Blogging is essential to creating new and fresh content for your website.  Each time you post a new blog, you have a new opportunity to reach a client.  You have an opportunity to answer a question, give insight into your practice and build a library of valuable information.  Beyond all this, blogging is the most direct way to maintain and improve your organic, online traffic.  Every search engine result, every website hit is a new potential client, customer or sale.  You can’t afford to neglect your website traffic and the heart of this is blogging.  Neil Patel of Quicksprout published a study about “What Happens to SEO When You Stop Blogging?” demonstrated a case study dealing with neglected blogging done by media manager Robert Ryan: “In 2015, he refrained from posting any new content on his blog for 251 days. That’s eight months and seven days.  Here are some of his key findings:

  • Overall traffic to the site saw a major decline as it fell by 32 percent.
  • Organic traffic dropped by a massive 42 percent.
  • Traffic to the contact page was down by 15 percent.
  • Overall site conversions fell by 28 percent.

This study demonstrates the clear and negative consequences of the absence of consistent fresh content.”  The results from this study are stark and directly reflect lost opportunities seen by the massive drop in website traffic and conversions.

Google search engine rankings are critical to growing your business.  If you are a business that relies on customers or clients, search engine results matter.  How many people do you know that still use the yellow pages of an actual phone book?  People do their research online.  They look to search engines to find businesses that meet their needs.  If a prospective client performs a Google search for your services in their local area where you rank matters.  If your search engine ranking is on page 3 or 4, your prospective client is never going to see your site.  There are many other companies working hard to get to page 1 of Google’s search results and you need to invest in your website to keep your ranking competitive.  While no one is certain of the algorithm that Google uses there are key indicators that show how to improve your rankings, and one direct link to higher rankings is fresh content.

Blogging to Increase Organic Traffic

Organic search engine traffic is valuable.  Dummies.com explains the difference between organic and paid traffic, “When a search engine returns its search results, it gives you two types: organic and paid. Organic search results are the Web page listings that most closely match the user’s search query based on relevance. Also called “natural” search results, ranking high in the organic results is what SEO is all about.  Paid results are basically advertisements — the Web site owners have paid to have their Web pages display for certain keywords, so these listings show up when someone runs a search query containing those keywords.” Organic traffic is valuable because, again it helps your search rankings with Google but the searches are valuable for other reasons as well.  Organic traffic provides legitimate prospects driven to your website allowing you the opportunity for conversion.  The more organic traffic that is driven to your website, the more opportunities you have to grow your client or customer base.

Search Optimized Blog

SEO is short for search engine optimization and as we move further and further into the age of technology it becomes more and more important.  Search engines look for high quality and relevant content.  If an end user performs a search and gets results that aren’t relevant or helpful that search engine has not done its job.  Fresh, quality content that is search engine optimized can help raise your ranking with search engines and get your site in front of more clients or customers.

Blogging to Acquire Natural Inbound Links

Blogs that contain relevant and current information can be invaluable to you in so many different ways. With regular blogging your site can become a valuable resource to your ideal customer. If you are trying to grow your business, your blog may contain helpful information on industry specific topics and commonly asked questions.   Your clients / customers will come to count on your site for information and help.  Your company and brand will become familiar and trusted.  The more quality blogs you publish, the more other websites will reference your content creating natural back links and improving your online visibility.  Back links a.k.a “inbound links“ are generated whenever another site links back to yours.  The more back links your site has, the higher your search engine ranking.

Blogging is arguably the easiest way to produce new content and increase new leads.  New, regularly updated content is your path to reaching new clients.  If you are looking to build your business you can’t afford to neglect your SEO, rankings and traffic.  If you neglect your blogs you run the risk of plummeting in search engine rankings and your site will become stale.  New and regular visitors will see that you are not updating your site and will stop utilizing it as a resource.  In the case study done by Robert Ryan referenced above it only took 8 months of no blogging for website traffic to drop by almost a third.  Your competitors will reap the rewards of your neglect with their sites gaining more visibility and opportunities for conversion.  Stay a step ahead and keep blogging.