Does blogging help your website’s SEO strategy? The simple answer is yes! It’s one thing to get your blog up and running, but your SEO efforts can go a lot further if you know the reasons why it’s essential for the success of your website.
Blogging contributes to many SEO ranking factors including keeping fresh content on your site, improving regular engagement and produces posts that are high quality and relate to your audience’s interests. These simple points can make a big difference to your website’s performance in search engines. Here are the reasons why in more detail.
It helps to keep your website content up to date
Out of date content on a website can be a good reason for users to steer away from your website. The information is likely to be less trustworthy as it’s not relevant or it indicates to the user that the business is no longer able to run the content or it simply can’t be bothered to.
This is something that Google doesn’t want to provide for its users. Updating content indicates to Google that your website is alive and fresh. It also means Google is likely to crawl your website more often because it’s aware that you update your content regularly and you have up to date information that you want users to see.
Implementing a blog to your website is a great way to keep your content fresh and updated. It might not be easy to update certain pages on your website (the homepage for example) because the content will be relatively static. However, a blog allows you to write content and post it regularly to keep your information up to date.
It can improve your engagement rates
A big priority for Google is providing websites in search results that are relevant enough to answer their query first time around. A good way for Google to measure this is through engagement rates of a website. The longer the user is spending on the website, it’s likely it’s close to what they’re looking for and extremely helpful to them. If the user is doing the opposite on the website, then it’s not likely to be useful.
It’s not considered a direct ranking factor by Google, but bounce rates are definitely something that they pay attention to. Blog posts tend to range between 1000-2000 word counts, which gives users plenty of reason to read through the post and stay on your website, so have this as a guideline when writing your posts and ensuring the content is relevant to your industry.
Helps to target long-tail keywords
When business owners tend to start out with SEO, they tend to have unrealistic goals with want they want to target. For example, as an agency being an expert in SEO you’d love to rank number 1 for the keyword ‘SEO’. Whilst this would be ideal, it would be an extremely competitive keyword that would be difficult to rank.
However, targeting a more specific keyword such as ‘SEO Manchester’ or ‘SEO agency Manchester’ makes the word far more niche, which means you’re likely to target more quality users and target keywords that are relevant to your audience and business.
These are classed as long-term keywords which can be extremely important for SEO strategies. There’s a growing user trend that queries are becoming longer and more talkative which means targeting longer related keywords are perfect for blog posting. So for an SEO agency, creating blog posts such as “what to consider when using an SEO agency?” would be ideal.
They won’t necessarily attract large audiences, but they will help in targeting audiences that are interested in your services. They’ll also be easier to rank in search engines compared to broader terms such as “SEO agency”.
Provide an opportunity to internal link
Another important ranking factor that helps your SEO is internal linking and links. It suggests to Google’s crawlers that your website is easy to navigate around the website and provides a simple user experience.
Whilst main pages would be relatively straightforward to internal link with, adding more blog posts to your website will provide plenty of opportunities for your website to an internal link. The more related topics that you include, it’s easier to link one page to another. Specifically, using anchor text to link to another page indicates to Google what the page you’re linking to is about, strengthening their connection.
Where you can, write about topics that you can easily link to other pages on your website within the content, but at the same time, don’t spam your piece with too many.
Encourages backlinking to your site
Whilst internal linking can be a benefit for your website, gaining external links back to your website can be just as helpful and important for your SEO strategy. Gaining backlinks from other websites that are relevant to your business will indicate to them that your site is authoritative and trustworthy. Whilst it’s not impossible to gain backlinks without a blog, it can prove difficult.
Writing a blog means that valuable information is being produced on your website. If a website chooses to link to your website from one of their pages, it indicates that it’s useful for their readers to see and complements the information that they already have on their own website.
It’s suggested that websites who have a blog are far more likely to gain inbound links compared to a website that doesn’t. It makes sense if a website links to a page talking about why SEO is important compared to linking to the homepage.
Ensure your blog posts are optimised for SEO
A blog can be one of the most powerful tools for SEO when time is taken to optimise them correctly. Create it wisely and it can help to strengthen the authority of your website in search engines and increase your brand awareness within your specialty. Where possible, optimise your blog post at every opportunity using the tips provided above and watch the traffic flood through to your website as your website continues to build and grow.
