In the early days of the internet, blogging was often a personal endeavor – a space for opinions, venting, and daily entries, almost like an online journal. However, just like most things in our virtual world, the concept of blogging has come a long way.

Today, blogging is an essential component of any business’s online presence. Organizations who overlook blogging are doing so at their own peril. While investing time and money into a blog may seem unnecessary, it’s actually an essential part of growing your digital footprint. Maintaining a blog helps with everything from generating organic traffic to building links, and the high ROI associated with blogging makes it a sound business decision.

Let’s take a look at why one of the first SEO tips we give at Elevation Marketing is to start a blog.

A blog is a sound investment overall

If you only take one thing away from this article, make it this: companies that make blogging a priority are 13 times more likely to have a high marketing return on investment (ROI), according to HubSpot. A big reason for this is blogs are fairly simple and low-cost to maintain. For the most part, blogging only takes a minor time investment in order to post regularly, and the benefits are huge.

The other big reason that blogs are so profitable is because they improve your business along every step of the sales chain. Having a blog gives you more leads, as blog posts generate awareness of and interest in your business and products. A blog can also increase your conversions, prompting more visitors to fill out a contact form, sign up for an email newsletter or make a purchase.

While you should be using your blog to pitch to site visitors, a blog increases sales all the same. One study carried out by Conductor found that the likelihood of a customer buying from a brand increased by 131% after they read educational content from that brand. Overall, the low overhead of maintaining a blog, paired with the potentially huge increase in sales, makes blogging a sound investment.

Blogs improve your SEO and links

Another way that blogging helps your business is by improving your company’s page ranking and boosting your potential for inbound links. This is because a blog gives you nearly limitless space to optimize for certain keywords, whereas the opportunity to do so with your website alone is limited. In terms of SEO blog tips, you should never keyword-stuff, instead optimize each and every blog post for the keywords that matter most to your business.

In addition, regularly publishing blog posts that are genuinely engaging and informative increases the likelihood of gaining backlinks. If visitors to your site find posts particularly helpful, they’re liable to share these links, either on their own websites or on social media. And while not every blog post can’t go viral, it’s well worth it to take some time and make sure your posts are genuinely interesting and reflective of your brand.

Maintaining a blog helps build authority, trust, and a strong social media presence

Having visitors share your blog posts on social media is just one of many ways that a well-maintained blog can strengthen your business’s presence on the internet. These posts are a good way to build up a following on social media, as data suggests a healthy portion of consumers (23 percent) follow brands because they share interesting content.

But there’s much more to this: Maintaining a blog demonstrates that your brand is a thought leader in your industry. One of the most crucial SEO blog tips is to stay up to date on important industry issues – and post about them. This tells current and potential customers that you’re concerned about many of the same things they are. Blogging also helps build authority and trust, as your company can show off expertise by speaking to the pain points of existing and potential customers.

Regular blogging allows you to engage with your customers

Finally, blogging also helps give your business a voice with which to keep customers engaged with your brand. While the messaging and tone you use across your website contributes to your brand’s voice, this is largely constrained by a need to convey a restricted set of information: what your business is, what services you provide, how to get in touch with your business, etc.

A blog, on the other hand, gives you much more flexibility and space to be both friendly and genuinely helpful to your customers. A blog also enables your business to not just have a mission statement listed on its website, but to demonstrate how you carry out that mission statement by writing posts that support it. When customers are able to see your company as having a personality that reaches beyond just being a business, that’s a huge victory for your brand – and it’s a relationship that’s hard to establish without a well-maintained blog full of useful and fresh content.

Looking for SEO blog tips?

A blog is a solid investment that can help you build your brand in myriad ways. Still, at Elevation Marketing, we understand that writing blog posts every week isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. That’s why we’re here to make blogging a strong player in your marketing strategy, whether it’s with SEO blog tips to help you get started or with keyword-optimized blog posts to start building your audience. Contact us today to start building your blog and drive real results for your business!