As we have discussed previously, blogs are very powerful online marketing tools. They allow you to build your credibility as an expert in your field. They enable you to create a deep relationship through dialogue with your customers. And – perhaps most importantly – they get great love from search engines with regularly updated content and the ability to target specific, non competitive keyphrases.
However, you can quickly destroy all of these benefits with one little mistake: separating your blog and your website.
I am sure you have seen it. You are on a company website, checking out their services, and you click on “Blog” to see what they are writing about. You are suddenly whisked away to another website with a completely different look, a new domain name, and no easy way to get back to the main company site. This is NOT what you want to happen to your visitors.
Branding & Credibility: A key benefit of placing a blog on your site is that visitors read a few valuable articles and then see YOU AS THE EXPERT. If they are on a separate blog, however, that branding of you and your company as the go-to experts is not nearly as effective. Instead, your blog is becoming the expert while your company site (your ture online face) is left behind as some site the person visited ten minutes ago. People forget very quickly online, so you must always remind them who is giving out this great information by keeping your blog and your company site united.
Taking Action: A website is working if it gets visitors to take the next step in the sales process – contact the company, buy the product, sign up for the newsletter, download the coupon, or request that free consultation. So your website should be a conversion beast, continually urging your visitors to take action. But if your blog is separate from your website this becomes much harder. Once the visitor has read three articles and is finally ready to join your newsletter or chat on the phone… what do they do? How do they get back to your site, much less sign up for anything with just one click? Consequently, separating your blog from your website significantly decreases conversions.
Search Engine Love: As we’ve discussed before, blogs help with SEO big time! They allow you to target niche keyphrases, significantly improving the breadth of your website’s visibility. They also offer great content that will earn backlinks from other sites, improving the rank of your entire site. And they give search engines their beloved regularly updated content. But if your blog is separate from your company site (especially if it has its own domain name) these SEO benefits are all going to your blog and NOT your company website. If your blog was part of your site, all of the backlinks and new keyphrase ranking would be making you company soar in the search engines! But as a separate entity your blog performs well and your actual company site is just left in the dust.
