Four Ways a Blog Helps Your Business Beyond SEO

With these two recent developments…

1. ChatGPT’s search product launch, and

2. ChatGPT for iOS adding a new shortcut for SearchGPT, creating easier access on iPhones and iPads

…many in the business community are saying that the longstanding primary goal of blogging — to generate website traffic from online searches — is becoming less relevant by the day. This is because more search queries are being answered by a human-like AI tool rather than by a ranked list of results (that includes many business websites).

I personally think that reports of blogging’s death are greatly exaggerated.

It’s likely on life support for at least a few years, if not longer. Why? Well:

• While ChatGPT and its competitors have carved into Google’s worldwide search market share over the last two years, StatCounter shows that it’s still at close to 90%. In fact, it’s only fallen 1.6% since December 2023.

• Much of Google’s current 89.98% search engine market share is due to its Chrome browser being the default browser on many devices, including most non-Apple brands (PCs). The U.S. government’s current antitrust case against Chrome would have to succeed in the courts for Google to take a serious hit in terms of Chrome no longer being a direct conduit to google.com.

And that’s not even counting other factors that are a tailwind for SEO, including the proliferation of no-ad and privacy-focused browsers that give consumers who don’t want to use and/or don’t like ChatGPT (and the like) a traditional search-based hub for their queries, as well as the as-yet-unseen lobbying power of marketing firms that provide SEO services and support that space. (As of 2023, there are over 258,000 SEO and Internet marketing consultant businesses in the U.S. alone. That translates to a lot of jobs on the line if SEO goes away completely.)

Even if you think SEO is a dying marketing channel, blogging still has many benefits

If you don’t blog, your options to meet the following business content-development needs are greatly diminished. These are things I use in my business at scale:

1. Content relevant to virtual networking event conversations to share in real time at events. For example, when I’m in a breakout room in a Zoom event, I can share my blog post that relates to what my small “room” of business owners is talking about in the event’s chat screen. My fellow attendees can choose to click on the link to see what I’m talking about right then, or save the chat session and open my relevant link later. Either way, it’s a relationship-focused means of driving more traffic to my website that I wouldn’t have if I could only share the (far fewer) non-blog pages on my website.

2. Content for virtual networking event attendee rosters. Besides the opportunity I mentioned above to share relevant links during an event, many virtual networking event hosts allow attendees to get to know each other further after the event through a shared Google Sheet (where attendees enter their company info and links in a row on the sheet); or through a post-event email to attendees, where links and other content for each attendee come from a form submission (from a form link shared during the event) or from the chat screen transcript.

3. Easily searchable (by keyword) content for your social media posts and emails. Many website platform providers — like mine, which is Squarespace — automatically give you a search page as part of your page-building platform. Here’s my search page. While this page is designed for my visitors to use, as the business owner (and chief marketing officer, since I’m a solopreneur) I use it all the time to source links that apply to my latest social media posts and emails. This built-in search hub is an unassuming yet powerful way for me to expand my reputation as a marketing thought leader — for example, a social media follower can see that I’m not just talking about topic XYZ today, but I’ve also talked about it in the past.

4. Content to share in live events where you’re the subject matter expert. Whether it’s a Zoom event, LinkedIn Live event, or podcast that includes a video component for YouTube, having a library of topic-relevant blog posts at your fingertips helps you in at least two ways. First, if questions are set up in advance, then you know what to look up on your blog that you can reference relative to the question — and it also reinforces for your event host or co-host that you know what you’re talking about and are likely to be an insightful guest or co-host. And second, if you get the opportunity to share your screen and walk event attendees (or viewers) through your blog post, it allows you to bolster your reputation for those audiences — aiding your top-of-marketing-funnel lead generation efforts.

Regarding the last point, here’s what that looks like for a recent LinkedIn Live that I co-hosted with Karel Mergl of NCWEBDEV:

So the question shouldn’t be whether to blog, but how often to do so

And that’s easy to answer: most marketing-strategy resources I’ve seen advise to publish one new blog post at least every month. I used to publish weekly, and I’ve scaled back to every two weeks to balance this task with other tasks I need to focus on to meet my marketing strategy and revenue goals.

If you need any help when it comes to blogging, let me know. I don’t currently offer blog post writing as a service, but I know many great providers in this space with whom I can connect you.