Google rewards sites that publish a regular stream of written content, which means the SEO benefits of blogging include increased visibility and higher rankings in search results.
A recent study by SEMrush found that 92% of B2B and B2C companies produce blog posts to achieve their respective marketing goals, making it the most popular format by far, ahead of emails (66%) and infographics (45%).
Blogs have been a staple of digital content marketing campaigns for over a decade and while newer, flashier formats, such as live video, have emerged since then, brands continue to rely on the power of the humble blog.
One of the main reasons for this is that blogs align perfectly with SEO goals. The same research by SEMrush found that 83% of respondents use organic traffic as a key metric for measuring the success of their content, while 70% track page views and 66% keep tabs on leads.
Publishing blog posts will help to grow your online traffic, keep visitors engaged when they click through to a page, generate new leads and nurture them during the buying cycle, and keep them coming back for more, which feeds into loyalty and retention.
In addition to driving key metrics that will increase sales and revenue, blogs also enable you to showcase your authority within a particular industry or niche, and generate interest in new products and services.
All of these benefits have SEO at their core. SEO is the process of optimising content – in this case, blogs – so you feature more prominently in search. From here flow the clicks, traffic and conversions. So, how does it do this?
Publish fresh, relevant content
Blog management plays a major role in boosting SEO quality by putting your site front and centre when someone enters a particular query into search engines such as Google and Bing.
The use of target keywords, meta descriptions, engaging copy and optimised images within blogs all help your content to be more relevant and in turn, rank on the first page of search results.
The key factor here is relevance, which is something blogs are incredibly adept at supporting. Google has noted in the past that merely crafting content is not enough and that it needs to provide value for readers at a particular moment.
Google’s webmaster trends analyst John Mueller explains: “It’s not that blogging itself is something that makes the site rank higher or makes the content rank higher. It’s just you happen to have some new content here that happens to be relevant so we’ll show that.”
Blogs are arguably the quickest and easiest way to deliver new content on a daily basis, served to potential customers and clients when they need it, at exactly the right time in search.
This content also keeps your website fresh and current. This is important, as your homepage and about us page are unlikely to be updated frequently. Without a blog, your site can quickly become outdated, which is not ideal for Google as it wants to index and rank sites that are credible and trustworthy.
When publishing a blog, you will be adding more pages for Google’s bots to index over time and if it is hitting the right notes, increasing your E-A-T, an acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
Rank for keywords
When crafting blogs, you can target a set of keywords related to your brand or its products. By including these keywords in your content, you can attract the interest of people who are searching for answers or ideas related to a specific term. For example, if you offer a cloud SaaS service, you will want to rank for “cloud SaaS” on the first page of SERPs.
There are two main types of keywords: head and long tail. A head term is shorter, generates high search volumes and is likely to be very competitive. In contrast, long tail keywords are longer and generate low search volumes. You can use your blog to rank for both head and long tail keywords.
Build links
Including keywords is a prime white hat SEO technique, along with building an authoritative set of backlinks and improving your own internal links.
Backlinks are gained when another site links back to your blog. This is great for SEO, as Google uses backlinks as a signal in its search algorithm, believing that content that is linked is more noteworthy and valuable to searchers.
This is an organic process that is built over time, which highlights the importance of greenlighting a blog campaign as soon as possible. Working with an agency will also help with your blogger outreach, whereby you will be able to attract higher quality links to your site.
Blogs are also an excellent outlet for establishing your own internal linking structure. You can add internal links within the copy of your blog that point to other pages on your site. These links help to create a hierarchy for your website, which Google’s bots then use to work out its structure and index content.
Internal links basically guide visitors and Google to the pages that really matter, and blogs are a particularly valuable tool for achieving this aim.
The SEO benefits of blogging are vast and far-reaching. Just a daily or weekly piece that’s between 300 and 1,000 words can:
- Improve page and user experience
- Increase social signals when shared on social media
- Provide key insights and information to an audience
- Answer questions and meet consumer’s needs
- Help to connect and engage with that audience regularly
- Create “evergreen” content that drives results long after publication
- Be repurposed, upcycled, updated and spun into other forms of content at a later date
In addition to all of this, blogs are key to cost-effectively increasing organic traffic and your visibility in search. If you want to get a content marketing campaign off the ground and don’t know where to start, contact us today and we’ll help you to start crafting SEO-optimised blogs.
