Importance of having a blog

There are so many reasons why having a blog on your website is important, it is hard to even know where to start.

Firstly, we’ll discuss the benefits of having a regularly updated blog, which includes improving your search engine rankings and in turn, increasing your website visitors, but these ultimately go hand in hand.

Having a blog can help drive organic traffic to your website, capturing these visitors and ultimately turning them into customers. Let’s discuss how…

If you are an expert within your industry, a blog allows you to offer your knowledge to existing and potential customers, giving you the opportunity to answer questions in detail that customers might regularly ask.

How this can benefit your business is usually when someone searches a particular question or topic that you have covered in a blog post, your article will be suggested to them in the search results.

By having everyday interactions with car buyers at your dealership, blog ideas will likely flow constantly. For example, do you get a lot of questions about Electric Vehicles? Here’s an opportunity to write a blog.

If you decide to take your blog to the next step and want to rank well on search engines, you can search for inspiration for topics on platforms such as Quora and Answer the Public. These can provide further insight into what people are searching for across the internet, or specific trending topics which you can capitalise on.

A blog has the ability to turn a reader into a customer, as it can help build the trustworthiness and credibility of your brand. When you write a blog post that resonates with a reader, they are likely to explore your website further, perhaps viewing the stock you have available. Without the blog post, the customer may have never even found your website.

Having a blog on your website can also help the voices of your team to be heard, giving them time to shine and share their own individual knowledge and specialties.

Blog posts help present the personality of your brand and team, portraying a more human feel and helping to create personal connections with your target audience.

Blogs can be a great way to introduce and promote exclusive offers within your dealership, allowing you to explain what the offer is, and then communicate it through different marketing channels such as email marketing and social media.

This moves us nicely onto the topic of social media. Blog posts will likely become a huge part of your social media strategy as repurposing blog content will allow you to provide quality content to your social media following, whilst also adding additional channels to drive traffic to your website.

Consistent, regular posts will keep you in the forefront of the minds of existing and potential customers for when they are ready to purchase their next vehicle.

Mixing up the types of content you post – rather than only posting new stock, will keep followers engaged, especially if your posts are covering trending topics that are not only interesting to the customer but interesting to you too.

Let’s talk search engine optimisation (SEO). Blogs are a pinnacle part of SEO, for many different reasons. Firstly, blogging helps you to target longtail keywords, rather than just focusing on high volume searches which are often already covered by high domain authority websites.

As SEO is very competitive, an efficient method for car dealership SEO is to target longer, more precise keywords that car buyers are searching for and ultimately, try to rank your blogs for those long-tail keywords. For example, your dealership could use their blog posts to provide content on terms such as “best car model for my first car”.

There is also a case here for writing content for the user, as well as search engines, as Google in particular is now much more advanced than it was 10 years ago.

The Hummingbird algorithm update took huge strides with regards to semantic content, helping webpages rank for keywords related to their target keyword, which meant webmasters can’t just over optimise by keyword stuffing anymore. It also means the SERPs are much more relevant to what the user is looking for. Let’s say you search for Apple – the odds are you are looking for the iPhone rather than the fruit, which, in days gone by, SERPs would not have been able to differentiate the intent.

Blogs provide a place for fresh and regularly updated content which keeps search engines happy. It allows for search engine algorithms to index your website more often, which is important for rankings and generating organic website traffic.

Another valuable part of SEO is building backlinks, and what some may say is the hardest part of building up a your domain authority (DA). Having engaging blogs on your website makes earning backlinks much easier, as it creates an opportunity for other websites to link back to your website.

Websites linking through to your site is beneficial because Google will consider your website as a more trustworthy and authoritative source and is more likely to push your website up the rankings.

If you have relevant blog content that is unique, informative and clear, other websites are more likely to interact with you.

Sometimes short and snappy blog posts works well for customers, however not so well when it comes to ranking well on search engines. This shouldn’t put you off starting though, as you may use social media as your main advertising platform, in which case, word count is less of an issue.

Here at Autoweb Design we are happy to help you to establish an effective content plan to advance your website, stay visible online and steadily increasing your search engine ranking. Our SEO packages will help drive your blog to the next level, reaching brand new audiences. Get in touch below if this is something you’d like to discuss further.