We are often asked about the benefits of having a blog. And whilst there are many valid answers to this question, it’s always good to be able to use facts to back them up.

So it’s great to see some research from web platform Hubspot in the US, which reveals that blogging can increase traffic, inbound links and the number of indexed pages on a website.

By analysing data from the company’s 1,531 customers, Hubspot found that those with blogs had on average 55% more website traffic. Of course, this could be down to other factors as well but the figure is so high that there seems to be credibility here.

In addition, when it comes to search engine optimisation, the websites that contained blogs had 97% more inbound links (a measure of how many other pages or sites are linking to a particular website) and 434% more indexed pages (a measure of the number of pages that show up in search engines).

These last two statistics are hardly surprising, they just confirm what we would expect; because blogs are essentially creating valuable (we hope!) content – and lots of it – there is more content for visitors to read (and link to) and more content for search engines to crawl and rank.

Of course, establishing the blog is only the first step and it takes time and effort to keep it updated, making sure the content is both appropriate to your business and ‘valuable’ enough for people to want to read.

If you think a blog might be good for your business, let us know…

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