Why is blogging so important?

Writing a blog about blogging: despite the irony, it makes perfect sense to use our blog platform to explain why we advocate the use of one. Whether you’re a small business, or a multinational company, blogging should be integral to your online strategy.

First and foremost, blogging is an essential part of your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy: whilst we won’t go into too much detail on the intricacies of SEO in this blog, it’s important to understand a few of the basic SEO benefits of blogging: These are:

1. The more blogs you publish, the more pages of your website search engines (such as Google) can index.
2. The greater the number of topics you cover in your blog, the wider the net you cast for keywords that may appear in search results.
3. Google likes websites that have other websites linking to them. Blog posts give you valuable resources to share with other websites, increasing the number of websites that link back to you.
4. Google likes websites that have lots of internal links, this makes it easy for their bots to crawl. New articles give you more opportunities to place internal links to the most relevant sections of your site.

Regarding the actual content of your blog, it’s easiest to use a good old gardening analogy. Blogging is very similar to gardening – both require hard work and dedication to succeed in the long run. The most beautiful gardens are the ones that have been the most carefully planned; it’s one thing for a gardener to plant a seed, but to carefully nourish a seed until it flourishes enough to add its own harmony to the overall garden requires understanding, flair and maintenance.

In the same way a garden requires upkeep to preserve its appeal, writing a successful blog requires information gathering; sifting through current trending topics, facts, figures and finally arranging these finds into something coherent, relatable and client-focused.

In order to make sure your work weathers the storm (how long can we stretch the gardening analogy for?!), patience really is the key to your growth: make sure you set yourself a realistic schedule for updating your blog; this could be once a week or once a month, but when your readership gets used to your updates, they will be more likely to look out for them. Once you have established this attitude to forward planning, you can start to link your blog to social media promotion, driving more traffic back to your website, and therefore generating the ever-important leads that your business needs.

Lastly, but most importantly, the best blogs will stand out from the crowd because the blog author will have found his or her true voice. This means that their blog, and therefore the brand that they represent, are absolutely unique – no other blogger could replicate it. Amongst the pruning, weeding and research, you must remain true to yourself – there’s nothing worth worse than reading a blog that sounds bland and unoriginal.