How Blogs Help With SEO
When it comes to the challenge of driving traffic to your website, there’s no greater tool at your disposal than SEO, short for search engine optimization. And one of the best ways you can increase your SEO is with regular blogging. While a consistently updated blog—whether that’s once a week, twice a week, or once every other week, depending on what’s most realistic for your business—might seem like a lot of work on top of everything you’re already doing to run your business, these blog posts can make your website more appealing to search engines, ultimately boosting where you stand in the list of results and making you more discoverable.
So, what’s the big deal about blogging? Why is it such a great opportunity for SEO? Consider these 6 key points of blogging.
6 Key Points of Blogging
1. Blogging is what’s known as content marketing
When you blog, you aren’t being overtly self-promotional. In fact, being too promotional is frowned upon in blogging—it turns readers off because not many people are looking to read a blog post about how amazing you are (even though you are amazing). Instead, you’re providing value to your audience—web visitors who may or may not turn into customers—so that you can establish a relationship with them.
Think about it this way: If you’re a landscapist and provide information on your blog about how people can maintain beautiful gardens and lawns, they will see you as a reliable, trustworthy source. They will have a relationship with you, even if that relationship is only from knowing you through your blog. When they need to hire a landscapist or if they have a friend who is looking to hire a landscapist, you are the first person to come to mind.
When you have people regularly seeking out your website for good information, that increases your traffic. And high volumes of traffic are good for indicating to search engines that you offer higher value, so they will ultimately send more traffic your way.
2. Blogging keeps your website updated
A stale website doesn’t look good to a search engine. But there are very few reasons to be updating your homepage or About Us page. Even if you have the occasional new hire you can add to your staff bios section, you won’t have many reasons to refresh your website. But with a blog, you’ll be adding fresh content to your website on a regular basis. And fresh content makes you an optimal choice for those search engines.
3. Blogging demonstrates you have relevant answers to common questions
Think about the questions regarding your field or industry that people are frequently searching for online. Can you answer those questions? Great—use those questions as a jumping-off point for a blog topic. The next time a web user searches for that question, a search engine can direct that user to your blog. By providing answers to these common questions, search engines perceive your website as more valuable—and ultimately worthy of more traffic.
4. You increase the amount of time people spend on your website
Another indicator that your website provides value is how much time people spend on your website. If they are landing there and then immediately xing out, a website won’t perceive you as highly valuable. And when people are using your website to check your business hours or look up your contact information, they likely won’t be spending a lot of time on your website. But reading a blog holds their attention and keeps them there for an extended period of time, which will boost your ranking in search results.
5. Blogs are an opportunity to use SEO keywords
Now we’re getting to one of the major reasons a blog is a valuable way of boosting your search engine ranking. SEO keywords are words or phrases that people frequently search for online, and the more often those words appear on your website, the greater the opportunity for you to have traffic directed your way. Unfortunately, there are only so many times you can possibly use those keywords in your regular web copy. But when you are blogging, you’re creating content that will give you an excuse to use those keywords or phrases over and over again—sometimes even 10 times per post. You can also use long-tail keywords, which are longer phrases that are hyper-specific to what sets you apart.
6. Finally, blogs are a great opportunity to add links
When you publish your blog post, be sure to link certain words in your text to other relevant blog posts. You can also provide links to relevant outside resources, ideally those that have a good reputation among your target audience. Building this network of links, both internal and external, will make your website more appealing to search engines.