Businesses with active blogs get seven-fold website traffic boost

A survey of over 2,000 businesses by the US firm HubSpot found that firms with active blogs get seven times more organic search engine traffic (i.e. traffic not driven by adverts) than non-blogging firms:

Businesses that published at least 5 blog articles in the last 7 days draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic and 1.12 times more referral traffic than those who don’t blog at all.

In addition,

Among companies that blog, organic search and referrals traffic are high[er] for those who published more blog articles up to date.

Although, as ever, correlation is not the same as causation, there are very strong reasons to believe there is a matter of cause and effect here. In particular, blog posts often come out better on search results than static website pages and the discipline of writing regular blog posts often also flushes out more timely and more interesting copy. Similarly, the accumulation of posts over time means there is a higher chance of a blog containing content that is of interest to a particular possible visitor at a particular time.

There is also other evidence that when presented with the choice of reading content labelled “blog” or “news”, people prefer the blog, as is shown by the web traffic statistics from Lynne Featherstone MP’s website, where the former gets far more clicks on the main menu than the latter.