A blog is a great way to communicate with your online visitors.
A blog can be defined as: “An online diary where people can post messages and others may view and respond to the posts.” So what does this mean for your business? Well, for one thing, this means you have the ideal opportunity to interact with your visitors on a more informal platform.
Blogs are a fantastic way to add unique, quality content onto your site without having to be as formal as you usually would. Adding information like company news, industry news and press releases adds quality, on topic content to your website. Remember, the more relevant content you have on your website, the better chance of it being found.
Another reason for having a company blog is that they enable you to interact publicly with your customers. Blogs have the ability for people to leave comments on your posts. This means that if your company launches a new product/service you have a great opportunity to answer any questions people might have about it. This can lead to an increased sales conversion rate.
The question then needs to be asked, do you go for an offsite or onsite company blog? First let’s look at the difference between the two.
Onsite Company Blog. An onsite company blog is one which is on your company website itself. For example your blog might be http://www.company.com/blog or http://blog.company.com.
Offsite Company Blog. An offsite company blog is a blog on an external domain, or free domain where you can write posts about your online business and link back to your main website.
So which is better, an onsite or offsite company blog?
They both have their benefits however we lean towards an onsite company blog for a few reasons.
- You are adding quality, relevant content regularly. Search engines love websites that regularly update and have fresh content.
- You can make use interlink your pages. It is good SEO practise to make sure your pages are interlinked to each other. More specifically, you need to ensure that these pages are interlinked correctly and you are channelling your link juice to the right pages.
- Build your reputation in your industry. By having a blog directly linked to your company you really illustrate your expertise in your field.
The main benefit of an offsite company blog is that you can make great use of obtaining external links to your website. However, the fresh, well written unique content you are placing on this site could be much more potent if it was indeed placed on your website rather than externally.
