For customers to find you, they turn to their favorite search engine. They don’t start by typing in your website because they don’t know you exist yet. How can you make sure potential customers find you when they need you?

Sharing links on social media doesn’t often reach potential customers at the time they’re searching for businesses like yours. Paid ads work but disappear after your allocated funds run out, or when you stop paying for them. Email newsletters are a great option once your customer has found you and subscribed, but there is something that works really well. It’s free, and its benefits compound over time.

Blogging is how businesses grab their potential customers’ attention, increasing organic traffic to their websites. You likely have competitors selling products or services similar to yours, and consumers rarely scroll past the tenth result on the search engine results page (SERP). So, how do you rank higher than your competition on SERPs? The answer is blogging regularly and effectively. When you blog, you can insert keywords your audience uses in their search bar to find you and businesses like yours. Here are the advantages of blogging for your company:

You can move up the results page, also known as search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google reward companies for new content, keywords, and amount of indexed pages by moving them up in the results page.

Posting regular blogs is the best way to contribute to factors that put your business higher on a search engine listing. Blogs should be educational, valuable, and relevant to your target audience.

However, you could actually do more harm than good if the search engine considers your blog too sales-heavy or “stuffed” with keywords. Use keywords naturally, and just a few per blog to have the best effect. Otherwise, you’ll be penalized and moved down the ranks for ‘stuffing’.

A blog is more than a blog. Blog posts are content, education, and authority. They become a multi-use resource to which users often add more content to using comments & sharing.

Blog posts easily convert into other forms of outreach for target audiences in varying places and at varied times. For example, once you create a blog, you can also post the link on your social media pages. This handles your social media content while generating traffic and discussions through quality blog posts.

Additionally, blogs can become audio posts or scripts for a podcast. You can turn it into a YouTube video, infographic, or slide deck. You have a dozen different uses for one piece of content creation.

Your blog can even attract new talent. Others might want to help curate content and build a brand voice for you. Influencers might request interviews. Industry bloggers might contact you for quotes and opinions in their own blogs. You open many doors with well-written blogs within your marketing funnel.

A Pew Research study shows that Americans crave learning. They pursue additional knowledge specifically for personal and work-related gain. Digital technology assists us in those pursuits.

Give your audience something to learn about, something that leaves you looking like an expert in your field and leaves them yearning for more information from you. Do a good job and they’ll return to you again and again for reliable advice.

Remember that not every blog post needs to be business-related. Give your audience a variety to read. Answer common questions. Show how your product or service solves typical problems. Build trust by giving your audience reliable and honest information. Encourage engagement by adding links to your social media accounts with comment sections.

Businesses can quickly look like cold, hard, money-making machines in the eyes of their audience. Blogs help reveal the softer, human side of a company.

You have the chance to become more than a company. You become a brand that others identify with. You become a knowledgeable leader in your industry. Once your brand has become relatable, the cross-channel multi-functionality of blogging helps you expand to more audiences.

Your blogs are full of valuable information. They reveal your knowledge and show off your professionalism. You answer questions and show how beneficial your product or service is in solving dilemmas. Plus, the educational aspects of your information make for excellent customer attraction and retention.

You’ve already built trust with your audience. To compound that trust, personalize your content to readers, use multiple channels, and automate posting to a schedule so posts appear regularly.

Every blog equals a new indexed page for search engines, which is part of the equation for getting higher SERP rankings. Since blogs don’t go away like ads do, your well-placed keywords give you returns for years to come.

Blogging helps companies of all shapes and sizes, from online-only entities to mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar operations. It’s how customers connect to the businesses they’re searching for, and businesses attract and build a relationship with their audience.

Blogging is one of the best investments a company can make. Potential customers find your website, and you generate new leads that you can nurture and convert. You will establish more brand awareness and authority. Additionally, you’ll see how your audience engages with different posts and learn what interests them and what topics become popular. This data can lead to unexpected but rewarding avenues.

It takes time to create a blog, and remembering to post blogs regularly can be difficult. Make the time and set a schedule for posting. Hire a team member or a service to help with this part if necessary; your consistent efforts will be worth it.