Do I need a blog?

This is a neat article and it is so true:

Do I Really Need a Blog?

Written by Nick Stamoulis
One of the first things we recommend to full service or consulting SEO clients is to add a blog to their website if they don’t already have one and to start publishing posts regularly. It’s not uncommon to get pushback from clients since blogging is time consuming. Another deterrent is that there’s no way to directly tie blogging efforts back to sales, since blog posts are informational in nature and tend to capture people at the top of the sales funnel while they are doing research and aren’t ready to buy. Blog readers may never be ready to buy. So, is a blog really needed? Yes, it is. Here’s why:

Ability to target more keywords

Doing keyword research and optimizing the homepage and primary product/service/category pages on a website serves as a great foundation for an SEO campaign. However, each of these pages can really only target a few keywords, tops. It’s likely that there are plenty more (including longtails) that are relevant to what you offer and have search volume, but aren’t the best ones to target on these main pages. This is where blogging comes in. You can target these longtail keywords in blog posts and gain the ability to appear for more searches overall.

Gain more inbound links

Inbound links are an important search engine ranking trust factor. The best links are the ones that occur naturally when another site owner decides that your site has content that is worth linking to. In general, people are more likely to link to informative blog content than promotional service/product pages. In addition to improving search engine trust, these links will also drive traffic to the website.

Keeps your site fresh

The search engines like sites that are updated regularly and keep their content “fresh.” Whenever a website is updated and new pages are added, it gives the search engines reason to come back and crawl it and can result in a ranking boost.

Enhances your social media presence

Despite no longer being “new” many companies still aren’t using social media properly. They might set up a profile but then they either don’t post anything or post content that is of little value to followers. Blogging is a way to ensure that you always have something to share with social media followers, keeps social media profiles active, and helps to gain new followers.
Of course, the key to blogging success is to create high-quality blog posts that will resonate with target audience members. Posting thin content is actually worse than not posting any content at all. If resources are an issue, focus on posting a few well thought out articles a month to start. As you get the hang of things, you’ll be able to up it to once a week. Over time this will strengthen the website overall and generate more organic search traffic