By Anna Fitzgerald

According to HubSpot data, blogs are among the top three forms of media used in content strategies today.

This isn’t surprising. Whether you’re interested in blogging for your business or as a hobby, publishing blog content offers many benefits. Blogging not only helps you establish authority in an industry — it also drives traffic to your website and enables you to better convert that traffic into leads.

To reap the rewards of blogging, we’ll walk through the process of choosing the right platform for your needs and goals. Then we’ll explore some of the best blogging platforms that can help if you’re looking to add a blog to your business site or to create a stand-alone blog.

How to Choose a Blogging Platform

To select a blogging platform that’s right for your business, you first have to evaluate how its capabilities align with your goals and needs. If you need to boost your visibility in SERPs, for example, look for a platform with built-in SEO tools. If your main priority is to start publishing visual content fast, then you might focus on finding a platform that supports multimedia posts.

Let’s take a look at some essential features that you might need for your blog. You can use this list when evaluating different blogging platforms.

Content Editor

The content editor is the core of every blogging platform. As a blogger, you might be working in this editor every day, so make sure you pick a platform with an editor you like.

You could make a list of must-have and nice-to-have features. For example, maybe your editor must have drag-and-drop functionality and an auto-save feature but it’d be nice to have an option to preview how your post looks on different devices.

Themes and Templates

Themes and templates allow you to customize a blog quickly and easily. When looking at different blogging platforms, check out their selection of themes and templates.

Do they have a lot of options for blogging specifically? Do they have a variety of free and premium ones? What’s the average price of their premium themes? Can you edit the themes and templates to create a truly customized look for your site?

You might also want the option to start from scratch rather than use a predesigned theme.

These are just a few questions that can help you select a platform with the design and customization options you need.

SEO Features and Tools

Optimizing your content for search is essential to driving traffic to your blog. According to a study by Sistrix, sites listed on the first SERP in Google get 88% of the organic clicks for a keyword or phrase, with 28.5% going to the first result alone.

To get on that first page, you ideally want a platform with built-in tools to help you optimize your content. CMS Hub, for example, offers SEO recommendations as you write.

If a platform doesn’t have this type of advanced functionality, …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron