You feel like your business’s website is pretty awesome. It’s got a sleek design, it’s easy to navigate, and you’ve worked hard to create a personalized user experience.
But, there’s an issue: all the work you’ve put into your website isn’t doing much for your SEO rankings.
If this is the case, there’s likely one thing you’re doing wrong: not blogging.
Blogging is an essential component of SEO. In fact, companies that blog 16 plus times per month get 3.5 times more traffic than companies who blog 0-4 times per month.
But just what is it about blogging that’s driving this traffic?
Let’s take a look at exactly why writing blogs are so important for SEO.
Fresh Content
Google is a huge fan of websites that are updated on the regular.
It shows them that you’re still in the game, delivering your customers fresh and relevant content rather than content that is outdated and irrelevant. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of updating you can do on your website. Your contact page will likely stay the same for quite awhile, as will your pricing page, “about us” page, services page, and company history page.
Luckily, writing blogs give you the opportunity to add new content to your site on a regular basis. In fact, you can even add blog content multiple times per day if you wish.
The more blogging you do, the more pages available for Google to index. This means a better ranking for your site. And not to mention, an opportunity to build your brand and position yourself as an expert in your industry.
Keywords
Over the past few years, Google has started to really hammer down on sites that overuse keywords in their content, a practice known as keyword stuffing.
Instead, Google prefers sites to place keywords naturally and in ways that don’t sound forced.
Luckily, this isn’t all that difficult to do when writing blogs. Blog posts provide the perfect opportunity to strategically place keywords so users can find you when conducting a search.
Pro Tip: Don’t worry too much about keyword placement and hitting an exact number of keywords every post. Instead, focus on answering users questions. Also, try going for long-tail keywords (3 words or more), as these tend to have less competition.
Backlinking
Backlinking- the process in which you link to other blogs and they link back to you- is a surefire way to boost your SEO rankings.
In order to succeed at back linking, you must work on building relationships with high-quality blogs who are willing to link back to your content when you link to theirs. Sort of an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” game.
However, you can only build these relationships once you yourself have created quality blog posts of your own.
Pro-tip: Make sure the sites you develop relationships with are reputable, otherwise Google may slap a penalty on you.
Opportunities for Internal Links
Backlinking is super important. But, nurturing relationships with other blogs can take awhile.
However, backlinks aren’t the only type of links that can boost your SEO rankings. Internal links- links that are within your own site- can also be extremely helpful.
A healthy collection of links between your internal pages helps draw a “roadmap” for Google that makes it easier for them to understand what you’re all about and what services you offer.
Not to mention, internal linking also helps improve user experience by making your site easier to navigate. For example, if you mention a specific product in one of your blog posts and link to it, this saves the user time searching for that product later on.
Pro Tip: Don’t go crazy linking to every page though. Instead, focus on only placing links that are relevant and useful for your customers.
Images and Video
Images and videos are great ways to diversify the content you share with your readers.
When you name your videos and images correctly, it’s an extra way search engines can find you. Plus, videos and images are a great way to break up walls of text. And, users seem to respond to different forms of media quite well.
In fact, posts that contain images produce 650 percent higher engagement than posts that are text only. And posts with videos attract three times more links than text-only posts.
Pro Tip: Make sure videos are tagged with appropriate search terms and that images and their alt-texts are names according to your keywords.
Social Media
Google has begun including social media posts in search results.
By connecting your blog to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or other social media accounts, you give Google one more way to find your site.
Pro Tip: Make sure to still use search terms in your meta descriptions and titles on social media so search engines can find you.
Popularity
SEO can sometimes be a bit of a popularity contest.
Search engines will sometimes boost your rankings if your posts are clicked on a lot and being shared often. This is because when you produce high-quality content, readers want others to know about and will, therefore, pass it along.
Pro Tip: Quantity doesn’t win this popularity contest, quality does. The best way to popularize your posts is to make sure they contain unique, useful content.
Increase Engagement
A lot of times, users come to a website and leave within a matter of seconds.
In fact, 55 percent of users read your posts for 15 seconds or less.
This is not only bad for business, it’s bad for SEO as well.
Search engines like to see readers spending time on your pages. It tells them that the content you’re offering is useful and informative.
Writing blogs is a great way to present useful content and get users to stay on your site and keep them engaged.
This will put you in a better position to climb in the search rankings.
Writing Blogs For SEO: Wrap Up
As you can tell, writing blogs plays a huge role in the overall success of your SEO efforts.
But, blog posts are also only one aspect of SEO. You also need to worry about optimizing your other landing pages, focusing on local results, and analyzing data to improve the user experience.
Sound like a lot to handle?
Don’t worry. We’re here to help with all of your SEO needs. Contact us today and let’s get started.