Blogging is apparently good for business.
Anecdotally, bloggers and business owners can point to increased enquiries, improved visibility and growing reputation. Logically, creating new content via a blog increases your chances of getting found by search engines and creates more information to be shared via social media.
Logic and anecdotes are cool, but if you’re going to invest some time and money into blogging a few cold hard facts wouldn’t go astray either.
Business Blogging Increases Traffic
Inbound marketing company HubSpot decided to do a little research into how blogging affected the performance of their clients’ websites. They sampled a little over 1500 companies – roughly half of them blogged for business and the other half didn’t.
The results were striking.
The businesses who blogged had 55% more traffic, nearly double the number of inbound links and over 400% more pages indexed by Google.
Why the Figures Matter
Working from the bottom up, more indexed pages create more opportunities for search engines (and people) to find you. It also creates more things for people to link to.
Having more inbound links improves your authority with the search engines – leading, again, to more traffic. It also creates more breadcrumbs for actual humans to find your website without the help of Google.
Finally, in the same way as a better retail location gives you more chances to sell your wares, more traffic to your website gives you a better chance of converting that traffic into sales (or whatever it is you are looking for).
There are plenty of other reasons to blog for business – from customer service to building a brand personality – but on this very practical level at least the numbers seem to back up what good business bloggers have known for some time.
