Why you need to integrate a self-hosted blog with your company website
For high school students, stay at home moms or people who just want to tinker around with writing, publishing a blog on a free blogging platform’s domain such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com, or TypePad.com may work just fine.
But, for business development purposes, you really want your company blog to be associated with your main business website. Not integrating your blog with your company’s main website can cause more damage than good.
Before we get to the SEO Benefits of Business Blogging, let’s set up the blog by asking these basic questions; What type of company blog do I need? Where should I place the blog?
WHAT TYPE OF COMPANY BLOG DO I NEED
There are essentially two types of business blogs, company news and educational. Each has good qualities and could be right for you. Design your blog based on the objectives and goals you’ve set. Here are the differences.
Company News and/or product blogs use company focused content about products, services and achievements. Publishing product or company-focused content is okay in a company news blog in fact it is expected. On the flip side, if people are visiting your blog expecting to find educational content and all they find is you talking about how great your products and services are, you’re not going to attract very many return readers to sign up for your newsletter or share your content.
Educational blogs focus on business blogging that allows you to exhibit thought leadership and expertise. Publishing educational, data-driven and thought-provoking content relative to your industry has a better chance of highlighting your Brand, going viral and giving a better ROTI.
Do you need to change the way you think about content for you blog?
WHERE SHOULD MY BLOG BE LOCATED
One of the benefits of keeping your blog and website together is that the thought leadership on your blog increases the credibility and trustworthiness of your brand and its products. Thus the ideal home for your blog is either on a sub-domain of your main website (e.g. http://blog.mywebsite.com) or in a folder of your main website (e.g. http://mywebsite.com/blog). If you use WordPress as your CMS the system will allow you to choose what to call your blog and automatically create the page and you get the added advantage of built-in SEO benefits.
Both of these options will allow your corporate website to benefit from the search engine optimization advantages your blog will generate.
[su_highlight background=”#99f2ff”]Now, as promised, here are three major reasons you need to integrate a self-hosted blog with your corporate website:[/su_highlight]
SEO Benefits of a Business Blog
SEARCH ENGINE PLACEMENT
The biggest benefit of Business Blogging is the creation of spider food and its impact on search engine placement. Because each new blog article you publish creates a new web page you get more opportunities to ensure search engine optimization for your product or service keywords. If you create informative, unique, compelling content on a regular basis your website grows in stature and Google view this new content as organic growth.
Having a robust, quality business blog will also help the other pages on your site rank through other SEO factors such as internal page linking, keyword reinforcement, freshness, and social sharing. Thus, any SEO juice you generate from your blog will automatically benefit your corporate website as well.
COMPANY BRANDING
You put a lot of planning and effort into creating your brand. Even the smallest mistake can have negative impact. That is why I want to warn you about a few negatives associated with hosting your blog separate from your main website that could affect your company’s branding.
First, even if you link to the offsite blog from your website’s main navigation, your site visitors will get sent to a completely different website. Secondly, the design and branding elements may not be consistent with your main website and may result in confusion. Furthermore, sending site visitors to a blog on a free platform can result in the perception of your brand as unprofessional or unreliable, undermining your credibility as a business. NOTE; This is also why we encourage clients to make use of their own URL for the company email address NOT @yahoo.com or some other free email service. Company Image is everything.
Most Importantly – the goal is to attract visitors to your main website by using your blog as bait. Ultimately, you want all of the engagement to happen on your main website, and you want your blog visitors to associate your blog with your brand name. That brings us to. . .
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT (Social Media)
Social media engagement is for all intents the most critical component of business blogging. The reason blogs work so well for social media is people like to share great content on the social media channels they frequent. These social shares in turn increase your referral traffic as well as your organic traffic.
WordPress SEO Plugins that will help your Social Media efforts
By using social share widgets such as Ultimate Social Media and Mashshare Social which place floating social share icons on your blog posts and pages, gives readers the option of sharing your content.
Including behind the scene SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO and WP Social SEO will ensure that you get the full SEO value of all your article titles and descriptions. These handy SEO tools add the required code to get optimum performance from Open Graph, Google+, Twitter and other social sharing sites. Using these plugins and solid Search engine optimization practices will help make your company blog a force to be reckoned with in your industry.
THREE BUSINESS BLOGGING TAKEAWAYS
- Make sure you create a self-hosted blog to garner all the SEO and Branding benefits.
- Design your blog based on the objectives and goals you’ve set
- Set up a social sharing plugin to encourage Customer Engagement
[tweet_box design=”default”]SEO Benefits of a Company blog- Get 55% more visitors 97% more inbound links 434% more indexed pages.[/tweet_box]
OK, I know I only touched on the edges here but the importance of using a self-hosted blog on your corporate website are obvious and compelling. If you would like to add to this discussion I hope you will post a comment or share on your network.
Michael Klasno is SERP Sniper – Building local optimized websites for Attorneys, Law Firms and Business Professionals in Houston and Southeast Texas.
Michael Klasno is a consummate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist with an impressive 20-year tenure in the digital marketing landscape. Throughout two decades, Michael has been at the forefront of evolving website design & SEO strategies, seamlessly integrating the latest trends with time-tested methodologies.
His SEO expertise encompasses a vast array of skills, including keyword research, technical SEO, (both on-page and off-page) Local SEO, Google Business Profile optimization, SEO auditing, competitive analysis, and content strategy formulation.
“By building a cost effective corporate or business website that looks great and has a high conversion rate you can dominate the organic search results.”
