Professional services is an industry that stands to benefit the most from blogging. This article gives you five solid reasons why.

How can blogging help grow your professional services firm?

1. Show Up in Search

Search engines want to see lots of great content on your website—content that others will want to read, link to, and share. Content that contains the keywords you’re optimizing for. And a blog is one of the best tools to allow you to do just this. Create a regular stream of helpful and keyword-focused articles for your blog. Search engines will start noticing after a while.

Power Tip: Strive to publish 2,000 words per month to your website to get some traction with SEO. This could be four weekly blog articles @ 500 words (approximately an 8.5×11 page), or two 1,000 word articles bi-weekly, or one long, in-depth article monthly. Of course, you can publish more frequently if you have the time and resources, but this should be a goal to strive for in your first year to build up your blog. By the end of the year you’ll have 48 articles of useful, valuable content for your clients and your team, which is nothing to shake a stick at. Google will notice.

2. Education of Customers

What you sell is complex. And with that comes the need to educate your clients so you can align expectations and have successful engagements together.

Power Tip: Articles in your blog can be used to:

• Answer common questions your customers have (reduce time spent on routine calls/emails)
• Dispel myths about your industry (public relations, industry-wide issues, etc.)
• Provide news, notices and reminders (scam alerts, tax updates, market updates, etc.)
• Celebrate key milestones in your growth (new partners, branches, mergers & acquisitions, etc.)

3. Thought Leadership

Every principal wants their firm to be the “go-to” solution for client problems. Thought leadership is one of the best ways to achieve this, and many firms already do it in some form or another: speaking at seminars, submitting articles to industry publications, and being a resource for journalists when big stories break out.

Blogging can be a powerful addition to your thought leadership toolbox, and in some cases, your best tool. A blog allows you to share information with clients and give them a sample of what to expect from your firm.

Power Tip: Don’t be afraid to share some of your secret sauce. If your firm has something special to offer, your potential clients should know.

4. Customer Relationships

A blog is an effective way of making your website a living, dynamic entity. If a client visits your website and sees constantly updated content through the medium of a blog, then it shows that the company is active and thinking.

Further, if you use your blog posts to encourage questions/and or actions, then a blog provides an outlet to directly communicate with customers to your business, allowing you to start relationships with prospects before you even meet them.

Power Tip: Write directly to your customers and in your own voice. Treat it like a conversation and let prospects get to know you. It’s tempting to use a third-person POV in your articles, but don’t. In a blog it ends up sounding distant, sterile, and promotional.

5. Creating a Library of Reusable Content

The longer you blog, the more content you’ll have. A blog will eventually turn into a valuable stack of information which you can repurpose throughout your marketing and your business, for example, to be used as a supplement to employee onboarding & training.

Power Tip: A blog article can easily be turned into a script for a video, content for a brochure, a slide deck, or even the outline for a paid seminar. Developing content the first time is the hardest part of the process, but once you have it, you can leverage it time and time again for varying needs and situations.

Conclusion

A blog takes time to build, but can have a lasting and profound impact on your SEO position, and, I would dare to argue business overall – if used well, and the requisite effort (or resources) are allocated to this activity. If you’re wondering about the finer details of starting and maintaining a blog, don’t be afraid to reach out to our team or check out our Digital Marketing Bootcamp.