Have you been considering adding a blog to your business website? There is perhaps nothing as beneficial as maintaining a good business blog. If you're on the fence about blogging, this article should persuade you that you've got nothing to lose and everything to gain! This week, we're covering some of the biggest reasons why we think you should turn to blogging to help your company grow.

1. Blogs Provide Value to Your Customers

Blogs allow you to offer answers to your customers and potential customers. The value provided to internet users by blogs has kept blogging as relevant as ever, with around 77% of people reading blogs. So, when someone goes online to find a solution, providing it to them with no strings attached will build goodwill toward your company and brand. The more benefit you can offer your readers, the better.

Imagine you're painting a fort for your kids and need to know what paint to use on an outside wood surface. You go online and search for "best paint for a wooden play fort," and a local hardware store's blog comes up. There, you find a helpful comparison of various paint products and decide on one that fits your needs. Now, when you're on your way to buy the paint, are you more or less likely, to visit that hardware store? Probably more likely, right? The local business has provided you with value, and in turn, you bring them your business.

Of course, this front-end value model for blog marketing doesn't always play out instantaneously. And that's okay. A reader may visit your blog for months before ever becoming a customer. It doesn't hurt you to provide this benefit to them, and you've continued to elevate your brand in their mind that whole time. Eventually, they'll become a customer themselves or refer someone to your business who will.

2. Blogs Boost Your Website's Rating with Search Engines

When it comes to search engines, blogs provide advantages in a few important ways.

Keyword Strategy

There's no way around it: your website needs a large volume of text content addressing keywords relevant to your business. Search engines are growing ever more sophisticated as they try to serve results for the searcher's intent. While in the past, many people attempted to dump keywords on their sites haphazardly, modern search engines can tell the difference between keyword stuffing and content beneficial to the reader. So, it is essential that you continually expand your SEO blog. 

Keeping Your Website Active

Another reason to write new blog content regularly is to keep your website active. Good search engines reward websites that are updated regularly. It tells them that your website is being maintained, and they reward you by increasing the website's score and placing it higher on the search results page for relevant searches.

Increasing Web Visitor's Time on Page

An increasingly important metric for search engines determining your website's score is how long readers stay on your page. When web visitors stay on your web page for longer periods of time, it indicates to the search engine that you are meeting the readers' needs. In turn, the search engine rewards your website by regarding it as more credible and giving it a higher rating. And that's another good reason to emphasize providing your readers with value in your blog content. 

3. Frequently Updated Blogs Increase Customer Confidence

Your potential customers value an active website in the same way search engines do. When someone visits your website looking for your product, services, or information, they will want to see that your site has been updated regularly and recently. It won't matter to them that you have 27 blog posts from 2007. If you haven't kept up your blog, it will appear to them that you are a dead business, and they will move on. 

4. Blogs Increase Conversions

A conversion occurs when someone reacts to your marketing message by taking the desired action. Generally, a conversion will happen when a blog reader becomes a customer. But it may also include filling out a contact form, subscribing to a mailing list, or any other action you wish the reader to take. 

Key to your success will be your use of CTAs (calls-to-action). By skillfully balancing your blogs with upfront value to the reader and relevant CTAs, you will bring in a steady stream of new customers. For instance, to return to the previous hardware store example, a CTA at the bottom of the blog offering a link to their paint inventory would be a good balance.

Blogs Get Results

For all the above reasons, blogs remain an essential rung on your ladder to branding and business success. Blogs are the perfect intersection between outreach to potential customers, maintaining current customers, and increasing your prominence online. Few other marketing tools allow you to achieve that many objectives at once.

Want to start a business blog but don't have time? One of Zimmer Marketing's most popular web services is our Online Presence Management, which comes with two monthly blog posts written by our copywriting team!