The Benefits of Supplementing Your Company Website with a Blog
Many people are under the assumption that a website and a blog are mutually exclusive vehicles for presenting information on the web, but this is not true at all. The best websites incorporate both “static” web pages that either do not change or rarely change, along with “non-static” blogs that are constantly being updated. So if you have a company website why should you add a blog to it?
Interaction with your clients
When you are trying to sell a product or service there is no information more powerful than being able to get inside the mind of the people you are trying to reach. This is why companies have spent millions of dollars on focus groups, just to get an idea of what the general public thinks about what they are offering. But what if you don’t have millions of dollars to spend on this type of market research? Putting a blog on your company’s website is a great alternative. A blog lets you interact with your clients on a regular basis. You can write about upcoming products or events and they can leave comments for you with their thoughts. It creates an open forum for discussion, the same as a focus group. You can then take this information you obtained from your blog and use it to either make your product better or possibly scrap it completely if it was totally panned by your customers. This saves you time and money that would have been spent putting out a product that would have been a dud.
Search Engine Optimization
As anyone who makes their living from being a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist will tell you, trying to figure out how the search engines determine what makes one page rank higher than another is like trying to guess the lottery. Every day the rules change. But there are a few SEO concepts that remain constant even in this swirling mass of confusion. Search engines love fresh new, updated content. If you have a corporate website then odds are Google, Yahoo and/or Bing have indexed it and added it to their listings. The thing is, over time, they go back and look at your website again for updates and if they keep going back and seeing the same content over and over, they think your website is stale or maybe even abandoned and do not rank it high in their listings. But when you have a blog then you are adding new content on a regular basis. The search engines see this and realize that your website is an active hub of information so they give you a higher ranking. Now granted I have over simplified a very complicated SEO topic but the point remains the same. Give the search engines new and updated content in your blog and they will send more visitors to your website. More visitors mean more money.
Personalization of your company
People like dealing with other people. They don’t like dealing with faceless corporations. With a blog you can put a “personality” behind your company. One that people can relate to and interact with. This will make them feel more comfortable buying from you if they know there is a real person on the other end of their transaction that can assist them.
Category: Website Tips
