To stay afloat in the highly competitive e-commerce world, online retailers have to adapt to an ever-changing landscape hunting for the ways to build a strong web presence, engage new customers, and retain the existing ones. 

Creating a well-performing website is only half the battle. Establishing comprehensive online marketing and branding strategies that provide opportunities for businesses to go further is no less important. 

This is where a blog can shine. According to recent Hubspot research, blogs are among the primary forms of media used in content strategies today.

If you are looking for inspiration, here are five powerful benefits of blogging for your small retail business. 

1: Blogging Boosts Google Ranking And Increase Website Quality

The Google algorithms are constantly changing but one thing remains the same: the relevance of website content to the user’s query is among the key factors for Google ranking.

This means that if you want to rank higher, every page of your website should provide a solution to user’s problems. The principle is the following: they ask, you answer.

The process of website evaluation is vague. However, it is known for a fact that Google takes into account users’ behavior to judge websites’ quality. For instance, a high bounce rate along with a low dwell time are both indicators for the search engines that the page doesn’t satisfy the users’ queries and have to be lowered in the ranking.

According to Hubspot, blogging champions as #1 method for increasing traffic, ahead of SEO, email marketing, and paid search ads.

Blogging boosts SEO by positioning your site as a relevant answer to your customer’s questions. Besides, adding a blog will help you with a plethora of things that considered as vital ranking factors:

• With a blog, you can keep visitors on your website for longer. The longer people are on your site researching your content, the lower is a bounce rate and the higher is dwell time. 
• By publishing fresh content and updating the existing one, you will give Google a reason to index your site more often and eyes it as active.
• A blog will give you an opportunity to target long-tail keywords you want to rank for.

Articles published in your blog can help you establish a powerful link building strategy as they will give other sites more reasons to link back to your content. In fact, businesses that have implemented a blog receive 97% more links.  

2: Blog Helps Set You Up As an Expert

The latest marketing researches show that people are prone to buy products from industry leaders, companies that know the ropes, and make no bounce of showing it. Relevant, high-quality, insightful, and valuable information makes consumers more likely to take action. 

As such, your blog may include informative content, tips and tricks, use cases, tutorials, product reviews, how-to guides, as well as the latest news related to your industry to keep your audience updated. 

As long as your posts are insightful, interesting, and accurate, they have a tremendous impact on building your authority and brand awareness. If visitors leave your blog satisfied, they will go straight to your site when another question arises in their minds. Whenever they are ready to buy a product, they know where to go. 

Also Read: What is the Biggest Problem Bloggers Face Today?

To make things clear, let’s assume that you own an online store selling hardware components. Within your blog, you are regularly posting helpful tips on choosing the computer supplies, product reviews, as well as step-by-step guides on building a computer single-handedly.

Your audience is growing and more and more computer geeks are visiting your site for ideas and inspiration. Whenever they want to buy hardware components, where do you think they will go?

3: Blogging Helps You Generate New Leads

Blogs are robust customer engagement and re-engagement tool that can bring people to your digital domain. Here is the thing: a frequently updated blog with quality content is a lead generation machine. 

Blogs can assist with lead generation in several ways:

• By making people share your content.

People like to share. Let’s think about it. We all enthusiastically tell others about the dress we are dreaming about, the cafe we have recently visited, the sneakers we have bought. Lots of marketers recognized the people’s desire to share as a marketing opportunity – and so should you.

• By increasing organic traffic to your site.

The latest stats show that only 29% of consumers are willing to talk with sales reps to learn more about the products and 62% prefer to ask Google. 

• By adding more subscribers to your email lists.

A blog is a great way to get more email subscribers. As such, you can encourage customers to join your email list to get your content delivered straight to their inbox. 

• By delivering additional tools for users’ engagement. 

Pop Ups, live chat, various widgets, and other additional marketing tools implemented to blogs are able to capture more leads. Let’s take a look at the Jeff Bullas blog. He promotes his book on the sidebar of his blog homepage.

4: Blog Helps Get Feedback From Your Customers

Some companies create great business websites that provide customers with the information they need, but there is often no room for discussion.

That is the reason why a blog is so vigorous. It gives a greater voice to the audience. People can leave comments on content, ask questions, or initiate conversations. It is an interactive platform that creates a proactive dialog between your customers and business building trust and authority for your brand.

5: All the Cool Companies Are Doing It

If you are still doubtful of whether your small retail business needs a blog, here is food for thought: almost all companies from the Fortune 500 list have and maintain their own blogs.

Those companies have never had reputations as newcomers, but even they have been forced into the blogging arena to capture a market share. It is up to you to make sure you get the jump on them by implementing an exhaustive business blogging approach to your company’s web presence. 

However, building a blog for a small retail company is not the easiest task. Some platforms, say, WordPress has embedded features for this purpose, some platforms don’t have ones.

In some cases, you’ll need the help of an agency providing e-commerce consulting services for support. After all, all the money and resources will definitely pay off. 

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