how recently it has been either created or updated. With some research, companies can now find out what keywords potential customers are searching for. By including these specific keywords in your blog, you help ensure that your blog is indexed properly by Google and will hopefully be served to the right leads.

2. To Build Trust with Customers: This second reason is as equally as important as the first. Building trust and loyalty with current customers and potential customers is extremely necessary. As mentioned earlier, 81% of people conduct online research before making a purchase or hiring a company. In this digital age, credibility is huge. The more helpful and useful information you release, not only will search engines deem you more credible, but those searching online do as well. Creating content that is informative and helpful builds your credibility and helps position you as an authority in your industry. Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad was once asked about the numerous tutorial videos that his company releases and if releasing that kind of content would take away potential business. Robert responded, “Well, our best customers are the people that think they can do it themselves. But even if they can, someday they’ll be over their head, and who will they call for help? We’re betting it’s the company whose logo they looked at for 8 minutes when we gave them free video help.” Although he is talking specifically about video, the same principle applies to blogs. When you create useful and helpful content, you build trust with others, and one day when they are over their heads or don’t have the time and energy to do it themselves, they will call you to do it for them.

Search engine optimization and building trust with customers are two of the main reasons why blogging is so important, but there are definitely many more. By realizing the importance of blogging, hopefully you will start implementing it in your marketing efforts. We have seen blogging tremendously help so many businesses, including our own. So the question isn’t if your business should be blogging, but why you haven’t already started?