You already understand the fundamental purpose of blogs: to share information and ideas with your audience. But there’s a more practical reason to blog, too. Evidence shows well maintained and updated blogs can actually strengthen your SEO and improve your rankings over time.

Blogs, Keywords, and SEO

Stephanie LeVonne explains the SEO benefits of a blog in her recent article on Search Engine Land, “Will My Organic Rankings Suffer If I Don’t Have a Blog?”
According to LeVonne, a blog is a useful tool for expanding your content so you can cast a wider net for popular keywords. For example, if you’re an appliance repair company, you can use your blog to cover topics specifically related to appliance malfunctions, as well as tangential topics like household cleaning techniques and kitchen renovations. Just make sure you choose topics you know your target audience will be interested in. By covering brand-specific topics and loosely related topics in equal measure, you’ll increase your keyword base all around.
LeVonne also points out that, beyond keywords, blogs boost your SEO score on the merits of fresh content creation alone:

As an added benefit, an influx of fresh content requires Google to regularly crawl and index your site, and fresh content is a consideration when Google ranks your page in search results.

Blogs Help Sales

Of course, the ultimate goal of SEO is to create more brand awareness and increase sales.
Blog posts help you achieve this by giving you more content and making it possible for you to appear more often in the search engine results pages (SERPs). As a result, you’ll increase your click-through rate. Obviously, driving more traffic to your site is the first step in educating prospective customers about your company. And, as LeVonne notes, your audience enters the sales conversion funnel the minute they start reading your blog—before they even realize they might want to make a purchase down the road. Soon, your readers could become paying customers.
To sum up, blogs:

• Give you more topics to draw in a wider range of prospective customers.
• Improve your SEO and Google rankings thanks to more keywords and fresher content.
• Put more prospective customers into your sales funnel.

If you haven’t created a blog on your website yet, how much more convincing do you need?
Be sure to read Stephanie LeVonne’s full article for more details, strategies, and helpful suggestions!