Five Reasons Why Every Local Business Needs a Blog

A blog can be a great addition to any business’ existing website or it can serve as a business’ presence on the Web. And considering that nearly 50% of small businesses do not have a website – and small businesses make up about 99.9% of all businesses – establishing a presence on the Web in the form of a blog can do wonders for your business.

It doesn’t matter if you do business primarily or entirely offline or not, today’s consumers use the Internet to find businesses to do business with. And that’s especially true when it comes to local business, as Google recently reported that 20% of all Google searches have a local “flavour” to them (that number goes up to about 33% when you look at Google searches via the mobile Web).

And those numbers are only going to increase as Google and other search engines continue to improve local search capabilities and consumers continue to turn to the Internet in general and search engines in particular – and away from traditional tools – to find local businesses to do business with.

Establish and Build Your Reputation

People generally prefer doing business with companies and people that they know or, at least, feel like they know. You may have framed mission and value statements hanging on a wall in your office, but do your customers really understand what your business is all about and what it is trying to achieve? Do they know what’s important to you as a company? Do your customers understand the values and goals that are important to your business? A blog makes it possible for you to highlight achievements and contributions you’re proud of – such as charities you’re involved with and community activities you sponsor – showcase customer problems your business’ solutions have addressed – all with the intention of building your brand and solidifying your reputation.

Grow Customer Relationships

You might have some demographic/psychographic data on the people who are buying your business’ products and services, but what do you really know about them? People who are interested in what you have to say on your blog are probably your best customers and the more you know about your best customers, the better you equip yourself to find more of them. The comment portion of every blog post creates opportunities for you to engage in dialogues with your customers in a unique way. While the majority of your marketing efforts are limited to one-way messages, blog posts open up two-way communications.}

Build Customer Loyalty

Your customers want to get to know who they’re doing business with. And the more they know you – and know about you – the more loyal they become. As you showcase some of the different services and solutions your business offers, your customers and prospective customers are exposed to new and different ways in which you can help them, and they end up doing more business with you. Creating content around customer success stories is a great way to solidify your relationships with those customers and also to position different services and solutions in a way that helps to sell them without selling. And by offering the ability to subscribe to your blog – via email or RSS – you can keep your customer base up-to-date on your latest posts on auto-pilot.

Establish Yourself as an Authority

Without a blog, your website is simply a flashy online brochure filled with marketing messages. And, if you’re like many business owners, your website probably doesn’t generate a lot of business. By adding a blog you will be able to establish yourself as an authority on your niche through the content you post and the dialogues you engage in with customers. And you’ll start to see that your blog will become a source of business. Letting customers and potential customers get to know you, what you’re all about and all about the problems you’ve solved for other people will go a long way towards cementing you as an authority in your field.

Drive Traffic

Blogs are search engine magnets because search engines – like the people who use them – love fresh content. And while a static website offers up nothing fresh for search engines to consume, regularly updated blogs – whose posts are rich with high-value keywords – keep search engine spiders coming back for more. Every post creates an opportunity for you to capture new rankings in the search results and, with them, more targeted traffic.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, we’ll spotlight some local businesses in different markets that have been enjoying success in their markets as a result of their blogs (if you’ve got a local business blogging success story and you’d like grab the spotlight, send me an email and we’ll see what we can do).

Interested in adding a blog to an existing website; or, perhaps, establishing your presence on the web with a standalone blog? Click on the link to contact me for a free and painless – relatively speaking – consultation.