HOW BLOGGING HELPS YOU RANK IN SEARCH ENGINES

You want traffic to your site. Blogging generates traffic for your site. Everybody understands the first part, but surprisingly few businesses grasp the second part.

Its tempting to give in to the idea that the only way to generate sales is engaging in direct sales. Handling inventory, nurturing your email list, and calling to make potential customers will only go so far past a certain point. If youre spending all your time trying to convert customers, then youll soon be neglecting reasons for customers to discover your business in the first place.

Blogging is a great way to build your audience and generate more traffic and sales for your business. You shouldnt treat it as an unnecessary luxury. Even infrequent posts can help your business.

How?

Having more blog posts drives traffic to your site because it improves SEO; it lets you tell stories thatconvert visitors into customers; and it increases the chances of engagement, not just on social media but also on traditional media. You might increase the chances of being covered by a news site, which are usually seen as more credible sources of opinion. And besides, all that stuff you hear about content marketing? For most businesses, that means keeping a good blog.

If you need some inspiration, this post features examples of three small businesses that run excellent blogs. Stay with us as we explain how a blog helps your business, and to see the examples of stores that get it.

If your audience is small, you might feel the temptation not to blog because you feel that no one will read it anyway. Dont give in. Not blogging is one way to ensure that your small audience stays small.

Blogging, even when youre not breaking new ground, helps your site in terms of SEO. This is especially true if you create content that people want to link to.

Why does it help? For the following reasons.

First, blogging means more pages for your site. More pages means more internal links pointing to your homepage.

Internal links are great, but links from other sites are much better. When an article of yours gets shared on social media and gets linked to on other sites, then your page rankings really improve. It's easier to generate links from interesting content than from your product pages. And the more links you can generate back to your site because of the content you create, the higher you'll climb in the search engines.

Keeping a regular blog also signals that your site is being updated. Search engines track these changes. Each new page is a sign that your site is active. Google rewards that by ranking your site more highly.

Blogging also gives you the opportunity to rank for more key phrases because it gives you a way to create content around the keywords youre targeting. Any product page you link to in your blog post will also benefit if someone links to your post. It isnt just the fact that someone searching for what you write about will have a better chance of coming to your site. Youll also give yourself the opportunity to create strong internal links with rich anchor text that link to your product pages.

Want to see what how blogging can benefit SEO? Marcus Sheridan of River Pools and Spas wrote such a great piece of content that he ranked first on Google for a key phrase that's critical to his business. His blogging strategy was so effective that it got him interviewed by the New York Times as a success story. We'll let him explain the results himself: Within about 24 hours of writing that article, it was No. 1 for every fiberglass-pool, cost-related phrase you could possibly type in. And because I have analytics, so far to this day, Ive been able to track a minimum of $1.7 million in sales to that one article.

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