A major component of SEO is content marketing: developing well-written, quality content and submitting it to content distribution sites for publication. It not only helps establish you or your company as an expert in your given industry, it also helps raise brand awareness and creates credible in-bound links to your website. But Google’s recent crackdown on “content farms”—websites that produce low quality, republished or spammy content—means that content marketing has taken a hit. Even major content distribution sites like EZineArticles and HubSpot were labeled as “content farms” and fell dramatically in their rankings.
Now, more than ever, companies should be creating, publishing and promoting a company blog. A company blog that produces quality content is less likely to get flagged as spam than an article that got submitted to a general distribution site. A company blog can also rank in the search engines and drive more targeted traffic to the main site.
Here are a few more reasons to create a company blog if you have yet to do so:
1. Blogs give you the opportunity to target specific keywords per post. This gives you the space to go after certain keywords more thoroughly if you feel like they are a little under-represented on your main site. It also allows you to target completely different (yet still related) keywords that you may have had to remove from your site entirely.
2. Company blogs allow you to give a personality and voice to your business and brand. They are a great way to communicate with consumers in a more informal setting and encourage consumer feedback and conversation.
3. Blogs are a great place to quickly post company news and updates. A structured press release can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to get distributed and picked up by news channels. A blog post announces the news immediately.
4. A company blog can help establish your company as an industry expert. If you create your own content, as opposed to republishing work from other authors, you are directly contributing to your field and encourage consumer trust. Over time, your blog could be deemed a credible source of information for anyone looking for information about your industry. This builds reputation and brings a level of prestige to the company.
5. A company blog is also a good way to establish connections with other members of your industry. Invite them to write guest post posts or comment on yours. Do the same for them with their blog and help develop a meaningful relationship. These kinds of relationships can also help with link building, as a link exchange between two companies that work together is fairly common.
The key thing to remember about having a business blog is that you have to actually use it. If you are only going to be able to submit one post a month, it isn’t really worth doing. Aim for at least one post a week to keep the content fresh and relevant and your readers engaged.
