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How do blogs improve SEO?

Perhaps you want to blog…you tell yourself you “should”…but don’t really understand exactly why. How about to help the discoverability of your website (or SEO)? How about to offer extra value to your services or products?

There are lots of great business reasons and I have an easy-to-read post for you all about reasons to blog here:

However, in this blog, I want to share with you specific reasons why blogging is a powerful search engine optimisation (SEO) tool and how this works.

If you need a simple introduction to SEO, start with this blog:

Up to speed? Right, here are 10 reasons why blogging is useful for SEO and how just by writing and publishing regular blog posts, with SEO in mind, will help to increase your website traffic, increase exploration as well as ‘session times’, and, in time, lead to more conversions. Sound good? Then, read on…

10 reasons a blog is good for SEO

  1. Regular posts helps to keep your website active and updated
  2. Blog titles and headings are useful for capturing long tail keyword terms and questions
  3. Blogs will naturally contain lots of relevant keywords associated to your business
  4. Blog posts will attract new clients and audiences
  5. New blog posts give clients a great reason to re-visit your website
  6. A comprehensive blog can grow trust and build authority
  7. Blogs are a great opportunity to offer more interlinks within your website
  8. Good quality blogs keep website visitors on your site for longer
  9. Older blog post become great legacy content
  10. Blogs offer more reasons to direct people from social media back to your website

Let’s take each of the reasons in more depth…

Regular posts helps to keep your website active and updated

A search engine regularly scans a website for new and updated information. It also assesses how ‘active’ a website is. Whilst it is good to have the same content for a certain amount of time, to allow for traffic numbers to grow, you don’t want a website that is completely static all of the time. Whilst I recommend having a strategy for updating your website content and giving it a refresh, you have to be mindful of how you do this to not affect your SEO negatively. It can also be hard to keep thinking of ways to rewrite or update key pages on your site. However, a blog (or whatever you choose to call this function) is a great place for adding new content, regularly. You can explore more depth and different areas in your posts and the search engines have more and more words to scan and make a good ‘picture’ of what your website (and ultimately your business, service and/or products) is about.

Blog titles and headings are useful for capturing long tail keyword terms and questions

The way we use search engines is changing. With the growth of smart technology, including smart phones and smart speakers, we are using questions and long chains of keywords to get to the results we want. Choosing to match your blog titles to the common questions asked, in relation to keywords associated to your business, is a fantastic SEO trick.

You may have seen the ‘People also ask’ list of questions in a search engine result – you can write content that directly matches these (and, hopefully, one day it will be your post that is the chosen result).

Blogs will naturally contain lots of relevant keywords associated to your business

If you are writing about anything related to your business then you will naturally include keywords that a search engine will hook in to. Search engines, like Google, are getting cleverer and cleverer and are being developed to understand ‘natural language’, just like a human. Therefore, when matching keywords it searches for synonyms and collocates too. This means it looks for words with similar meanings (i.e. copywriting, writing, content writing), as well as words that often go together (i.e. marketing + content + digital ). When writing longer posts, you will use more and more terms, phrases and words associated with your business and profession. All of this helps a search engine to match your business to the relevant searches of potential ideal clients

Blog posts will attract new clients and audiences

Shock horror…not everyone is on social media. Shock horror…not everyone ‘searches’ in the same way. Shock horror…not everyone is willing to part with their money until they really know and trust you. Shock…happy days…a blog post can help with all of these barriers. Some people love blogs (some people, don’t!)…but having a blog will ensure that you are doing all you can to capture new clients and varied audiences. It’s also gives another starting point to your ‘customer journey’ and ultimately a nice entrance to your ‘sales funnel’.

If you are getting diverse visitors and new visitors regularly, this is a good illustration of trust, which is another criteria used by search engines to help it ‘decide’ where to rank a page in a results list.

New blog posts give clients a great reason to re-visit your website

Whatever your business, having a blog encourages your clients to revisit your website to learn or see something new. If you have a product-based business, a blog is a great way to show off new lines or give new information about older products – encouraging purchase. If you have a service-based business, it can be a great way to upsell, showing clients different ways you can help them and offering information they may not have considered. It’s a great way to add value to your offering too. The more people visit, the more traffic your website gets – these statistics are also used by search engines to assess the popularity of a website which also counts when it decides the order on a results page. This is vital for helping you to climb and work towards page 1 for key terms associated with your business.

A comprehensive blog can grow expertise, authority and trust (E-A-T)

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust and is what Google uses for its ‘search quality evaluation’. As mentioned above, search engines use lots of data and credentials to decide which results to return after an enquiry is entered.

Google will actively scan a website for credentials using your job title, therefore, discussing your experience or sharing professional stories/articles will help you to increase your ‘expertise rating’.

Authority is often based on citations. The more blogs posts you write the more you will be cited as an author. The more people who visit your blog for advice, the more authority you will also be seen to have.

Trust is based on reputation – this can be iterated through the bounce rate. If you have used clear and insightful blog post titles with relevant keywords, then it is likely that when a website visitor lands on your post they will stay and read the content (or at least scan it) because it matches what they are looking for. If you are writing quality content, then there is also a chance others will link to your content from their own websites. Again, to a search engine this is a sure sign that your blog is trustworthy.

Blogs are a great opportunity to offer more interlinks within your website

Search engines like to know that a website is cohesive and linked. Blogs are a great way to offer links between not only other blog posts but also to other pages on your website, such as the About and Contact pages. The anchor text (i.e. the word underlined for the link) and button text is also scanned as a priority, alongside headings, within a post, making them (in themselves) a good SEO tool.

In addition, adding interlinks can elongate the time a visitor spends on your website as they are enticed to explore other posts and other areas of your website. Keeping your visitor on your site for longer, as mentioned, is another powerful SEO tool and a great indication to a search engine that your website is trustworthy.

Good quality blogs keep website visitors on your site for longer

In addition to engaging website visitors to follow links and explore you blog and website more widely (see above), if your blog post content is engaging and valuable a visitor should stay on the page for longer – hopefully, reading what you have to say. As above, this ‘user behaviour’ is a positive sign to a search engine and will help you ascend the rankings.

Older blog posts become great legacy content

There is no quick win for SEO (sorry to disappoint you!) …time is often the most powerful SEO tool there is. Search engines take their time to scan and build a picture of what your website is offering.

Most blog posts are ever green content, meaning they have great longevity. This means you can post something and leave it live for a good two years – this gives the search engine ‘bots’ plenty of time to crawl this content and use it to return relevant results. When looking at old blog posts, don’t just ditch them. Consider if you can leave the title, URL and headings but update the main body of content to keep it fresh – this is a great SEO trick…rather than continuously deleting old posts and adding new.

Blogs offer more reasons to direct people from social media back to your website

You may have heard the term ‘backlinks’ – this simply means a link from another website or source to your own site or blog post. As mentioned above, these are a powerful SEO tools because it illustrates an element of trust to a search engine, especially if the website who is linking to your site also has a good E-A-T rating. This is why paying for backlinks doesn’t work, because search engines are smart enough to see those website as neither trustworthy or authoritative.

Every time you link to your website from your social media this acts a backlink. Although a search engine know it doesn’t hold quite the same ‘weight’ or ‘prowess’ as a standard, trusted website, it still counts. It can get repetitive to keep linking back to your home page or a services page…however, with a blog, you have lots of content that you can not only use directly on social media, but also link to. This variety is great for social media too.

Ready to start your blogging journey and enhance your SEO naturally?

I hate it when people get bogged down in SEO and keyword ‘stuffing’. What I love about blogging is that just by creating regular posts and writing about what you know best – your business – as well as sharing your expertise, you are naturally including a great SEO tool…without even really noticing.

If you would like to start a blog or would like support with blog writing, please don’t wait another moment…get in touch with me – kate@thecontentconsultancy.com

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