Blogs are a great way to keep your website information up to date and keep your users on your website for longer. Whilst these can be great benefits to posting a blog, when they’re optimised to their full potential they can go a longer way than you’d expect. Blogging is a great way to develop your SEO strategy as they can easily work hand in hand.
In this article, we’ll look deeper into how blogging can improve your search engine optimisation and the reasons why it should be implemented. Blogging truly does help your SEO and here’s why.
Keeps your website up to date
Up to date information on a website informs users that the business is well up and running and well informed of the latest trends. This instantly instils trust into the business from the user perspective as they know they can depend on the website to provide them with the latest information.
This is something that Google is greatly fond of. The last thing they want to be doing is providing their users with links to websites with information that isn’t up to date. By regularly updating your content, this provides signals to Google that you’re giving users fresh content. Therefore, their crawlers will index your site more often as it will be monitored more closely compared to other websites.
It can be rather difficult to update every single page on your website, especially as some of them won’t even need an update. With a blog, you can help to make sure your blog is regularly updated and keeps aspects of your website looking fresh.
Users will be on your website for a longer time
Being able to provide users with what they’re looking for is the number one priority for Google with their users. This means, if possible, they’ll want to be able to match their search results with the users’ intent and enable them to land on the most useful page the first time they click. If for whatever reason, Google finds that users are clicking on a website and then immediately leaving the site straight away, this suggests the website is not useful and it’ll result in a high bounce rate for the site.
It’s still not clear whether Google considers dwelling time as a substantial ranking factor. However, it’s still positive for websites when users are remaining on their websites for long periods of time. It suggests that the user is engaging with the content well and believe they have found the website that will provide them with the answer they are looking for.
This is where blog posts can also help. Blog posts are long pieces of content that are normally used to provide information or answer questions. As a user will need to read through the content to find what they’re looking for, it’s more likely that they’ll stay on the page for longer.
Ability to target long-tail keywords
Keyword research is a major part of your strategy. As a business, you’d want to target keywords that are most relevant to your products and services. So, if you sell football gear, it would be ideal to show up on the first page for ‘football gear’.
The issue with this is that many other companies who specialise in your sector are likely to be doing the same. This means it will take far longer for you to rank as the keyword will be too competitive. Therefore, a better strategy to entice your audience would be focusing on ‘long-tail keywords’. These are keywords that have a more niche and specific meaning, but they’re still related to your chosen industry.
Blogs can help to target these more easily. Searches are now becoming more conversational and longer which makes them perfectly suited for blog post titles such as “best football gear for cold weather” or “best methods to keep my football gear clean”.
They may not necessarily attract the most traffic, but they can seriously help with targeting the audience you wish to attract and make it easier to rank for them.
External linking opportunities
Internal linking is important for SEO as it helps search crawlers better understand the structure of your site. However, the concept of making your website more trustworthy and authoritative to crawlers is where your SEO strategy can be most effective.
By producing blog posts, it provides an opportunity for other websites to link to informative information produced on your website. Whilst it’s not impossible to gain external links without a blog, it can make it far harder.
By producing quality content that is likely to be useful to several readers, other websites will link to this on their content/website. Here, it will be important to know how to build links for better results. Good reputation of the other websites is important as Google doesn't promote bad links. This indicates to Google that your website is one that others trust, and therefore rank you higher in search engines. It also means your website is likely to gain more exposure and increase traffic levels in the long run.
Optimise your blog where you can
A blog on your website can be one of the most powerful tools that you have. Optimising it correctly can increase your exposure as a brand and help it to become more authoritative. Wherever possible, whether creating the blog yourself or working with an SEO Manchester agency, optimise your blog posts so it can live its full potential to benefit your SEO strategy.
