Dale Franks writes a nice piece on Blogging is for Business on the Qanda (question and answer) blog. Franks says businesses are keen on blogging because it is “an excellent way for businesses to increase their visibility on the web, and to project their brand into the marketplace.” He points out some blogs offer key advantages for business seeking to get the word out about their services. I’ll summarize the keys one for you.
- Blogging software sends notification to the major blog update services whenever the weblog is updated so thousands of potential customers are notified when they peruse the list of recently updated weblogs. The more often the weblog is updated, the more often this potential customer stream is pulled towards the web site.
- My comment: Also adds incoming links to improve the blogs search engine ranking.
Constant updates help with search engine placement. Many search engines use an algorithm in their “spiders”, i.e., web programs that catalogue your web site’s content for the search engine, that causes them to spider your site more frequently if the content is regularly updated. If you have a static web site, the frequency of spidering falls off, and your web site may begin to drop lower and lower in search engine placement as its perceived relevance declines. By maintaining a regularly updated blog, you keep the search engine spiders coming to your site, and your relevance stays high.
A blog is an excellent way to implement search engine optimization. If you want people to find your blog or web site through searches on Google or Yahoo, you have to have content that the search engine can match with the types of searches that users are doing to find businesses like yours. A blog creates content that contains those important key words and phrases that users enter into a search engine when looking for your service.
A blog is also a fantastic communication tool. Because of the power of blogs to draw traffic to you, they also provide you with an avenue of direct communication with your customers. Traditional methods of communicating with the public, such as press releases, often have to pass through a media filter. Information may not be reported the way you’d like to see it presented or may not be presented at all. Effective PR also costs a lot of money. A blog offers a low-cost method of direct communication with your customers. Because most blog software offers readers a comments function, your readers can communicate with you directly. This gives you the opportunity to get direct feedback from your customers, and to respond to customer feedback directly.
A blog increases the ability of your staff to contribute content. Traditional web sites make it difficult for your employees to add content, because they don’t know how to put content into web pages. You must either have a Webmaster that can get content on the Internet, or you have to be satisfied with less staff input on your Internet content. Blog software requires no knowledge of HTML coding. You write text into an input box, and the blog software handles all of the HTML formatting for you automatically. Anyone on your staff can contribute content easily and directly to your blog site.
- My comment: This is a big deal in law firms where law marketing professionals are overworked and their departments are often understaffed. Blogs empower lawyers to handle more marketing with little marketing staff involvement.
Like Franks says, blogs are “…[not] just for political junkies or compulsive journal-writers.” The blog “…[O]ffers your business effective new ways of communicating, building web site traffic, and increasing your search engine placement.”
