Your Blog Posts Need More Statistics: Why And How To Get Them

Your blog posts are full of words, but how many numbers do they contain?

Well, here’s a statistic for you: there are roughly 30.6 million bloggers in the United States alone. And amidst the consumer trust crisis, if you aren’t giving your readers the facts necessary to back up your points and establish trust, it’ll be more likely for you to get filtered out as white noise.

But are statistics really that important to make a good blog post? And if so, how can you get them?

The Importance of Statistics

Unless you’re writing a piece that’s entirely based on your subjective feelings on a topic, it’s vital that you include at least a few statistics or objective facts in your posts, with citations, if you want to see the benefits. These are just a few of those benefits:

Justification. Nothing proves your point better than a well-placed statistic. Consider this statement by itself: “the bubonic plague was very destructive.” Now imagine it followed up with the statistic, “the bubonic plague killed more than 20 million people, which at the time was a third of the population of Europe.” Suddenly, the point seems much more apparent, and your statement

becomes less debatable.

Trustworthiness. Including citations for lots of facts in the body of your work also makes your content more trustworthy. It shows that you’ve done your research and that you haven’t come to these conclusions without consulting multiple different sources first. Over the course of multiple blog posts, this effect becomes even more important. Reader value. Statistics are also useful for helping your readers make more rational decisions. For example, telling your customers that SEO is a cost-effective strategy is helpful, but it’s even more helpful to say that SEO yields a 30 percent return on investment (ROI) after 6 months of effort, on average. Only with numbers will readers have enough information to make a complete decision.

Originality. If you’re gathering your own statistics (a process I’ll touch on later), you’ll also get the benefit of originality. You’ll differentiate yourself from your competitors because you’re offering information they can’t offer (unless they cite you to do it).

Link attraction. There’s a reason original research tends to attract so many links. Providing new information to the world makes your content a commodity; competitors, consumers, and curious-minded bloggers alike will be more likely to link to your research as they cite interesting insights from it. That means you’ll get more referral traffic and a boost to your website’s domain authority.