Why Blogging Is Important for Business Growth: 6 Key Benefits

Blogging is one of the best things you can do for your business. It helps the right people find you, showcases your services and expertise without selling, allows you to share your thought leadership, and helps you stand out from your peers. Here are the six key business benefits of having a regular blog publishing schedule for your business.

1. Blogging Improves SEO Rankings

When you publish new content on your website, it sends signals that the expertise you share is the latest and that you’re keeping it fresh. Regular blogs mean you’re more likely to be found online with both traditional search engines and AI tools. For the best results, you need to have a strong SEO strategy. That means understanding your audience, knowing what they are searching for and their intention behind that search.

Blogs often form a key part of this. If you can attract the right people to your website with helpful and clear content, you can gain their trust enough so they want to find out more about your services.

Creating good SEO content, in your brand tone of voice and speaking directly to your customer is a balancing act sometimes, but it is one worth doing. Plus, the better the quality of the blog, the better the search results will be for it.

Blogs bring in traffic. The right blogs will bring your potential customers to you, rather than you hunting them out. That’s got to be one of the best reasons to write a blog, right?

Yet, one of the big mistakes that businesses make is only creating SEO content for the top of the funnel. These are usually the broader subjects and the how-to articles. While it’s still important to write these kinds of blogs, the way in which people are searching is changing.

Often, this top-of-funnel content is often shown through AI results. This means that your potential customer may be getting their answers without ever clicking on your website. This is known as zero-click search. It doesn’t mean that you should stop creating this content. You want citations in the zero click search as it helps increase your visibility on AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.

However, it does mean that you want more in-depth middle- and bottom-of-funnel content. That means addressing more complex subjects, going into deeper and more technical answers and creating the comparison content that saves your reader time.

More importantly, as AI soaks up ever more top-of-funnel traffic, we can assume that when someone does hit our websites, they are doing so with some awareness of your services and brand. This is a good thing, and the blogs you create need to answer their different needs.

2. Use Your Blogs To Answer Customer Questions

Let’s say you don’t get many leads or sales with SEO. That’s okay, as there are many other ways to market a business. But people will want to check out your website to make sure you’re legitimate and trustworthy. They will also have lots of questions about you, your business and your product.

Questions like:

• How does this work?
• How much does this cost?
• Why should I buy this?
• Is it better than this other thing I’ve seen?
• How long will it take?
• What’s in it for me?
• What can I expect if I buy this?
• What if something goes wrong?

Now, of course, you can answer these on an FAQ page or a sales page, but wouldn’t it be nice for your potential new customer to read the answer in a blog? That goes into depth and answers any secondary questions they might have.

While bunging all of your FAQs on one page for your customer to scroll through might make your life easier, it’s not necessarily making their life easier.

How many times have you found an FAQ, got to the end and seen the little question: was this helpful? Most of the time, you’re probably thinking, “No, not really. It answered a question, but not my specific question, which is more nuanced than the generic two-paragraph answer here.”

Of course, you can’t cover every single possibility in a blog, but you can give it your best try. And your reader is more likely to build trust in you and your brand because you’ve gone to the effort of fully answering their questions. See also the point above about this kind of content becoming more important as search behaviours change.

3. Share Your Unique Insights and Thought Leadership

As more businesses are leveraging AI to create their blogs, it becomes essential that you stand out as the expert in your field. The only way to do this is by sharing your unique experience and brand story. Blogs allow you to do this, as you can go deeper into a subject, demonstrate your expertise, and share any unique research you’ve developed.

If you’re a purpose-led business, combining your expertise with the difference you’re trying to make in the world can give you a bigger impact on both your purpose and your business. There is more room for storytelling in blogs than in most other content types.

By their very nature, blogs are storytelling devices. This means that you can delve deeper into your brand story, your positioning and how you help your customers through a blog. You can demonstrate the challenge over adversity and get the outcome that your future customer very much wants.

4. 50% of people buy after reading a blog

Yet, a blog isn’t a sales page. It showcases what the business can do and creates trust in your services. This is the opposite of advertising, yet it is a great driver for sales. Again, looking at the questions people ask when they are close to buying will help them make the right decisions for their needs.

Blogs form part of the sales process. They can help move someone to the next stage in their buyer journey or help existing clients understand more of the services you offer.

A truly great blog keeps someone reading right through until the end. It’s part of a bigger strategy where you move someone from not knowing about you to buying from you again and again.

Blogs are brilliant at doing this because they can entertain and inform. People enjoy reading. It takes them to different worlds and shows them endless possibilities. You can’t get that on your sales page. And a blog can form part of a series that helps convey complex ideas.

5. Blogs Built Stronger Trust With Leads

When you make your blog entertaining or, dare I say it, funny, then you create a connection with your reader. They want to know more about you and to get to know your business a whole lot more. By bringing through a strong voice and standing out from all the other content online, you’ll build trust faster with people.

Blogging is important to businesses because connecting with people is the fast track to selling. It’s one of the best ways of delivering your argument. It can also be repurposed into newsletters, social media, podcasts and videos.

Oh, and that brings me to the final point.

6. Blogs can help you write a book

That’s right. If you’ve ever dreamed of writing a book but find the whole massive word count a touch overwhelming, getting a collection of amazing blogs together takes you part of the way there.

Let’s say you only blog once a month, that’s 12,000 words ready to be edited together into a book draft. Not bad for something that is also doing all of that stuff up above.

Although writing a book, even with a good blog archive, takes time. You can fast-track some of this by using blogs to test your book ideas. Find out which blogs get the most traffic and engagement, then look at developing that idea further into a book. Likewise, when you have a core idea that you share, your blog can help refine that idea until it’s ready to bring in a greater level of visibility.

Common Blogging Mistakes To Avoid

Having spent the best part of a decade writing and editing business blogs across all industries, here are some common mistakes that you can avoid.

1. Worrying about word length

When you’re writing online, the only thing you need to worry about is conveying the information in the right way. Word length is generally for printed articles because there is a limit based on design. When you’re writing online, you’re not limited by physical length.

There is some research that longer blogs tend to perform better than shorter ones. But the best way to consider word length is to make sure you’ve included everything that you need to without repeating yourself. Of course, you need a decent word count for SEO, but if your blog subject is good enough, then you’ll probably not need to worry about it.

2. Not putting the reader first

All of these need consideration when writing a blog. Above all, you need to be writing about subjects that your potential clients want to read about and are actively searching for.

3. Getting to the point in the third paragraph

Writing a blog because you want to write about it isn’t enough. You need to put your reader front and centre in your blog. Think about what they need to know, how much information they’ll already have and why they should read the blog in the first place. Is there anything you need to add? Such as video or diagrams to illustrate your points? How can you make it easy for them to use the information?

It’s easily done. You want to build suspense. The reality is that people want answers in the first sentence. Part of the solution is dealing with this in the editing process. The other part is getting a good grounding in blog writing in the first instance. When you know what a good intro looks like, you’ll get better at writing them. Then the good results from your blogs will start to improve.

4. Forgetting that people skim read

If you cannot get a good overview of your blog from your subheadings, then it’s time to edit your blog. While you will lovingly put your blog together and pour effort over every word, most people will skim-read. Knowing this can help you write better blogs for the business and get results.

5. Missing the entertainment

I honestly think there is no business too boring to write about, but there are plenty of boring blogs out there. The important takeaway is that you need to stand out in the age of AI. This means making your blog more entertaining is essential to keeping people on the page long enough to build trust in you.

6. Blogging without a strategy

Whether that’s an SEO strategy or a bigger content marketing strategy, you need to know why you’re blogging and the results that you want from the blogs. Without having a strategy in place, you are at best wasting your time. A strategy will give you structure and a destination. It will also make your blogs more effective. When your blogs sit within a wider strategy, it means you’ve considered where your reader will go at the end of the blog.

Overall, a blog helps answer customer questions and creates that connection with people who might buy from you. Blogging isn’t the be-all and end-all, but very few businesses blog on a regular basis. Almost half of companies with a content marketing strategy use a blog as part of this strategy. That means that the other half are not, and this is an opportunity for most businesses to leverage their company blog and start bringing in the business.

Why is blogging important to business?

If you’re ready to get proper results from your blogs, join the next Blog Confidence course.