There are many reasons why you need to have a blog on your company website. Apart from sharing company news and promotions, helping earn trust among your customers and building your reputation as an industry expert, one of the best reasons to blog is because it helps boost your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings.
With the first five organic results getting 67.60% of all the clicks and 70-80% of users ignoring paid ads for organic results, simply blogging or publishing blog posts for the sake of it will not work magic. There’s a sort of science and chaotic discipline to blogging that will only work if you know the basic ingredients.
Here are some ways how blogging benefits (and levels up!) your SEO game.
1. Fresh, Unique Content
Apart from your audience, guess who loves fresh, unique content? Google! And other search engines for that matter. Search engines want to provide relevant and updated information to their users, so regularly updated pages signal that they’re most likely to have the most time-relevant content.
Additionally, putting out content regularly gives the search algorithms more opportunities to index your site and keep it on their radar. In this sense, blogging is by far and large the easiest, fastest, and most cost-efficient way of publishing new pages and content on your website.
On the flip side, 30% of consumers rate quality content as the top factor that adds credibility to a blog. Making content that’s both fresh and high quality is more likely to get your readers to stay longer on the page, working wonders for your search rankings. It also increases your ‘authority’ potential for your industry’s main keywords, making it more likely for Google and other search engines to recommend your page for expert knowledge on related topics.
2. Backlinks
Backlinking can be beneficial for companies—each link back to your content tells Google that your blog offers valuable and credible content. The more backlinks your page gets, the more likely your content is to rank higher on the results pages. In fact, Ahrefs found in a study of over one billion webpages, 90.63% got no organic search traffic from Google. 66.31% of the indexed pages had zero backlinks.
These figures mean that the 2000-word research report you worked hard on could be missing out on pageviews due to lack of links. However, it’s important to aim for high quality links, as lower-quality backlinks may not be as effective in boosting your rankings (and can even harm them). The best way to tell a quality backlink from a lower-quality one is if it has the following traits:
- It comes from a reputable and authoritative website.
- It includes your target keywords in the link’s anchor text
- The site linking to you aligns with your covered topics and themes
- The link has a “Dofollow” tag attached to it.
- The link comes from a domain that hasn’t linked to you previously
3. Keywords
Keywords are crucial in getting products and services in front of the eyes of your target market. However, while using relevant keywords may be a no-brainer, the competition is fierce for the top-ranking spots. So, unless you’re the biggest known brand in your industry, you’re better off aiming to rank for long-tail keywords.
Blogging provides the perfect opportunity to target long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are often more specific and therefore have less competition in the rankings. This also allows your content to reach more qualified leads as they’re already searching for a particular solution or query.
Of course, the key to effectively using keywords is to avoid over-saturating your content with it. Insert your long-tail keyword when it’s relevant and natural to the flow.
4. Virality
Sometimes, you get lucky and your blog post becomes viral. It can even happen overnight! But that’s like shooting for the moon. More often than not, even if you publish a really interesting, timely article, these two factors don’t guarantee virality.
While virality isn’t something you can exactly aim for, the best practices to get your content in front of more readers is to either publish evergreen articles, showcase timely content that touches on latest or even future trends, and master the use of keywords. Determine what your readers really want to read online and give it to them.
In Ahref’s search traffic study, even pages that got a ton of backlinks received zero traffic from Google due to the topics being dated or unheard of by most audiences. So, make sure that your content always satisfies its primary purpose, to engage and provide value to your target audience. Building links should be seen as the icing on the cake.
5. Social Media Sharing
When a site gets increased traffic and repeat visitors, it shows search engines that the page is reliable and raises its authority level in their algorithms. Nowadays, digital marketing strategists should take social media into consideration for best SEO practices. When you make great content, readers are more likely to share it and even return to your page and sign up for a mailing list.
Make it easier for people to share your blog post to others by incorporating social media sharing buttons on the page. The faster people can share, the faster your SEO ranking will go up. Additionally, if your brand has a social media presence already, consider adopting new strategies to better promote your content on various platforms.
Not only will you drive traffic to your site, but you’ll be connecting with your target audience and nurturing your relationship with them, which can play a big part in your other business objectives.
6. Images and Videos
We all know that a good visual adds drama and character to your blog post. It can add more value to a piece of content and keep it interesting and engaging enough for visitors to stay on the page. With the rise of Pinterest, Instagram, and other visual-based social media platforms, it’s no wonder that images are returned for 22.6% of search queries on Google.
Blogs can cash in on this rising trend by optimizing your content’s images and adding a keyword to their filenames and the alt-text HTML tag. This will help search engines read your images as keywords and help customers find you.
The same goes for tagging your videos with unique search terms that your customers often use to find information online. Even simply updating and republishing old blog posts with fresher content and images can increase traffic by as much as 106%.
7. Guest Bloggers
Inviting a thought leader to post a blog on your website will not only get you that guest blogger’s following but also improve your company’s reputation in the blogging community. Guest bloggers are treated as experts in their own right.
If you’re a makeup or lifestyle brand, inviting beauty bloggers to create how-to posts and even videos can help you build content that owns the SEO game. If you’re in the hospitality business, inviting a travel blogger to blog about his or her personal experience can also boost your exposure and rankings. In terms of website views, bloggers are notorious for sharing their own posts on social media, giving you that added traffic from their audiences.
On the other hand, your brand can provide expert insight on other blogs within your niche industry. This helps increase your credibility in the field, as well as drives traffic back to your page through high-quality backlinks.
But remember, not all bloggers are created equal. The best thing to do is to screen potential guest bloggers and host sites and check their portfolios before acting on an offer.
Blogging and SEO
What’s great about blogging is that it is treated as a fresh content once it is published. Depending on your blogging campaign or strategy, businesses can create their own blogger persona to ensure valuable user experience.
For instance, if you are in the customer service industry, influencers, experts and peers in your niche who share or link to your content affect your SEO naturally.
A regularly updated company blog creates a constantly growing list of cached pages which can help create a rich user experience. And in each of these entries, you can inject keywords based on what you are selling and what your target customers are searching for.
To quickly answer the question “do blogs help seo?” Blogging helps you build content and links, therefore increasing your authority.
In Conclusion
In the beginning, most bloggers came onto the scene without any knowledge about SEO, or not really knowing that blogging has a massive effect in search visibility and rankings. Modern blogging as Content Marketing is one of the most effective to do SEO and to grow your business organically.
In an interview conducted by Payoneer, I’ve discussed the evolution & trends of Digital Marketing (Content Marketing in particular). See it here, Expert Interview Series: Mike Lagman of Spiralytics Inc. On Digital Marketing Strategies
Unsure how to do SEO? Here’s a 50-Point SEO Checklist you can download for free.
