Should you have a blog separate from your website? Probably not.
There are a few good reasons to keep a blog as a separate piece from your website, but most of the time I am going to recommend you keep that blog on your company website. Let’s take a look at why to keep your blog on your company website first, then we will look at valid reasons to take it off the site.
Visitors expect to find a blog on your company website. Along with ‘about us,’ and ‘contact us’ the blog page is a standard people expect to find and will look for when they visit your website. Visitors to your website have usually done so to either solve a problem or answer a question. Your blog is where that magic happens.
Keeping a blog on your website creates a seamless visitor experience. Many times it is the blog that brings those visitors to the website. Once they are on your website, what you really want is for the customer to take action. That action may be buying a product, filling out a form or downloading an app. Keeping your blog on the same website with the rest of your company information makes this easier.
Example:
A company blog sets you apart from other websites by promoting you as a thought leader in your industry. If you can answer questions and solve problems for a person you have become a valuable resource. This can help you and your business by building the trust and confidence of that reader. Also, if you are creating really awesome blog content, other people will talk about it and link back to it. This can help your website rank higher on search engines. If you have that blog separate on another site, it will do nothing to help your company site rank higher.
So - Should you have a blog separate from your website? Probably not.
There are very few cases where I think having a blog separate from your company website is a good idea. We’ll take a look at those now.
Sometimes you have no choice. If you are part of a franchise or your website is corporately controlled and you have no control over the content, then an external blog may be a good option. If this is your situation, I strongly recommend investing in a good SEO (search engine optimization) expert to help you choose a domain and optimize the blog properly so that it benefits you and brings your main website traffic as well.
Other reasons you may decide to keep a blog separate:
- You blog about things that are not relevant to the company
- You speak in a tone not appropriate for your corporate website
- You promote your personal brand rather than your company brand
If your situation falls into one of these exceptions, then having a separate blog space may be your best (or only) option. If you don’t then keep that blog on your website. Make a prominent space for the blog. Blog often and blog well.
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