It’s sad to see how many businesses neglect their blog even to this day. They assume that because it’s not getting too much attention yet or they aren’t getting immediate results that it shouldn’t be a priority. But we’re here to tell you that blogging should be a central role in your business’s SEO. While having a blog won’t automatically give you SEO points, it will contribute to factors that will. Let’s take a look at a few reasons why blogging is beneficial for SEO.
Great Way to Increase Visibility
Having an independent blog is one of the best ways to bypass your competition. You may not be able to rank against competitors for your main website, but a blog could be used as a tool to show expertise and rank for a wide variety of keywords. You then have the chance to get mentions and backlinks, which will boost the popularity of your website. You can then increase the number of mentions of your products in your content to boost organic mentions of it.
The first step is to build a mobile-friendly blog. If you have limited SEO and web design skills but want to create a beautiful blog, you can get started here.
It Keeps Your Website Fresh and Outdated
If you’ve ever come across a website that had completely outdated information, you probably instantly lost trust in it. Or you may assume that the company it represents is out of business. There’s also the possibility that things have changed since the piece of content you’re viewing has been published and some of the information has been debunked or is irrelevant.
The last thing Google wants to do is serve irrelevant content to users, so sites with stale content or those that haven’t been updated in a while will be penalized. Also, publishing new content regularly will give more reasons for search engine algorithms to keep indexing your website, which allows it to stay on their radar.
Blogging Generates Backlinks
There are few types of content that people react to more than blog posts. When people see a great post, they will want to comment and share it with people in their circle with the same interests. Or they might want to share it with their Twitter feed. This all generates organic interest for your blog and backlinks.
As you may already know, backlinks are still one of the main ranking factors Google uses, and the more organic backlinks you have from good sources, the better it’ll be.
Your Blog Can Help People Stay on Your Website
There are many metrics that Google uses to rank websites, and they don’t all have to do with keywords or backlinks. They also look at engagement metrics, like bounce rate, for instance. If you have very high bounce rates, meaning that people come in from a search and leave right away without checking your site, this sends the signal that your site wasn’t helpful and you will get penalized for it.
There’s also a rumor that Google uses the exact amount of time people spend on your pages for ranking purposes. While Google hasn’t come out and said explicitly that it is a factor, they have still alluded to the fact that it’s something you should be paying attention to.
Bing also hinted that dwell time can be used by search engineers to determine the quality of a site’s content. Duane Forrester recently wrote in a post that dwell times could be used as indicators of whether a user’s needs were met and that 1 or 2 minutes was considered a good threshold.
The point is that a blog can generate genuine interest in your website as a resource. It can also help boost factors for other pages, which then start trickling down to your whole site.
Blogging Allows You to Target a Larger Variety of Keywords
While things like keyword density don’t hold as much weight as they used to, they still play a central role in SEO, as they allow search engines to categorize content and reconcile it with relevant searches. While having relevant keywords on your website content is important, it has to fit naturally.
The thing is that it can be difficult to include sometimes awkward looking long-tail keywords on your regular pages. While some of these keywords could pay big in terms of SEO, they could end up hurting your pages by making them look unnatural or unprofessional.
With blogging, you can simply find a subject that would be suitable and naturally insert the keyword. This also allows you to rank for current keywords that are trending related to your niche. This isn’t something that you could do on your average product or homepage.
These are all reasons why your blog could very well be your most powerful SEO tool. Make sure that you at least have a basic blogging strategy in place and that you constantly work to improve your efforts.
