Blogging For Small Businesses: Why Bother?
By: Shane Black
Tags: Blogging Tips, Blog, Content Marketing, Blogging, SEO

Blogging for small businesses can be time and resource consuming, so why would a small business owner even bother? Well, let’s take a look at some statistics that may surprise you.

What Is Blogging For Small Businesses?

Your small business blog is a section of your website where you regularly share information. This could include:

Information about your area of expertise

Useful articles that your clients/customers may find helpful

Updates about your company/industry

News about your business

Case studies about your client’s success

Information about your services

Updates about your products

The list of topics that your blog could cover is only limited by your imagination.

Why Blogging For Small Business Is Important?

Blogging can be a powerful strategy for your business but to get the most impact out of it, you need to understand why blogging is important, and you need to formulate an effective content strategy.

For starters, blogging can have a significant impact on search engine optimisation so you will definitely need to conduct keyword research to identify what keywords and terms are resonating with your intended audience. If you haven’t defined your audience yet, you can use our Buyer Persona guide.

In this article, I’ll spend less time on the ‘how’ of blogging and focus on the ‘why’.

Here are 7 reasons why blogging for small businesses is important.

#1 Boost SEO

I already mentioned this above, but it’s worth repeating. Regularly contributing towards your own blog will help boost your SEO. Search engines, such as Google, adore new content and by posting to your blog you are showing search engines that you are an active small business and are continually updating the information on your site. A steady flow of blogs is also feeding the search engines fresh new content to index, which means that you are giving your small business more of a chance to get ranked for your target keywords.

When creating new blogs, ensure that you are optimising the on-page ranking factors so that you have are showing search engines that your content should be ranked. Click here for our simple 5-point on-page SEO checklist.

If you’re not sure whether your current website has any technical SEO errors, request a complimentary SEO audit from my team.

#2 Stay Ahead Of The Competition

Studies have indicated that 55% of marketers say that blog creation is their top inbound marketing priority. Whether these marketers have actually implemented this strategy is another matter, however, if more than half of small business marketers are intending to blog, then it would be a good idea for your small business to at least keep up with the competition.

With a bit of focused effort, you could use your blog to catapult over your competition since blogs have been shown to…

#3 Generate More Leads

The same HubSpot study that I mentioned in the previous section also indicated that businesses who blog more than 16 times per month generate 4.5 times more leads than businesses who blog 4–5 times per month.

If creating 16 blogs per month sounds a bit of your reach at the moment, then there is still a benefit to a lower number of blogs per month.

For example, small businesses who blog 11+ times per month still generate 4 times more leads. This would be an average of 3 blogs/week… which may still feel like a lot but is well within a stretch target. It’s possible to batch your blog writing process (i.e. write them all over a 2–3 hour period once a week) or to outsource a cost-effective ghostwriting service.

#4 Build Authority

By regularly publishing blog content, you are establishing your business as an authority in your space. If your content is useful, and it’s about a topic that people are searching for, then both your website and business will build authority.

Building authority will create opportunities as both potential clients, and other industry participants will turn to you for help as you have published useful information on the topic that they are looking for help with.

#5 Attract More Traffic

One of the most significant benefits of blogging is that the blog will remain searchable in the future. When a blog is “evergreen” (i.e. it’s about a topic that never goes out of date), it has a chance to compound over time. HubSpot estimates that 10% of blog posts are compounding as their organic traffic increases over time. This is particularly relevant for small businesses since 75% of blog posts and 90% of blog leads come from old blog posts.

This again plays into point #1, as compounding posts will attract more traffic as part of the SEO boost.

#6 Create Connection

Creating a connection with your audience is vital for your small business’ success as studies show that 47% of consumers view 4–5 pieces of content before reaching out to a sales representative of a company.

Blogging will help your small business generate enough content for a lead to view so that a connection can be established with your brand before they even come into contact with anyone within your company.

#7 Amplify Your Brand

Your blog content can become a vehicle to amplify your brand as good content will often be shared. When content is shared, people who haven’t come in to contact with your business before will start to become familiar with your brand and may click through to read your blog. This gives your website the opportunity to turn this new visitor, that wouldn’t have landed on your site if it wasn’t for your blog content being shared, into a lead.

It often takes a bit of promotion to get your blog content shared, so use our checklist to help spread your blog towards every corner of the internet.

Should Your Business Bother With Blogging?

In short, yes. Despite all the different types of content that are emerging, blogs are still a solid foundation for your content marketing efforts. Unlike social media posts that often disappear after a few hours, blogs remain searchable on the internet and can generate significant traffic to your site over time. Blogs will also help both you and your business build authority and create a connection with potential clients.

The obvious obstacle to creating enough blog content to make a meaningful impact is time. Most business owners are already busy enough as it is without adding regular blogs to your to-do list. If you are the business owner, then delegation is one of the most critical skills to learn. It’s possible to delegate both the content marketing strategy and implementation to a team of content professionals who can help make sure that your blog stands out above the competition.