We occasionally get questions from our clients about whether their company blog should be on their corporate site or off. We’d like to discuss the pros and cons of both options, and provide a little insight into what most companies are doing.
It seems that so far, most companies house their blog on the corporate website, but there are certainly pros and cons to both options. The majority of companies are also using a development platform such as WordPress or Blogger. Customization is expensive!
Onsite blog
A blog set up directly on your business’ website
Example: www.company.com/blog
Pros:
- Increase traffic to the main site, increasing Alexa rank
- Increases indexing of your website by search engines, which is especially valuable if site content is not updated frequently
- If blog is shared, tagged, linked to, etc. via social media, the website reaps the benefits
- Keeps your audience up to date
Cons:
- Harder to implement if custom building on site (and not using a development platform like WordPress or Blogger)
- Website might include restrictions on length of post, etc.
- Might lower the rank of other more important pages
Offsite blog
A blog set up on its own domain that links back to your business’ website.
Example: www.companyblog.com
Pros:
- Your business brand has two properties online
- Gives you two domains to rank twice for your keywords in search engines
- Easy and quick to install, especially if using WordPress or Blogger
- Very quality links back to main site
- Greater flexibility with design and coding
- Offsite is best if your blog will contain content that is unrelated or only slightly related to your main website
Cons:
- May take longer to draw traffic to the main site
- It can get more popular than the main site on search engines
- Could look less professional than an onsite blog
- Less control (based on the development platform — WordPress, Blogger, etc.)
- If blog is shared, tagged, linked to, etc. via social media, the development platform reaps the benefits, not your corporate website
Whole Other Option
Why yes, there is a THIRD option! You can have your cake and eat it too. If you have a prolific company (or awesome PR agency), you can have two blogs – one onsite and one offsite. This is a great option as it literally gives you all of the benefits, increased traffic on your site, high quality inbound links, multiple domain properties, etc.
Our research shows that in this event, it is best NOT to duplicate your content. That will just annoy people and search engines. Consider keeping company news on the onsite blog , and letting the offsite blog be a little more exciting. It could be commentary on the industry or opinion (food is delicious, banking is exciting, robots are fascinating!) anything that relates to the brand but is just a little beyond corporate news. This is a great example of a win-win.
So what about you? Which would you choose? Anyone daring enough to do both? The right answer depends on each company’s situation, and we’ve had clients successfully do both onsite and offsite blogs.Of course, blogs are like our babies, and we think they’re all beautiful. Just get blogging!
This post was contributed by Alexia Haynes, Clearpoint Agency Senior Account Executive