In order to have a competitive advantage, your business has to be highly visible to potential customers. If you are not blogging regularly and providing great content for your audience, you are ignoring one of the best ways catch and retain the interest of your target market. Don’t take our word for it, though. Check out these five reasons why blogging increases your company’s visibility.

1. Blogging Improves SEO Rankings and Drives More Traffic to your Website

Each well-written blog post is a new page that is indexed by search engines, ensuring your website remains relevant and continually updated. When the search engine algorithms crawl over your site, if they see you are posting regularly, it triggers them to crawl your pages more frequently. Combine the more frequent crawling with compelling content that makes use of your targeted keywords in a natural manner, and you have a winning method to improve your ranking. According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Report, marketers who blog faithfully realize a ROI for their inbound efforts that is 13 TIMES those who do not.

2. Businesses who Blog Receive 67 Percent More Leads

Your blog is an opportunity to place your business as an authority on its products or services. People research heavily before making purchase decisions, so the more quality content they can access regarding your offerings, the better. Producing content regularly and ensuring it’s high quality, will keep your business in front of the people you are targeting as you share your posts on social media or include them in newsletters sent via email. Including strong calls-to-action on each blog post will convert more of your visitors into qualified leads.

3. Quality Blog Posts Provide Long-Term Returns

Long after you have hit the publish button, your blog posts will continue attracting visitors to your website and generating more leads. It’s always great to see high numbers after a particularly successful blog post, but if you track it over time, you’ll see that older posts are actually still attracting a steady stream of visitors, often more than in the first day or two of publishing! Here’s the thing- if a post receives a lot of attention, search engines take notice. If people read the post and find it worth sharing, they share it across their social media platforms. This opens your post up to many visitors who otherwise may not have viewed your site. Research has shown that as great as 70-percent of monthly traffic comes from posts that were made in previous months!

4. Blogging Increases your Backlinks

Some time ago we published a post on the importance of backlinks for SEO and for improving your brand’s authority. Publishing great blog posts is an excellent way to increase your backlinks with minimal effort. In fact, the State of Inbound Report revealed that companies who blog receive 97-percent more backlinks than companies who don’t. Other businesses and high-profile bloggers who link to your blog post are improving your visibility by sharing your information with their visitors. This also improves your SEO because search engines consider your site to be an authority and will rank your site higher in SERPS.

5. Blogs are the Third Highest Consideration for Buyers

According to research performed by HubSpot, only retail and big brand sites rank higher as a trusted information source than blogs. Blogs have greater influence over purchase decisions than Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites or forums. For that reason alone, you can understand the importance of blogging for your business!

Blogging provides many opportunities to improve your company’s visibility, attracting more visitors and generating more qualified leads. The biggest investment in creating a quality blog is time. When done properly, however, the ROI is too large to pass up!