If you have an online store, creating a business blog can bring many benefits, including attracting more traffic and increasing sales. If it’s something you have not considered before, this post will explain how a business blog can be a valuable asset to your company.
Blogs are great for SEO
If you have a business blog, it goes without saying that some of your posts will discuss your business and the products your online store sells. As a result, when you publish those posts, you’ll be adding lots of relevant keywords to your site.
Those keywords, of course, will be noticed by search engines and this improves the chance that your website can rank for those keywords when someone searches for them. As a result, your site is likely to get more visitors.
Rank for search intent
Product pages are designed for the final stage of the purchasing process – the sell. However, before people get to that stage, they will research the market, looking at the types of products available and finding out about them. Blog posts are ideal for making people familiar with your products before they get to the purchasing stage. You can write about and link to them as solutions to problems (e.g., What to Look for in a Good Tumble Dryer) or compare them to other products (e.g., 10 Best Tumble Dryers).
The reason why you should do this is that search engines now understand search intent and know which stage of the purchasing process a user is at. As a result, they are less likely to rank a product page for someone at the research stage. If you want your products to get noticed earlier, before someone else’s products catch the shopper’s attention, then it is important to create content for the research stage too – and the blog is the best place to put this.
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Get noticed in search results
Every blog post is indexed by search engines, and this means they can all appear in search results. If you are creating one post a week, it means that over time, you will have a lot more pages that can appear in search results. Aside from bringing in more traffic, anyone seeing these listed in the results will become more familiar with your brand, so, when they do arrive at your site, that familiarity will increase their confidence in your business.
Establish your reputation
Many online stores thrive because their customers know they are buying from the experts. If you sell home brewing equipment and recipes, for example, those home brewers who spend a lot of money on kits and recipes will expect you to know a lot about brewing. However, just stocking great products doesn’t prove you are an expert – what can, is a blog.
Writing helpful blog posts for your customers not only provides them with the information and advice they need but shows you know what you are talking about. As a result, customers come to trust your opinion which can be invaluable when it comes to attracting and retaining blog readers and, most importantly, building a body of loyal customers.
Make marketing easier
Great blogs get regular readers and many of these will sign up for email subscriptions because they want to keep up with your latest posts. Over time, this means you can build up a long list of subscribers who you can send not just blog posts, but other marketing information, like special offers and details of your newest products.
With a growing email list, you’ll be less reliant on expensive forms of marketing, like PPC advertising. What’s more, if you use email marketing, you are already on to a winner as, statistically, it has the highest conversion rate of any marketing technique, a whopping 66% – outperforming social media, PPC and direct mail.
Get feedback and interact
An important feature of a blog is the comments section. This enables you to ask for comments and let readers leave them. It is a brilliant way to get feedback about your products and services and, as such, provides you with helpful information about what your potential customers want and need. This applies not just to your products and services, but to the blog topics they want to read about.
Importantly, you can also respond to comments made on your blog. This helps you to build relationships with readers and answer any questions they ask after reading your posts.
Post on social media
You can reach a wider audience, improve brand awareness and generate more traffic by posting your blog content on your social media page. Unlike advertising, you can do this for free and when people click on your post to read more, it will bring them straight to your website.
Conclusion
Creating a blog for your online business can benefit your company in a range of ways. It boosts SEO, provides content for different search intents, increases brand awareness in search results, establishes an expert reputation, makes marketing easier, enables you to get feedback and interact with readers and lets you take advantage of social media. All of these, in turn, bring more visitors to your website and help increase sales. If you are looking for hosting that can support both an online store and a growing blog, visit our homepage to see our range of hosting solutions.
