This article kicks off our new series, Why your competition is blogging, with Reason #15: To attract customers.
15) Why your competition is blogging: To attract customers
Attracting potential customers to a company’s website through blogging is a large part of the Corporate Blogger’s role.
Why does a company with a blog have an advantage in attracting customers over a company without a blog?
1) Google LOVES BLOGS
Why does Google love blogs?
- a) Fresh Content. It all goes back to Google’s charter “to deliver the most relevant search result to searchers”. Blogs, by nature, are updated regularly – ie. their content is fresh. Fresh information is more likely to be relevant to a searcher than old information on the same topic.
- b) Search Engine Friendly. Most blog platforms are search engine friendly – making it easy for Google to read and index the site in the Google database. If Google has difficulty reading your site (not uncommon with other ‘static’ websites), your site might not get indexed properly or at all.
- c) Blogs notify Google of changes. All modern blog platforms notify Google the second an update is made (this is known as a ‘ping’). This is a signal to Google to come back to re-read and re-index its database with the new information. Static sites don’t ping and therefore need to wait until Google (in its own time) decides to come back and have a look at your site.
These three reasons alone mean that a company with a blog as a website already has an advantage in the search engines – based purely on platform alone.
2) Bloggers build bridges
Someone, somewhere has a problem that your business has the answer for.
Naturally these people ‘google it’ to try and find a solution.
A good Corporate Blogger can:
- Find out what customer are searching for by perform keyword research
- Write Search Engine Optimised articles (based on the keyword research) that appear on the first page of Google when those customers are searching
- Build a bridge between what the person was searching for and the services your business is offering
- Persuade the potential customer to take action (ie. contact your business, download a brochure etc)
Finally, a good Corporate Blogger can persuade customers to keep coming back – especially if there is continual fresh, relevant content being continually updated.
3) Bloggers can blanket the market
Search Engine Optimisation is one weapon, however good bloggers have an arsenal of weapons that they can use to ensure that wherever potential customers are online, the company will have a presence.
These weapons include:
- a) Advertising – paying for advertisements to appear either on search engines and/or on relevant websites.
- b) Social Media – participating on targeted social media sites to attract customers.
- c) Affiliate Marketing – partnering with affiliate marketers who will be incentivised to get customers to take an action (eg. buy a product online).
- d) Email Marketing – keeping leads warm by relationship building over email (and/or RSS feeds)
Using all of these weapons (and more), a corporate blogger can even blanket out all competition so that no matter where a potential customer goes online (eg. Facebook, twitter, online forums etc) they may have no choice but to see your brand.
Why your competition is blogging: Conclusion
As you can see, the reason your competition is blogging is no accident.
One significant reason is to attract customers.
Business blogging attracts customers because:
- Google loves blogs
- Bloggers build bridges (between what people are searching for and what you offer), and
- Bloggers can blanket the market
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