Currently, there is a trend in digital marketing strategies focused on creating blogs within business or brand websites. Is developing a blog just a trend for brands, or does it have real strategic value? Should my business have a blog? This article seeks to clarify these questions so that those who read it can make an informed decision about starting their own blog. While the importance of having digital assets has always been emphasized, it should be noted that a blog is not a simple or minor task, as generating valuable content for users requires an investment of time and effort. Therefore, before starting this initiative, you must be clear about what you want to achieve with it.
Continue reading this blog post, and our experts, Blas Giffuni and Camilo Ramírez, will provide their perspective on including blogs in any company's SEO strategy and a series of tips for each person to make the best decision.
Let's understand what a blog is!
A blog is a web page or a section of a website where articles with updated content are regularly published on various topics chosen by the author as part of their digital content strategy. In short, blogs are a space on the Internet where individuals, brands, or institutions can publicly express their ideas, interests, and knowledge and share them with others.
How does a blog contribute to your website's SEO?
Increasingly, blogs are becoming a good practice within SEO strategies, as they enable the creation and publication of valuable content that enhances the user experience by addressing their doubts, solving their problems, and meeting their needs by appealing to search intent. In turn, generating valuable content through a blog allows brands, in terms of SEO, to demonstrate to search engines their Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, which we previously defined as the E.A.T. methodology for content creation in another blog. This is precisely what search engines like Google are looking for: positioning you as an expert in your field and demonstrating everything you know about your area of action, industry, or product category, and in return, thanks to a job well done, they can recommend and show you in the top positions of the search results page because you know what you are talking about.
Should my business have a blog on the website to improve SEO?
Yes, a blog is a valuable tactic to improve your website's SEO strategy. A website must offer quality content to its users, and a blog is a great way to do so.
Therefore, our recommendation is that you strive to create solid and valuable content and create good pieces of content that allow you to establish authority and that other websites want to recommend or reference. A blog allows you to show search engines and users that you do know what you are talking about. It is not just about branding or a trend; blogs are a tool that, when used properly, allows you to share your discoveries, research, industry trends, or product category with target audiences, teach them how you can solve their problems and needs, among others.
Benefits of having a blog on your website
Improves SEO positioning by being a space that allows you to include keywords, place internal links, update content regularly, and achieve links on other websites.
Increases traffic to your website.
Converts readers into leads.
Generates sales.
Helps to raise awareness of your brand and make it a reference.
Sets you apart from the competition.
Provides content for social networks.
Helps you better understand your target audience or user persona.
Allows you to establish links with other brands and consolidate strategic alliances.
You can monetize it.
Recommendations for starting your blog and improving your website's SEO
First, start by identifying the goal, not so much of the blog, but of what you want to achieve in general terms with your brand's website.
Everything you write on your blog should pursue two fundamental objectives: generate more business and provide an excellent experience for your user, with a view to financial benefits. That is, enriching the user experience with quality content to generate conversions.
With this in mind, think: what kind of information would you like to give a user or customer if you were face to face, in a one-on-one conversation? This is a good approach to start thinking about what content you can create for your blog.
Divide your knowledge into logical compartments or content buckets in which you can group content by themes or categories and think about how to write pieces for each of them.
Speak from your experience and share knowledge that is important to the consumer. All this through a narrative that engages the user and tells an attractive and interesting brand story.
Strive to create good and quality content. Do not worry, initially, about the number of words, where to put the keyword, and technical SEO guidelines. Google is smart enough to understand when a company is small and just starting out, but they will know that you are making an effort to create good content, and even if you have technical flaws, it will help you.
When creating content, implement a 360° strategy that is comprehensive and involves the different channels of the company. It is not enough just to create articles for the blog; you must also properly disseminate them so that your clients know that this information is available there.
Website and own digital assets vs. Social networks. What is better?
In general, we have found that the vast majority of brands or businesses do not even consider the possibility of having a blog. Many of them prefer and limit themselves to generating and sharing their content through social networks. We are not saying that this is a bad strategy. In fact, a good digital marketing strategy should consider both channels. However, you must analyze the significant differences between each channel to define which one will give greater profitability to your business in the short and long term and thus be able to make a strategic decision about which one to prioritize.
The main differences between a website and social networks are:
Objective or essence: the main objective of a website is to attract quality traffic to promote your business and your products or services, in order to generate a conversion and increase the possibility of having more business and sales. On the other hand, the essence of social networks is to build community, that is; to bring together people around a shared topic of interest, whether to stay informed, learn, or simply have fun and entertain.
Speed to generate conversions: on your website, if you effectively develop a comprehensive SEO strategy to improve positioning in search engines, you are likely to quickly obtain qualified prospects. As we saw earlier, the objective of social networks is to build community. Consolidating communities around one or more topics takes quite some time, and it takes even longer to generate the necessary trust to close a sale. Therefore, it must be understood that social networks are not the most suitable channel if what is sought is to generate sales or conversions. But to aim at the first stages of the marketing funnel, such as discovery and interest, social networks work quite well.
Return on investment (ROI) and conversion rate: through a website, you can generate good income with few visits. On the other hand, on social networks, you can have millions of followers and not generate any sales.
Durability: the content you upload to your website can always be found. Meanwhile, the posts you publish on social networks will lose visibility after a couple of days.
Ownership: a website is your property; consider it as land you buy on the Internet and that belongs to you. Social networks, on the other hand, are a space that you rent and that does not belong to you, so it can stop being yours from one day to the next.
In the end, it all boils down to measuring whether the content you are generating and the channel you are using to disseminate it are indeed providing real value for the brand and generating conversions that align with the business's financial strategy. Therefore, marketing strategies must be aimed at generating income because if not, you are not doing anything.
A real-life case: A team from Panama, which Blas Giffuni was advising, was delighted because they installed a plugin that led from the website to social networks. They were asked to analyze the metrics from Google Analytics and answer how the installation of the plugin affected the bounce rate, the time spent on the website, the number of pages per visit, the exit rate, or the number of exits from the homepage.
It was also suggested that they analyze how these metrics were before and after the installation of the plugin and, finally, how many of the visitors returned from social networks to their website. The result was that within weeks, they had already removed the plugin. In this case, we are talking about almost 78% of the website traffic being organic traffic coming from search engines, and there were only 38 visits that came from social networks out of around 5,500 visits in a week. This is normal! Social networks fulfill another brand objective, and the traffic they attract to websites is usually not high because social networks seek to keep their users within the platform.
In conclusion:
It doesn't matter if you are a startup that is just starting out; we all have the ability to create quality content that attracts our users and makes them fall in love with our brand. That is, content that is useful because it helps people solve their problems and needs. We believe that a blog is an excellent way to share that knowledge, generating benefits and profitability for the brand in turn.
We invite you to continue reading our blog to learn more about search engine positioning.
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