Inbound marketing is the name of the game, and your website is primed and ready to take in some serious traffic from search engines and social media. However, one question yet remains:
What are you going to do with your blog? Should you host your blog on a different domain entirely, or actually combine it with your site?
To save you the time spent going through the advantages and disadvantages of either setup, I will just come out and say it –simply integrate your blog on the same domain as your website. Here are a few reasons why you should host your blog this way:
Reason #1: It’s just easier to host your blog on the same domain as your website.
When businesses add complexity to their marketing strategy, the typical result is not a beneficial one (unless everything has been well planned and researched beforehand). In effect, the whole point of marketing is to funnel your company’s prospective customers, clientele, patients, etc. into your pitch, and make it fast, easy and convenient to do business with you.
In terms of where you should host your blog, the answer is quite straightforward. You don’t want to lose customers because they weren’t sure how to find you, and you certainly don’t want them navigating away from your page. Having everything centered on a single website with consistent branding and aesthetics makes marketing and selling a one-stop-shop for the people you want to attract.
However, there is a scenario where it might be beneficial to separate your blog from your website. Say for instance, that you run a website for one of the top family Phoenix dentist offices, and you want to drive even more traffic to the site. Essentially, you open up an info-blog that talks about dental care and all things teeth, and then refer your readers to your office.
Unfortunately, this has SEO disadvantages, but in terms of attracting traffic, it’s not necessarily a bad strategy to host your blog in this way. You just have to make clear that you are affiliated with both sites.
Reason #2: It concentrates the flow from social media.
As I said before, you want your marketing strategy to be a seamless streamlined flow from first attraction to the point of sale. This was why it is almost always better to host your blog on your website. When it comes to social media, however, this truth requires even more emphasis.
Social media is basically structured around ease-of-use and integration – and, quite frankly, nothing gives traffic love to blogs like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Through buttons, apps and news feeds, social media has been, and likely always will be, a blog’s best friend. So why would you separate such a powerful marketing tool from your website?
Simply put, you want all your traffic to end up in the same place – especially as heavy traffic in one place tends to attract more traffic. If your blog post gets 100 ‘shares,’ you want all those beautiful backlinks pointing back to a source, and it’s better if that source is a page within your website. Having those backlinks pointing anywhere else creates an unnecessary additional step in the process of a person becoming a happy customer.
Reason #3: It’s about the search engines, people!
Gone are the days of simple ‘Google-hacks’. The era of keyword-stuffing and artificial automated backlink building is over – effective, when Google became wise to the crafty wiles of those internet ‘gurus’ of 1999. Now, it is good content, persistence and relevance that rule the Googlesphere.
What does this mean for you?
Simply put, the antiquated tactic of optimizing your rankings by posting 1,245 backlinks from your separate blog to your website has been devalued – exponentially (in a very literal sense). Google has made it so that if another site links to your site, that backlink receives a value of 1. If the same site posts a second, it then receives a value of .5. A third, .25… and so on.
This is why, having a separate blog doesn’t necessarily hurt your search engine rankings per se, but it doesn’t help–and time and labor spent will pile up fast.
What do you think? How should you host your blog?