Do I Need A Blog Section On My Website?

Blogs are a brilliant way to bring top-funnel users to your website – learn more with Spark.

Home » Do I Need A Blog Section On My Website?

Gone are the days of blogs typically being reserved for individuals utilising their platform to share opinions, tips and more. Blogs have become one of the most important elements of a business’ website and we’re here today to tell you why you absolutely need a blog section on your site, regardless of your industry.

Drive traffic to your website and turn that traffic into business.

A well-maintained blog section will typically drive the largest percentage of overall traffic to a site. This is because blogs will drive “top funnel” users. Top funnel users fall under the “awareness” section of the marketing funnel, where users are usually using your content for knowledge purposes over being conversion-ready traffic. For example, if you were a business that sold garage doors, you may create content such as “how to keep your garage door in great condition” or “how to get the most out of your garage space”, which are all great topics for the garage door industry but will likely drive traffic that isn’t necessarily in the market for purchases just yet.

However, driving top-funnel users is a fantastic way to build brand awareness, and is a marketing tactic used successfully by businesses across most industries. Not only is this method great in the eyes of the user, but search engines also love it too.

A very important ranking factor is fresh content, and blog content is the quickest and easiest way to keep that fresh content coming. Not only this, but a well-optimised blog piece, with great internal links, keyword inclusion and relevancy can indirectly help improve your rankings elsewhere across your functional content.

Whilst blog sections will typically serve the purpose of brand awareness across your marketing strategy, it is still a great tool to turn a percentage of that traffic into profits. With clever content topics, internal links to your best converting functional pages and trustworthy content, you will drive some of that awareness into intent through blogs. It’s not instant success but it’s definitely worth the time and effort to turn some of those awareness users into customers.

Give your social media and email marketing efforts a boost

Blog content can be shared alongside your social media and email marketing activity to help boost that traffic across the different platforms. It is important to try and keep your strategies across different platforms aligned, so using your platform on email and social media, where you already have an engaged target demographic behind you, is a great place to start sharing that quality content. What’s more, you can repurpose that content across multiple posts and link back directly to your website to encourage shares, engagement and more!

Engage directly with your audience

So, now you’ve written your engaging content, uploaded it to your blog section and the traffic is rolling in across many channel sources, what next? Engage with your audience!

The comment section within blogs is a great way to build authority and trust, whilst making sure your users feel heard and appreciated. Not only this, you can encourage the conversation by asking questions at the end of your blogs to kick things off, and the responses you get from this will provide you with invaluable, direct and quality data to really understand your consumers and what they want from your industry, which could help shape your entire offering.

How to get started with blogging

It’s easy to shout about the benefits of a blog section because well, there are just so many!

But we really want to help you get started so here are some quick tips to help you get going:

Think about what’s trending, how can you add to topics that are hot news right now? Try to be as original as possible, but jumping on trending topics can help push big numbers of people to your site. A great tool to use to get ideas as to what is trending is AnswerThePublic and Exploding Topics, two great platforms to help you understand what the consumer wants to see.
Make sure your content is one of three things, educational, entertaining or inspiring, and ensure you have a great mix of the three across your whole blog section.
Use keyword research! It is so important to ensure that your content is informed through data, if people aren’t searching for the terms you’re using in your content, you won’t get traffic. Make sure your keywords are used only if they are relevant to the topic and form part of a natural style of writing (no keyword stuffing!).
Make sure that your blog pages are easy to navigate and are well optimised for mobile.
Use images and make sure they are optimised with ALT text to encourage traffic from google images.
Be consistent! You need to commit to your blog content to show the search engines and users that you are serious about providing quality information across the landscape.

These tips are a sure way to help you get started and we can’t wait to see what you come up with! If you’re looking for more content guidance please check out our packages or get in touch for more.