Having a blog on your website is considered SEO’s best friend. Why? Because the unique characteristics that a blog has can be extremely beneficial towards improving your SEO strategy and overall website performance. There are many elements that search engines consider good ‘features’ for a website to have in order to perform well in search engines and blogs can help with the majority of these, when created correctly.
It’s one thing creating a blog and updating it with new content from time-to-time, but where you can truly take advantage of what it can offer is by optimizing the blog to benefit your SEO.
Below, we look into the exact reasons how optimizing your blog can benefit your SEO and give you plenty of reasons of why it’s a no brainier for you to start doing now.
Does Blogging Really Help SEO?
The simple answer is yes. But this should not be mistaken for the fact that having a blog is a ranking factor itself. It’s simply the characteristics of a blog that contribute towards the increased performance of the website which can increase its chances of ranking higher in search engines. These characteristics somewhat relate to the ranking factors that experts believe help website’s to increase their ranking. This is because when the content you produce on your blog is relevant, well updated and caters to your audience’s requirements, it’s seen as an informative website by search crawlers.
This is why.
Content Remains Fresh and Up to Date
Do you ever find yourself finding a website untrustworthy because the content that’s on the website appears out of date and ancient? Well, it’s likely others are probably feeling a similar way about it too as it indicates to them that the website is old or potentially not operating anymore which deflects them away to another website which might be.
Google wants to make sure that the sites that it displays for its users in search results are the most up to date who regularly update their content. Updating your content also means that Google crawlers will check up on your website more often to see if there have been any further changes made to the site when they last came, so will monitor it closely.
As it would be impossible to update every single page on your website regularly, a blog is a good way to keep fresh content going, updating it whenever you wish to discuss trends, news and other information.
It Engages Audiences for Longer
Google’s sole purpose is to provide users with the information that they’re looking from the first click or result. If they find that there are too many users clicking on results and then immediately returning back to the search results page for a different source, it shows that the website isn’t catering to the users needs and will likely decrease that site’s ranking as others perform better.
On the other hand, if there’s a result that they seem to click and land on for an extremely long time, it shows that the website is exactly what they’re looking for. It’s something that Google definitely pays attention to and producing blog content on your website will help to achieve this. Blogs tend to average around 1,000 words on a page and before a user completes reading all this, they would have been on the page for quite a long time.
It’s showing to Google that your blogs are engaging because users are choosing to stay on the page and read for longer, spending more time on your website and increasing engagement rates in the process.
You Can target Long-tail Keywords
In an ideal scenario, if you’re a businesses that specializes in selling clothes for men you’d more than likely love to rank no.1 for the term ‘mens clothing’ – that’s going to be an extremely optimistic target considering there are a stupid number of clothing stores across the globe. SEO is an extremely competitive form of digital marketing which is why it’s more ideal to look for niche words that are still relatable to your business, but easier to target for ranking.
Long-tail keywords are considered words that stretch beyond a primary keyword and give it a more defined meaning compared to a broad one. They may be rather difficult to optimize for product pages, but they can be great when it comes to blog posts as they can answer questions like ‘5 best outfits for men to wear in the winter’.
This won’t necessarily attract as many visitors to the site as ‘mens clothing’, but it’s still attracting relevant users who are interested in your line of business and this is always a positive for your website. The worst-case scenario is that they’ve read the blog and realize it’s not what they’re looking for, but at least they’ve experienced what your website is about and it may be something they will remember in the future which will have them coming back.
Internal-linking Opportunities
Links are a large factor in SEO and whilst links that externally link to your website can help to increase your authority and trust, internal links can be extremely beneficial for Google crawlers to understand your website structure and pages.
Adding blogs pages to your website provides perfect opportunity for internal linking as topics that you talk about will be related to the different pages on your website which you can internally link to. For example, a blog post related to ‘the best fashion trends for men in 2020’ could link to a page that has an item of clothing related to one of the fashion trends.
This way, you’re being informative to the user but also making them aware of the products or services that are related to what you offer. Anchor text to link to the page can also help the crawlers to better understand what the page is about, increasing it’s chances of ranking better.
Create a Better Connection with Your Audience
A blog post can be a great marketing tool to gain exposure to your brand and website. If you create blog posts which your audiences can relate and engage to, they’ll be more likely share it and drive even more traffic towards it. This means your website traffic is likely to increase and you’ll have more users browsing your website to what services or products that you offer.
The increased traffic level that you have, the more likely that Google are to recognize it and realize how much authority you have in your sector. Therefore, there’s a better chance of your website increasing its ranking. The bigger picture is that you’ll have a targeted audience visiting your website and becoming regular followers of your brand. In the long term, this is more than likely to increase conversions on your website.
Ensure Your Blog Posts Are Optimized
A blog can be an extremely powerful tool when it’s utilized correctly on your website. With every blog post that you create, take the time to ensure that it’s optimized to the best of its ability and it targets the correct long-tail keywords that you feel are most valuable and relatable to your brand. Don’t waste the opportunity when you have the chance to increase your website performance.
