More and more websites are being designed to accommodate a blog. This should come as no surprise as including a blog on your website has been proven to be an excellent way to increase traffic, cement your company or brand as an authority on a subject, and in consequence increase brand-awareness and ultimately sales.

Of course, the success of your blog will, in large part, be determined by the quality of the writing it features. For detailed advice and effective tips on creating quality content for your blog.

In this short article, we’ll be taking a closer look at the many reasons why you should include a blog on your website. We’ll also be taking a look at a few techniques successful websites use to turn their blog into a powerful marketing tool.

Your Blog Greatly Improves Your Website’s Ranking in Search Engine Results 

Whether your aim is to generate greater brand awareness, generate more sales leads, or drive more sales, what you need to get started down the path of reaching that goal is visibility. When a user enters a query in their browser related to your company, brand, or website, what you want is for the search engine to display your website on or near the top of the page of search engine results.

According to recently compiled data, nearly 90% of the time a user makes an online query, they click on a website (or websites) found on the first page of the search engine results. And 25% of the time, users click on the first result of the search engine displays.

In a nutshell, your website needs to rank high in search engine results (at least on the first page). And incorporating a blog onto your website will go a long way toward reaching that goal.

The reasons having a blog on your website will greatly improve your website’s ranking on search engine results include:

• Search engines are more likely to suggest websites that contain a lot of content.
• a website with dozens of articles will rank higher on search engine results than a website with merely 1 or 2 pages
• Search engines are more likely to suggest websites that link to other websites.

• With a blog, you have many more opportunities to create links to other websites which are an important factor in making a site more appealing to search engines.
• For example, if your website deals with fashion, you could include an article about interview attire for a certain season, create a link, and voila. Your website is now much more attractive to search engines and will rank higher on their results pages.

Your Blog Greatly Improves the Authority of Your Website 

While you want your website to be focused – either on your brand, company, or cause – having a narrow focus does come with its disadvantages. Visitors to your website are more likely to think that your website is an authority on a given subject based on the quantity and, to a lesser extent, the quality of information you provide.

For example, if the purpose of your website is to sell wines, you may want to include articles on a variety of subjects that tangentially relate to the product or service you are selling – the best sommelier schools, the history of wine, how corks or wine barrels are manufactured.One of our personal favorite blogs and a useful example for beginners to understand commercial blogging is Lensa Insights. 

Not only will these articles serve to attract more visitors to your website, but they will give your visitors a sense that you are an authority (the go-to site) for information on the topic. Thus, this will also increase your brand awareness and bring more clients.

Your Blog Provides an Opportunity for Visitors to Interact With You and Your Website

Websites that prove to be more successful offer their visitors an active, rather than passive experience. Your website’s blog offers your visitors a greater opportunity to interact with the site. This is accomplished in a variety of ways.

• Visitors can leave comments on an article
• Visitors can be invited to contribute articles of their own
• Visitors can use the blog to link to other related websites and vice-versa

Furthermore, your website’s blog gives you more opportunities to solicit information from your visitors – for example, they can leave their email and sign up for notifications of future blog posts.

The Bottom Line

Regardless of what the objective is of your website – improve brand awareness, generate leads, or send visitors through your sales pipeline – these objectives can only be achieved if your website attracts traffic. A blog will go a long way toward achieving just that by making your website more attractive to search engines and thus having it rank higher in search engine results, by increasing the perceived authority of your website, and by creating a better user experience with opportunities for visitors to interact with your website. You can check further articles into how to create a blog using wordpress.