Having a blog for your business can be an effective way to connect with your audience. However, it can be a big commitment to write a regular blog. While it helps achieve important digital marketing goals like building brand awareness, but does it help with SEO?
That’s exactly what we’re going to discuss in this blog, along with if blogging can help SEO, and how you can maximise your blog effectiveness.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of making a brand’s online content more easily discoverable. The goal is to improve its ranking position in search engine results pages (SERP). When ranking results, search engines will take a combination of factors into account. Google’s algorithm, for instance, looks at the following:
- Keywords and phrases.
- How helpful the content is to the searcher.
- How well content answers the search query.
- How secure the website connection is.
- The number of times a page is linked elsewhere online (backlinks).
- URL text.
As you can see, that’s quite a lot to bear in mind for business leaders that are trying to run their operations at the same time. What’s more is that search engines frequently make updates to algorithms, which influences SEO for businesses. At the time of writing, Google’s most recent updates were announced in April 2023. Many companies opt to use SEO copywriting services to create optimised content for these reasons.
The SEO benefits of blogging for businesses
A blog is a web page containing text, images, and/or videos about a particular topic. They can be used to cover news, give information, provide solutions to industry problems, or for entertainment. For businesses, it’s often an opportunity to connect with their audience on a deeper level. Blogging often achieves this with a more informal style of writing.
A blog will usually have a dedicated area of the website where posts can be viewed. Blogging can help businesses rank higher in search engine results pages, although only when it’s done well. The following are the ways that blogging can help with SEO.
Source of organic clicks
Blogs are a popular form of inbound marketing for businesses. This means instead of content being delivered to consumers unprompted, they are left to discover it through their own activities. Blogging is a great way to attract organic site traffic, as the practice gives businesses opportunities to rank for a range keywords.
Organic SEO efforts can also benefit from content that’s able to fit a range of online search types. This is since people make internet searches for many different reasons. Included are queries that are informational, commercial, transactional, or navigational. Businesses that can cater for a variety of consumer needs are likely to experience more page clicks.
Frequent indexing
Every piece of content found by search engines gets added to an index. When it’s deemed relevant to a query, the page is retrieved from the index to be displayed in SERPs. Blogging is an excuse for businesses to create a steady stream of content that leads users to their website. The more keyword dense and helpful content a business puts out, the more indexes they have, and the greater the chance is of their site being retrieved in SERPs.
Link building
Links, both internal and external, can help optimise website content for search engines. The main benefit of internal linking is navigation. Businesses can use them to direct visitors to the content they’re looking for. Internal links are also valued by search engines, as it allows crawlers to assess site organisation more easily.
Blogs are a simple and effective way to increase the number of internal links on your website. They also increase the number of pages that can be linked to. This commonly occurs when two blog topics overlap slightly. The result is that users are spending more time crawling your site.
Links featured on external sites, known as backlinks, are evidence your content is considered authoritative. Think of it like peer review. Search engines recognise that other businesses trust what you have to say. A piece of content that has multiple backlinks is likely to rank higher than those without any. Blogs are well positioned to acquire backlinks as they typically aim to educate and inform.
Google likes fresh content
Google’s search algorithm values sites that are active. This is because they’re more likely to be able to help searchers, either through up-to-date information or through quick responses. A blog that’s regularly added to can signal your site is active. There’s no set timeframe for how often a blog needs to be updated, just as long as intervals are somewhat uniform.
Blogging also allows your business to cover evergreen topics. These usually impart valuable information to consumers within the industry, which stays relevant over time. Google likes to recommend evergreen blogs to searchers due to this informational function. As long as these blogs are maintained in minor ways, they can help businesses develop their brand authority.
Another part of how Google ranks content is with EAT. Blogs feed directly into this, as they contribute to a site’s perceived overall utility. Learn more about EAT scores by reading our other blog – What is E-A-T and why is it important?.
Blogs vs landing page content
Blogging allows businesses to supplement landing page content. Oftentimes, businesses experience higher bounce rates and shorter visits on landing pages than blog content. This is simply because landing pages are more focused on the back end of the buyer’s journey – convincing them to make a purchase.
Unless the individual already knows about the business, they’re more likely to be searching for solutions to their problem. This is where blogs come in. As mentioned earlier, blogs work with landing pages to help SEO by facilitating internal linking. A blog might link to the business’s product or service page, for example.
The main benefit of focusing on blogs is they’re flexible in their application. This is useful for SEO as it allows businesses to capitalise on new trends. Keywords wax and wane all the time but there’s no point putting new ones on a landing page, only to change them a month later. It’s far easier to write a blog that focuses on a relevant rending topic, making it natural to include the new keywords.
Blog copywriting services
Implementing and maintaining a blog SEO strategy can be challenging. As a business, you simply might not have the resources to create quality blog content consistently. If that sounds familiar, your business can make use of our professional content marketing services. The Deliver Media team contains multiple expert writers to provide SEO content across a variety of types and platforms.