Adding a blog to your business website is a great way to keep a steady stream of great information going, thus keeping the interest of both your customers and the search engines that enable them to find you.

Here are five reasons that your business should add a blog to its website right now.

1. As far as copy goes, it’s pretty dismal out there.

Consumers are tired of being force-fed low-quality articles with poor keyword integration. With your blog, you should focus first on publishing good, relevant, valuable content—not shameless self-promotion at every turn—and second on the keywords you include while doing it. Give your readers a trusted source for good information, and they will thank you for it.

2. Consistently published new content can boost your pagerank.

The more frequently you publish, the more relevant Google and other search engines will find you, and the higher they’ll boost you as a result. (Of course, there’s a lot that goes into this; SEOConsult.com has a great article on updating content to improve your pagerank.)

3. Blogging is a great way to develop and maintain relationships with customers and other bloggers.

Consider guest blogging opportunities—they’re a win-win situation, offering you the chance to market yourself to a new audience, as well as giving you one more link in your link-building SEO strategy. Additionally, your customers will enjoy having a forum to interact with you and other customers.

4. A blog lets your business’s “personality” shine through.

Instead of dry, professional-sounding website copy, you get to show your customers another side of your business—the human side. Customers will appreciate your business on a whole new level, and you’ll have writing opportunities beyond describing your standard services and products.

Case in point: I enjoy writing website copy, but sometimes it’s nice to stretch my legs and talk a little more conversationally; it’s difficult to work George Lucas, the Bluth Company, or Spock and Nurse Chapel into professional website copy, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t fun to write about!

5. Targeting specific keywords is a cinch.

Website copy should be informative, engaging, and easy to read—keyword-infused doublespeak will make your customers feel like you’re insulting their intelligence. A blog is a wonderful way to publish material containing certain keywords naturally, without awkwardly trying to shoehorn the desired keywords into your copy.