FAQs: Why Do We Need a Blog?

What is a blog?

A blog is a digital repository or “place” – normally on your website – where you publish various types of content that display your expertise, your activities, and your opinions about selected issues.

Do I need to call my blog a “blog”?

No, you don’t. Some people like to call their blog “Insights” or “News” or something like that. We’ve had clients call their blogs a “Journal” and even a “weblog” which is the original term for an online journal, with “blog” being a truncated version of that.

What are the benefits of a blog?

We like to say that your website is the foundation or “engine” of your digital marketing. And the blog on a website is kind of the engine of that engine. You see, if a website never has new content – if it just stays the same, like a static digital brochure – search engines such as Google simply won’t rank it very high in search results. Google “crawls” the Internet 24/7 seeking out the most valuable content to display in its search results. It’s pretty clear that sites that regularly publish new content get crawled more often by Google and get ranked higher in search results.

What do I blog about?

Chiefly, you should blog about your areas of expertise and about how you can solve your clients’ and audiences’ problems. People search for helpful content online, and blog content often serves that purpose. Blog content is also very good content to “attach” to your services or issues pages. Let’s say that you are an expert on Topic A. If you blog regularly about various aspects of Topic A, then your blog posts about that subject can appear on your main Topic A page. With content grouped together like this, people can find all the information they need in one place. Google can too, which is why content that is grouped together around a particular topic tends to rank high in online search results.

How long do blog posts need to be?

Of course, it depends. Good writing should not be verbose. If a particular topic can be covered in 300 words, then so be it. In other cases, longer blog posts are required. For longer posts, we recommend breaking up content so that it is more easily “digested,” with numerous headings, subheadings, bulleted lists and numbered lists. These allow readers to scan through the content more easily. Content structured like this is also easier for Google’s search algorithm to understand.

What kind of content should I blog?

We believe that variety is the spice of life. People like variety in what they read, and you can see this when you search for content online. Google will show search results in the form of articles, news, images, videos, and more. So create text-only blog posts, blogs with infographics, blogs with videos, and blogs with listicles. They all help you reach your audiences.